welcome to my tough skin

Prologue:

Effervescent, champagne-like, I began from a nylon stretched over a clothes hanger and a soapy pot, colorful and transparent. Often trapped in an ice-cube, my thoughts like to hiss and escape. All those things that define a bubbly blonde could make me alla fulla air and meaningless, except I’m definitely alla fulla air and I know it means something.

P.S.:

In the first chapter, learning the stats of the heroine is vital and through her actions whom she really is and not through what she says is important for connectivity. It’s like elementary school and for clarity on a subject I need something concrete for Show and Tell. Before I do that, though, just so it is known, I’m the biggest snob, the biggest stinkin’ critic a person could possibly ever meet with the sweetest smile on a face. My dimples demand “Increase that, decrease this, & also, I would’ve done without.” However, I say that’s life and lies told to the self can become truths. To avoid these lies from solidifying, here I am, a bubble about to pop, chiseling that sternum open for the microscope. The microscope will pick up the threads for me to follow and I hope I pop.

Chapter 1:

My name is Haley and back in the day I was a tiny bully. Elementary school is such a fuzzy vague memory, in fact, I remember the winding, often soggy, traffic-stalled drives there more than the classes themselves. I recall being happy and content in that I was keeping up with my Spelling Book and could run faster than all the other girls and most of the boys except this fellow who ran like the Mariners’ second baseman, Joey Cora, who could be compared to a shrimp but was much too fast to be called so. I liked being the fastest and the brightest. I also recall getting frustrated by the fact that I seemed to attract the really nerdy schoolboy crushes. I was passively aggressive nice. So nice, that I’d laugh through the flying wood-chips, and then within the next second I’d realize I had just played along with the sweet but uncool kid I couldn’t be possibly be seen near.  Finally, I lured the same boy into the playhouse at recess only to shove him straight to the ground on his heinie and basically told him off. My abuse of weak little kids was an occasional thing and it happened away from school, too. Having an older brother builds tough skin. Today, I can show you all the scars I have, because to me they were cool to sport. Only now as a woman, I complain that I had never thought of treating them and now I definitely have tough looking skin. As to my older brother, he knew I liked to do things with him and got me to do things I wouldn’t do without his goading. I don’t know why but at some point my parents happened to give us these bulky red boxing gloves (which I still own cracked and extremely broken in.) Perhaps it was in their hopes that we would release steam while being “safely” padded. With these gloves, my brother matched me against his friend’s younger brother of the same age… the worst part wasn’t that he was thin and sinewy, but he had just recovered from being in the hospital after the discovery he had some odd muscular disorder. It must’ve been funny for my brother to put the little deaf sister up against someone and to see her kick his ass in the best way possible, with giant red boxing gloves. I look back in horror, realizing I beat up an invalid. There’s much more where these came from but take my word on it, I was a silly billy bully. Now, I’m a bully who knows better, a bully who knows to pick fights wisely, a bully who keeps them far and few, a bully who doesn’t smack for petty things like being better, brighter, and stronger but for a cause.