"The Yellow Dress"

        Just a pair of jeans and a few practical shirts. Maybe a new sweater. The shy girl’s shopping goals were not ambitious. She was friendless and dateless and had no use for pretty clothes. A plain and conservative wardrobe was all she needed to stand quietly in corners and visit the bookstore alone.
        Padding timidly amongst the racks of clothing, she picked out a pair of jeans that was sure to attract no attention, three simple collared shirts in black, navy, and dull green, and a black sweater that an elderly librarian might wear. She was examining the sweater, trying to decide if it would attract much cat hair, when a loud peal of laughter startled her into turning her head towards the summer tank tops and skirts. Two girls her own age were giggling as they grabbed clothing off the racks, holding them up for each other to critique and piling the hopefuls over their arms. One of the girls realized that her friend’s stack had become ridiculously large, and began to tease her as she whipped out a digital camera. Her friend grinned and pretended to fall over while she took the picture. Upon seeing the photo, both girls burst into laughter again.
        The shy girl watched them by turning her head slightly, pretending to continue her evaluation of the collared shirts, and a longing she did not want to acknowledge crept out of the back of her mind to gaze through her eyes. The two girls were alien to her, living an alien life. They probably knew all each other’s secrets and talked for hours on the phone, squealing with delight over cute guys and gossiping about the scores of people they knew. They would buy cute dresses and go to their next school dance, and then stay up late at a party drinking. Or whatever it was that normal teenage girls did. The shy girl didn’t know for sure, but only had an academic idea of how they might pass their time, just as she had an idea of how a herd of zebras might pass their time on the savannah. It occurred to her that she might actually know more about zebras than she did about other teenage girls, and for a brief moment she smiled to herself.
         Eventually she decided against the smile and put it back along with a pink fitted t-shirt that didn’t suit her either. As she slunk behind the two shopping buddies on her way to the fitting room, the one carrying the bigger armload of clothing stepped backwards into her path as her friend shouted “Oh, watch out!” But the shy girl anticipated not being seen or heard and deftly moved out of the way, never stopping or lifting her eyes.
         She slipped into an empty stall in the fitting room and locked the door behind her, trying the handle several times to make sure. People couldn’t be expected to knock and seemed to have a tendency to walk in on her.
         The girl took off her gray t-shirt and worn jeans and looked with disdain at the reflection of her body, disgusted by the shadows in between her ribs, the odd depressions and protrusions around her stomach and hips, the pitifully small breasts in a worn bra that she still had because she was too embarrassed to shop for another one. Casting her eyes away from the mirror, she hurried into the new jeans and the black collared shirt. The hot shame receded when she looked back at her reflection and saw that she was safely inside the modest garments, but still her brown eyes gazed sadly back at her, lonely and lost and uncertain.
         After a moment she turned away again, put her old clothes back on, and headed out of the fitting room towards the check-out. She got in line behind a girl and her boyfriend, who held his girlfriend’s hand and every now and then pressed his lips into her wavy blonde hair. When his girlfriend asked if the dress she was buying really did look good on her, he smiled and said, “You look beautiful in it.”
         As the line inched forward, the quiet girl wondered vaguely what it would be like to be kissed. No matter, though; it would never happen to her. She wished some guy would tell her she was pretty. The blonde girl moved closer to her boyfriend and began to coo at him, and the shy girl awkwardly turned her head away from them - and saw the dress. It was a cheerful yellow, and it struck her eye like a beam of sunshine.
         Her fingers were touching its soft, delicate folds before she realized that she had drifted out of the line and come to stand before it. Its sweetheart neckline gracefully dipped towards the flowing, gently pleated skirt.
         Something desperate awoke inside her. Gently she lifted the dress from the rack and carried it back to the fitting room, where she took off her old clothes, stepped in front of the mirror, and carefully pulled the dress over her head.
         The curtain of yellow fell past her eyes, and she watched the dress float through the air and fall into place. For a long time she stood there staring at herself. She felt pretty for the first time in years. She could see what her loose t-shirts and baggy sweatshirts usually covered up, things she hadn’t realized were there - the smoothness of her shoulders, the curves of her sides, and even the roundness of her breasts. She twirled once and watched the dress swirl around her bare legs, then smiled shyly as if she were meeting a boy. She imagined a strong arm around her waist, fingertips following the swellings of her breasts, warm lips brushing her cheeks. The yellow dress billowed around her on a summer breeze she could almost feel as she walked confidently in the sunshine, hand in hand with someone who thought she was beautiful and smart and fun to talk to. Someone who had chosen her over the popular girls, the sexy blondes, and even the two friends with the piles of clothes. They could laugh all they wanted, but the girl wished they would go and laugh that grating laughter somewhere else. It was getting louder. Why couldn’t they just -
         Bang bang bang. The pounding on the door shook the girl out of her daydream. Immediately she clapped her hands onto the door and a startled noise that was supposed to be “Excuse me” forced its way out of her throat. More laughter followed as the pair moved down the row of doors, finally entering a stall.
         Quickly the girl slipped out of the dress and back into her t-shirt and jeans, her spirits light. She lovingly placed the dress on top of her other purchases and cradled the garments in her arms.
         With her head held a little higher and her eyes a little more hopeful, she carried her clothes and her fantasies back towards the check-out. She turned a corner and fell into step behind a group of teenagers, guys and girls her own age, and the confidence that had glimmered under the bright sun of her daydream evaporated like the illusion that it was under the harsh fluorescent lights of the store. Still the girl tried to look past them, clutching the yellow dress as if her life depended upon it. But they were joking and laughing and putting arms around shoulders and she couldn’t help but watch. They were friends; they thought nothing of teasing and hugging and poking each other. They probably ate lunch together and went to football games together and dated each other. All the things that were no more real in the shy girl’s world than magical princesses living in castles, yet made her heart ache with longing more than any fairy tale ever had.
         The shy girl’s shoulders were collapsing in on her body under the heavy shame of being herself, yet still she held the yellow dress against her heart. Even as she began to feel big and clumsy and ugly again, she made no move to return the dress to its place on the rack. And then one of them glanced backwards and looked at her. There was a clanging of metal, and the iron bars were around her.
         The glance lasted no longer than a second, but it told her everything. She did not belong. She was an oddity, an eyesore. She was unimportant and uninteresting. She did not belong. She was a fool for dreaming of being one of them.
         Bitter hatred filled her eyes as she watched them walk away from within her cage. She felt sick to her stomach and her head was screaming in frustration. She looked down at the yellow dress. It was no longer hers, and she realized that she had never been meant to have it. As she hung it back up, she felt like a guilty child who had been caught pilfering cookies.
         The shy girl bit her lip and looked down as she waited in line, purchased her plain shirts, sweater and jeans, and walked out to her car. She got into the driver’s seat, turned the key, felt her lip quiver once, and burst into tears. For several minutes she sat in the car sobbing. She desperately wished for a car crash, for an undiagnosed fatal disease, for a rampaging gunman, anything that would take her away from this terrible pain and this world in which she did not belong. Then she thought of how easy it would be to crash the car, or to leap off of a bridge, or to slash the arteries that carried the blood that kept this grotesque thing alive. It would be so easy…
         But in a little while her roiling emotions turned to resignation, as they had so many times before, and she wiped away the last of her tears. Once again she was passive and disinterested. The part of her that had woken up screaming in pain was asleep again.
         She pulled out of the parking space and headed home, enjoying the blue sky and the breeze from the open window. Real sunshine came in with the breeze, sunshine that couldn’t be banished by the glances of the strange creatures that lived around her. She didn’t care about those strange creatures, not right now. She was not one of them and they needn’t concern her. All that mattered was that she had some nice, simple clothes to wear so that she could stand awkwardly amongst them for a while until she found a chance to escape and read a book.