Makeup Girl

I really don’t know where to start with this girl. Despite how quiet she is most of the time, I have so many notes on her, and I could take many, many more. However, perhaps fittingly, most of the notes I have on her are focused on her appearance. Her clothes, and makeup. She puts a lot into it.

She always wears a lot of black. There’s one pair of black arm warmers that she wears almost every day, that have little bats on them. But she always contrasts that black with some other solid color—bright pink, or vivid dark green, or neon purple. She has lots of accessories; she often wears bright colorful flowers in her hair. Her makeup is always done to match her colors, and is different every single day.

She has many different varieties of eyeshadow, eyeliner, even face paint. Some days her eyes are just thick with black eyeliner. Other days her eyes are edged with spiderweb-like patterns; other days, there’s a colorful starburst around her entire right eye. Or a rainbow painted across her entire face.

She remembers every holiday, even little ones like Mardi Gras. On those special days, her makeup is always holiday themed. For Halloween, she made herself look like a zombie; at Christmas, her eyeshadow was red and white and green; on Valentine’s Day, she wore lots of pink and red, and around her eyes were lots of small red hearts. On Mardi Gras, she wore lots of greens and purples and colorful beads, and painted her face with purple and green feathery strokes to look like a mask.

“Do you plan out your makeup before you do it?” I asked her once. “Like, do you do sketches of it, or do you just make it up as you go?”

She just shrugged. She does a lot of shrugging. Always has.

In middle school, she shrugged a lot, and spoke even less than she does now. That was back when her makeup was just black eyeliner, and she wore the same black sweatshirt every day, zipped all the way up, even on the most sweltering hot days of the year.

“Aren’t you baking in that sweatshirt?” other kids would ask, and she would just shrug, her mouth looking scared to form words. She never took that sweatshirt off.

She’s totally blossomed in the past year or so. When she started painting her face with makeup each day, she started to come loose a little, let herself out.

I mean, there are parts of her that are still hidden up inside. She still wears those arm warmers, and she still doesn’t talk much. But when she does talk, her voice is loud and her words very clear. She keeps her head up and walks with big steps: her arms swing with confidence, and her heels don’t touch the ground.