Over long months my hair slowly grew long enough for me to brush it down to hide the worsening protrusion of my growing face. No longer just a case of goofy gawkiness, my adolescent bones now developed so that my upper jaw pushed forward exposing my teeth, pointed like the bow of a ship. Perhaps if my lower jaw had also grown forward to match it I could have justified the nickname “metal-crusher”, but instead it failed to grow much at all and, with the lack of a clearly defined chin, my face seemed to disappear down into my long neck. The arrangement of this rather wonky facial architecture made it impossible to hold my lips closed together, though in moments where I thought there was dignity to be salvaged I would brave the discomfort. Like when I met someone new and wanted to hold out as just a regular-faced-girl, before being outed as NFWK.
With new people there’s a chance. How long do they say you’ve got? Thirty seconds? Seven seconds? One tenth of a second to get that person to see you and like you and believe that there is something worth knowing? I could keep my lips shut together for less than ten seconds, which meant my bids for a new friendship might just succeed, if it weren’t for the crooked shape made while smiling with my mouth shut. Sooner or later the hope of meeting and making a new friend would collapse in the taut grimace of my pursed smile, or with the gush of words revealing not just my name but an unexpected flash of pink, bony jaw.
If I’d lived in a world where faces were not the litmus test against which a person was judged or if I had simply learned not to take to heart the judgement of my peers then I would have continued, as I had since I was a child, to smile uncompromisingly. In the face of new friendship I would have smiled widely and openly, allowing the edges of my eyes to crinkle with mischief and glee. That is the story I would like to have written – about how, at twelve years old, I faced my tormentors and frenemies with an unshaken belief in who I was. How I met the stares of school peers with unblinking self-possession, rooted in the knowledge of all that I knew lay behind that misshapen fraction of my face. But at twelve years old I wasn’t telling the world who I was, because I was listening to voices that were giving me the answer: the wrong voices – the ones that summed all of me up as defective and ugly. Voices that dismissed the whole of me in a scourge of name-calling about my mouth.
When girls giggled about a boy they fancied and dreamily etched his name inside their pencil-case, I looked on not daring to mention the boy I had spied in Year 10 whom I would watch playing football at lunchtime. It was not my place to have crushes. If I had named a crush out loud my friends would have to acknowledge him and cheer me on in this new drama. They would have to sound like they believed something could happen between him and me. It would be like standing on the sidelines of a hockey game talking animatedly about the goal you were hoping to score. I couldn’t bear provoking the look of embarrassment in their eyes while they searched around for some disingenuous words of encouragement.
It’s not that you forget the other voices, the voices of love that tell you who you are and where you have come from; it’s just that you allow other voices to grow louder. You give them more airtime, listening and learning that not all of you is acceptable or welcomed. And so you begin cordoning off parts of yourself, silencing them and shunning them. Until you are fractured and unwhole, unable to look at what doesn’t seem to fit, or to embrace all the unfinished parts of yourself and no longer sure how to let the beautiful or the broken parts reflect the light.
There were moments of mercy when I was caught in the light of another’s reach. Strange occurrences where, through the crush of bodies heaving along the one-way corridor at break time, I was seen, not as sport to trample against the wall, but as something else. I don’t really know what, because what could account for a Year 10 girl reaching through the door and pulling me out of the throng and into the safety of her classroom? Popular, talented and distinctively impish Beckie Harper was one half of the identical Harper twins, recognizable to anyone in a crowd from their eruptions of pale fluffy hair. Three years above me, the twins were the kind of girls I knew but who certainly wouldn’t know me. So I’m not convinced that Beckie really recognized me from way back in junior school when she hauled me in and offered me a table to sit on while I ate my crisps. She was just very kind. Which is how I became friends with Beckie and her friend Lauren, and began a rhythm of lunchtime escapes from school, accompanying them on walks across the fields and scrambling through hedges to the forbidden woods beyond. With them there was never any need to explain the misery that school had become; I guessed that they already knew that and that’s why I was here with them, invited to tag along.
When, one day, after a group of girls rounded on me in the girls’ loos stabbing their fingers at my torso and shouting that I was the cause of all ugliness in Curie house, Beckie and Lauren listened with serious faces, unfazed by what they were hearing. Kindness shone, not in phony attempts to tell me I was fine or in pretence that my face wasn’t really problematic for other kids, but in their determination to open up a different vista for me. They asked questions about what I liked, what was I good at, who my friends were, and trod carefully to find out if life was any easier outside the school campus. Discovering that church was the main feature of life beyond school, Beckie invited me to her confirmation service at Christchurch. When I told them I loved dancing she found out where my ballet school was and turned up with Emma the following Saturday to see if I was free to wander into town with them after my class. But it was too late. The lazy Saturday pastime of wandering around town had begun to induce cramps of fear, causing my stomach to revolve turbulently. Going to town was about buying stuff: clothes, make-up, things that would make you look better. It was about seeing people, and I no longer wanted to be seen or reminded that I didn’t fit, and that no amount of make-up or new clothes could alter that.
Saturday was where I reclaimed territory and made the world my own again. It was spent in ballet lessons, and cycling over to Jane’s where we rearranged her parent’s basement into an office suite in which we played out our business idea. “Problem Page” was a couple of desks, two telephones, a pile of notepads for our case files and us, with our fake American accents. We had to have accents and they had to be American – it added instant sophistication to what was otherwise a game of social workers answering the phone on imagined basket-cases and proceeding to solve their problems. It could have all run its course within the space of a couple of Saturdays, except it ran on for months once we introduced the added plot-line of our imaginary boyfriends, Dan and Tim. Interspersing our client calls every once in a while we would lean back on our swivel chairs and, thinking ourselves into the heavyheartedness of a woman in love, solemnly tell each other the difficulties of our love lives. All with very bad American accents.
Problem Page was my turf; an afternoon a week where I could put things right and life’s impossibilities could be waved away by my soothing, simple answers. Here I knew what I was about, because in this bunker no other voice but mine could be heard. The imaginary clients unloading their imaginary woes were my chance to be something; they asked me for help and gave me a voice that I hadn’t worked out how to use anywhere else. Into the receiver of that old disconnected phone I seized the opportunity to speak words that proved that I was not my teeth, my braces, a girl hiding behind her hair. I was grown up, independent, useful and had my stuff together.