Misfit

by Charli Howard

  But Miss Miller wasn’t having any of it. As I made my way back to the pool, with the repetitive and overpowering thoughts of having shared the material with somebody else’s vagina, I just wished I could’ve saved myself the embarrassment of being paraded along the side of the pool in front of everyone and brought my costume with me. My thighs jiggled on the edge of the pool, and my cheeks flushed red with shame. My plan of hiding out of sight had instead made me a spectacle.

  5

  MILFs, Models and Magazines

  Now fourteen, I was rather enjoying being the apple (95 calories) of my grandparents’ eye when my parents announced they were moving back to England. While the idea of them moving back was nice, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit annoyed about the changes that would be happening. I loved my mum and dad, obviously, but I also liked being the centre of attention with my nan and grandad.

  Once my mum and dad moved back, life suddenly became very strict and boring. Gone were the days of being spoiled by my nan at weekends. Gone were meals out and takeaways. There were so many rules, rules, rules to abide by, and I felt like I was in trouble for absolutely everything. My dad began a new job in London, and would travel up to us every other weekend, so the most I spoke to him was down a phone.

  The other annoying thing about my mum was that she was considered a MILF. Not to me, obviously (that would be weird), but she was, without question, a very attractive woman.

  I didn’t quite appreciate how good-looking she was until the girls in my class mentioned how ‘fit’ she was after she came to pick me up from school one day, which isn’t really what you want to hear as a teenager, especially when you feel like you resemble a human slug. She was much younger than the other mums, with beautiful curly red hair and perfectly white straight teeth that lit up a room when she laughed – which is annoying, considering my teeth look like they’ve been put through a lawnmower.

  She’d done a bit of modelling as a teenager, following in the footsteps of my nan, who had also won a few beauty contests in her youth. To top it off, my little sister was the picture of innocence – an angelic face and bright blonde bob, with a cute grin and little frame that everyone considered ‘adorable’. Nobody said I was cute. Then again, why would they? I was a pain in the arse. It felt awfully unfair that I hadn’t been blessed with the same looks as all these women in my family had.

  ‘Is that your mum?!’ people would say, and I would say, ‘Yes, that is my mum.’ ‘But she looks so young!’ they’d add, as though being youthful was some sort of an achievement, and I would smile through gritted teeth, saying, ‘Yes, she had me at twenty-four.’

  Mum was a size eight; I was bordering on a size twelve to fourteen. Her boobs were a pert and perfect C cup – I was lucky if I filled out a B.

  I knew people questioned how someone as beautiful and as slim as my mum could possibly be related to someone like me. That’s how I felt, too. On top of people calling my dad a DILF (yuck) or my sister ‘cute’, I couldn’t have felt more unrelated to my family if I’d tried.

  Since I’d been bullied in my last school, I had no confidence whatsoever. Nothing I did could bring the old me back or make me feel confident again, even though I’d formed a small group of friends by this point. I developed a stutter and, when speaking, would have to come up with another word in my head that didn’t begin with the letters ‘W’, ‘L’, ‘R’ or ‘K’, so as not to make an idiot out of myself. My life was spent constantly second-guessing everything and wondering if I’d offended someone somehow – more unresolved anxiety.

  I don’t know why I thought everybody hated me. I was by no means ‘cool’, but I wasn’t a total geek, either. But what was the point in making friends anyway? I’d only be taken out of this school in a couple of years’ time. I didn’t want to get hurt again.

  As far as I was concerned, everybody in my class hated me. They surely must’ve viewed me in the same way my ex-classmates in Belgium did, and I couldn’t blame them. I mean, what was there to like? I was still the class clown, but when I played up in class and made people laugh I assumed they were laughing at me, not with me. I believed I was worthless, and that I didn’t belong anywhere.

  Eventually, the paranoia I felt about people hating me became unbearable. The negative voices hissed and murmured in my head like snakes. Night-times made it worse: I’d go over and over images of girls huddling together and giggling about me behind my back. The Brain Deviant would whisper in my ear, telling me that people were gossiping about me and saying how much of a loser I was. I know people gossiped about me to an extent – we were teenage girls, after all. But all I was absolutely paranoid about was not being liked.

  It’s embarrassing for me to admit, but I would get the overwhelming urge to ask girls in my class if they liked me or not, with the same level of urgency I did when I had to pray to the invisible Brain Deviant for my sins, or when I had to obsessively wash my hands in case something bad happened.

  ‘Do you like me?’ I’d ask pleadingly, hoping desperately that they’d say they did. They’d be sympathetic the first few times I asked, nodding in agreement and saying ‘Of course!’ as though I was being silly, but once I’d asked them four or five times over a period of a week it understandably began to p*ss them off. Yet again, I knew I wasn’t acting sane, but the urge to get their approval was like an itch I needed to scratch. The phrase ‘Do you like me?’ would spill out of my mouth in conversation, even if I didn’t want it to.

  I was in the canteen one lunchtime, heading over to my table, when a chorus of girls in my class called out to me:

  ‘Charli, do you like me?’

  ‘What about me, Charli? Do you like me?’

  ‘What about me?!’

  They burst into fits of giggles, and I was left clutching my plate with a very red face. Why, oh why, couldn’t I make myself normal?!

  I wished they knew I couldn’t control the insecure words that spewed out of my mouth. I wished they could’ve understood the jumbled mess and unexplainable fear in my brain, or the feeling of nausea in my lower gut. Most of all, I wished they could’ve understood how truly desperate I was to be liked.

  I didn’t know why I was still at that school. I’d been excited about going to boarding school to begin with, but I always assumed I’d leave when my parents moved back. I’d even written them an angry letter saying how much I hated it and wanted to leave. Isn’t that how you resolve things? By writing angry letters?!

  But my mum and dad thought boarding school was a great way of keeping things in my life consistent, in a lifestyle where schools and houses weren’t permanent. By the time they moved to England to be nearer to my school I was living in house number nine. And even though they thought they were doing their best, and even though I can see it from their point of view now, I just didn’t view it that way at the time.

  I received my first fashion magazine in something called the Birthday Sack, which was basically a pillowcase that your friends would take from dorm to dorm the night before your birthday, in which girls would gift you totally random and unnecessary things both you and, most importantly, they didn’t need.

  Among the array of toothbrushes, perfume samples and sweets that I’m sure had been lying at the bottom of someone’s handbag, was a copy of Elle. Its edges were tatty, and it had clearly been read by a lot of people, but instantly I became hooked.

  First off, it had Elvis’s granddaughter on the cover, dressed in bright neon colours and pink-and-purple-striped socks with high heels. I’d never seen anyone look so beautiful or glamorous. Aside from once having Michael Jackson as a stepfather, I bet she didn’t have any problems. Secondly, the articles in it seemed so grown-up and glamorous compared to the ‘What does my discharge mean?’ questionnaires in my teen magazines. I treasured that magazine like it was my most prized possession, reading it from cover to cover.

  This magazine was my escape from boarding school. I dreamt I was in the shoes of the models who were shooting in exotic locations
. I bet those girls weren’t expected to play lacrosse on a rainy sports field, or made to wear leftover swimming costumes by their bitch of a PE teacher. Nah – their lives looked whimsical and perfect. If only I was a model …

  Oh, who was I kidding? Like that would ever happen.

  Still, it didn’t mean I couldn’t fantasize about becoming one – even if I looked nothing like a model. I dreamt of being on the pages, where some place, somewhere, some girl would want to look like me. But in order to become one I needed to become thinner.

  That’s what models were: thin. There were no Ashley Grahams lining the pages, and certainly no ‘body positive’ movements. Instagram didn’t exist, so there were no models doing their own thing and modelling at the size they were meant to be. You were expected to hate your body – because, as all retailers know, getting women to hate their bodies sells more products.

  The supermodels of the eighties, models like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, were, at this stage, probably considered ‘fat’. Now every model you saw looked anorexically thin.

  In fact, it seemed that every celebrity was size zero. Size zero was everywhere. Weekly gossip magazines would print hundreds of images of these thin women, parading them like their obvious mental illnesses were something to be gawped at. It was a very irresponsible thing to publish, especially for girls like me who were easily triggered and influenced by images like that, but you couldn’t pick up a magazine without reading about it. Those images were hard to escape, and hard to steer your eyes away from.

  I remember reading an article in one of these magazines, with a photo of a clearly anorexic celebrity next to it. The magazine had written ‘HOW DOES SHE DO IT?’ at the top of the article, along with a step-by-step daily meal guide of what she probably ate. The total amounted to a mere 800 calories a day. I doubt you’d be able to print that in a magazine nowadays, but back then I remember cutting that segment out and keeping it in my purse like some sort of Holy Grail. Reading about size-zero models didn’t deter me from eating disorders – it gave me the inspiration to look the same.

  Now, perhaps you’re someone who isn’t easily influenced by reading that kind of thing, and can let these photos go through one ear and out the other, so to speak. But seeing that diet plan fuelled my already-distorted body image and gave me more of an incentive to achieve my size-zero goal. It was just the encouragement I needed.

  People believed that size zero was a choice. Women ‘chose’ to look that way, didn’t they? As it was a beauty ideal at the time, perhaps that’s how it started for some women. Thin was fashionable. These women wanted to stay ‘en vogue’. But while it may start off as a ‘choice’, when it’s this drastic, it comes with consequences. There is only one way to become that thin, and that’s by starving yourself.

  If fashion wanted to shock, it did. It created millions of headlines and photo opportunities for brands everywhere. Some models I know from that time now recall being told to ‘look anorexic, but not actually be anorexic’. So, if you were a model and wanted to book big jobs, that’s what you did: diet until you looked excessively thin. Some models said they lived off apples and Diet Coke for years to keep the weight down and book jobs. Others injected heroin, took cocaine or ate balls of cotton to suppress their appetite. You could never look ‘too thin’. One model even died coming off the catwalk due to starvation.

  As seasons went on, the girls got thinner and thinner, before size double-zero became popular. And at that time millions of girls around the world who, like me, aspired to be models, assumed that having this body shape was necessary to be considered ‘beautiful’. When skinny white women are the only women you see represented in the things you see and read, why wouldn’t you believe that is the ideal?

  Worse of all, size zero wasn’t a trend. It lasted for years and years, was photographed for years and years and was written about for years and years. This body type would influence me as a teen and throughout my early twenties, and leave me with both physical and mental health problems.

  It was a simple diet. That was all. Not even a diet, really – just choosing to lead a healthy lifestyle, choosing not to eat copious amounts of chocolate bars or junk. Cutting down on cans of Coke and lemonade. Not having double portions of everything. Being in control of what I put into my mouth, when I hadn’t been able to stop myself from binge-eating before.

  And it worked! The weight did come off – a healthy amount. I was by no means skinny, and I was still ‘bigger’ than most girls in my class, but I was slowly becoming ‘normal’ like the rest of them.

  My new obsession was pulling my jumper up to my neck and seeing if I could see a bit of ribcage yet. The inches of fat that had previously covered my ribs seemed to have shrunk ever so slightly, as had the squishiness of my tummy. No one else seemed to notice my efforts, though. Although the scales were going down, no one mentioned that I’d lost weight, and this felt frustrating.

  Limiting what I ate didn’t make me feel any better about myself, but it did make me feel in control and gave me something to focus on other than homesickness and the constant paranoia and anxiety. Well, it wasn’t like I had control in any other aspect of my life, was it? I felt trapped at a school I didn’t like very much, on a campus in the Welsh countryside predominantly surrounded by sheep and rabbits with myxomatosis. Like most teenagers, I desperately wanted freedom.

  So now, eating was my new obsession. Or rather, not eating. Every meal was a test of my willpower, and became an even bigger excuse to put myself down.

  My control over food was drowning out my anxiety – and so was bad behaviour. I did have one best friend in school – Dave the Woman. Dave wasn’t a man, obviously, but I do have a ton of fond memories of her, and she was great.

  Dave the Woman came from a very wealthy family. Her mum was very beautiful and fashionable and let us get away with a lot, so going to her house was a lot of fun and a retreat away from the prison. The thing I loved most about Dave was that she was always up for a laugh, and humour-wise she was just as immature as I was. She also hated boarding school as much as I did, and so we’d lean on each other when times got hard.

  I suppose you’re wondering how Dave the Woman got gifted her name. Well, back in the days when YouTube was merely a twinkle in the internet’s eye, Dave was given a camera you could record videos on. A few people had uploaded videos to YouTube, but it wasn’t that popular. However, for two bored schoolgirls, it was very popular indeed.

  After a series of in-jokes that were funny to nobody bar us, the character Dave the Woman was born. Dave wasn’t a man or a woman, really – just a crazy person who wore a pink bobble hat, a beige sweater and who would go around the school doing random things, like making prank calls; hitting fire alarms and running away; hitting vending machines until packets of crisps fell out; ringing the school payphone and watching through the window as we told someone they were going to get murdered by a ghost; or pretending to ‘tree watch’ – i.e. sitting on a wall outside the dormitories and waiting to see if a tree moved or not. It was silly, but it took our minds off being homesick – and Dave and I were both incredibly homesick. Homesickness bonded us, but also got us into a lot of trouble.

  Once our video compilation of Dave’s adventures was complete, I’d sit on my laptop and edit them together before uploading them to YouTube. Famous YouTubers like Zoella certainly didn’t exist back then, but I’d like to think that had I kept it up I’d probably be as good as her now (and maybe as rich).

  But you know what? Dave the Woman’s video took off. It began to get shared hundreds of times across a popular social media site for teens at the time called Bebo, which was like – in my humble opinion – a crap version of Facebook. Kids from schools across the county shared our video, and Dave the Woman became an internet sensation – well, at least among a few schools in the north.

  The filming of Dave the Woman took up the majority of our spare time. People couldn’t wait to see what ‘adventures’ Dave got up to next, like wha
t would happen after we cling-filmed toilet bowls in the middle of the night. Even boys found it funny, which in hindsight isn’t that surprising, considering our videos were very immature.

  But then I had the grand idea to make Dave the Woman: The Movie. This was going to be our funniest video yet, and would help viewers understand the real Dave. I was the presenter, and we got another friend to film it.

  During one scene, we wanted to artistically show the viewer that Dave had the mindset of a child. As if by magic, a group of ten-year-olds were coming out of their PE lesson. When the teacher’s back was turned, we decided to get them involved.

  ‘Would you like to be on TV?’ I said, holding the camera in my hand. ‘We’re filming something for the BBC.’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ they squealed.

  ‘Great!’ I said. ‘When I put my thumb up, I need you to all wave your hands, OK?’

  ‘OK!’ they said enthusiastically.

  ‘Three … two … one … action!’ I said, and Dave jumped into the frame.

  ‘These are my friends! They are all little children!’ she yelled excitedly, and once I’d put my thumb up, the kids started waving.

  ‘And … cut!’ I yelled, which was handy, because the teacher had just walked back.

  It was great footage. Once it had all been edited, it was uploaded to the internet and people went crazy for it. Dave would walk in the street and people would yell ‘Dave!’ like she was some sort of celebrity.

  Meanwhile, some teacher at our school, who clearly had no life of her own, had set up a secret Bebo account to spy on what the girls were doing. No, I’m not joking. In fact, a lot of girls had been in trouble in school recently for posting things online, and none of us could work out who the snitch was. But because Dave the Woman: The Movie was going semi-viral, and because this teacher had no life, she’d spotted the video one evening. And rather than view it as the Oscar-worthy piece of artistry it was, she found a big issue with it – which may have been understandable.