Jerry called out my name when he saw me from across the room and it surprised me. He was a popular senior, although popular by private Christian missionary school standards, meaning he was on the worship team and vocal ensemble and brought up Jesus in almost all of his conversations. I only knew Jerry because of a play we had both been in earlier in the school year. We had never hung out outside of school hours; he was both too old and too popular for me to know him personally.
“Your hair!” he said. “It looks so good! It’s not a wig, is it?”
That comment stung a little, as though he couldn’t believe that my hair, so often frizzy and unmanageable, was capable of being groomed into the shiny, straight, soft mane I was now sporting. It usually wasn’t, though; it only looked that way because we were at Amanda’s Disney-themed costume party and my best friends and I had chosen to dress up as three pretty, normal-looking girls from some random movie. I had spent two hours with the hair stylist who had been cutting my hair since I was five in order to make my hair look so smooth. It began to frizz by the end of the night.
“No, it’s my real hair,” I said.
“Well, it looks really pretty,” Jerry said. He was cool enough to pull off having an ironic name when irony wasn’t even in yet.
We ran out of things to talk about at that point, so Jerry moved to stand at the side of his girlfriend and I scanned the room for someone my own age and status who would talk and talk and talk without my having to come up with something clever to say. I moved across the room and back into ninth grade obscurity.
