Embarrassment
Disaster struck 13-year-old Patricia Grey as she opened her eyes. Complete disaster. There, in the middle of her left cheek, stood a pimple. Not just any pimple, no. This pimple had a wife, three kids, a job in a law firm, and a fancy sports car. It was a landmark on the map of her face.
“What did I ever do?” She muttered to herself, she half-expected it to respond to her, in her mind, it did. The pimple blamed the fried chicken she’d had for dinner the night before, as well as countless missed chances to wash her skin.
In school, later that morning, Patricia was spited by PSE day. Mr. Hunt, who could barely utter the word ‘breast’ without his face turning red, stumbled his way through his PowerPoint slides and his diagrams. Patricia fought back her laughter. In her notebook, she wrote: ‘Mr. Hunt is scared of puberty. That’s why he looks like he’s still in it’.
Patricia imagined puberty as an evil wizard, like Voldemort. Ugly. She pictured the puberty wizard as he cast spells of awkwardness: bushes of armpit hair on one classmate, a voice that cracked like ceramic on another. By the end of the first lesson, Patricia decided it would take a miracle to survive puberty.
Patricia’s best friend, Jane, won jackpot, she was immune to the evil puberty wizard: her skin glowed and glittered, like Edward Cullen in the sun. Jane must have had a puberty fairy god mother, Patricia decided. Complete with birds that sang, and magic potions. Then there was Maureen, the Goddess of Puberty. She looked like one of those 1960s models, completely flawless.
On the other hand, there were the boys. Patricia was convinced that they were going to be transformed into werewolves. She’d heard George talk about shaving in the hallway. She pictured the boys as they howled at the full moon. Their newfound obsession with deodorant only fuelled her werewolf theory more.
Patricia decided that she was going to defeat the evil puberty wizard and take control of her own puberty. She stood in the kitchen one evening and made up a DIY facemask made of pickle juice and peanut butter. She’d read something on a Facebook page dedicated to middle-aged women. The smell stunk out the whole kitchen, and her little brother’s mockery didn’t help.
“Patricia’s turned herself into a butty!” He yelled. Patricia made a mental note to stick to store-brought facemasks in the future.
A few weeks passed by, and not much had changed, more and more pimples invaded Patricia’s face, they colonised her once perfect skin.
Her science class had been assigned a project, and Patricia presented ‘Puberty! It’s Like Riding on a Roller Coaster with Voldemort’. Her presentation contained sketches of over-exaggerated caricatures of her classmates. She had drawn George as a shaggy werewolf, Jane as a fairy godmother, and then herself with her colony of pimples. Everyone was amused, even Mr. Hunt who had turned red as Patricia uttered the word ‘breast’.
The only way to handle puberty, Patricia decided, was to embrace it and humour it.
Lola Hobson is an English Literature student and self-proclaimed Bob Dylan expert. She's had several online publications and has been featured in a few anthologies.