15Average: the common ground for a society that says there is none.
I am the girl next door that no one knows exists, the shadow that walks in the room on the third floor after 8pm. There is nothing wrong with average, and most are content with just being that and would much rather be that, but I am tired of it. I want to be something-other then average in every way other then my weight. It just didn't make sense that I could be so average or that anything could be as average as I could.
It was like being given peanut butter and jelly every single day for lunch and being expected to bite into it as if it were the first time you had ever tasted it. There are different qualities about peanut that make people like the same consistency they have, the chunks, or how smooth it can be, or the fact that when you open a new jar there are three peanuts on the top. There are different qualities about jelly that makes people spread it on everything, like the taste, the shape of the jar, or the fact that some jellies come with seeds or rind or zest from the fruit and it makes it that much more exciting. In truth neither of these condiments are at all exciting because how is one supposed to become excited about extra extra creamy smooth peanut butter, or strawberry jelly. They both lack the imagination to be anything great after the age of five and then fall into the category of average.
I knew the turning point for my life was when I had counted 365 bite size peanut butter sandwiches that had been made for a funeral. It was a sign, I was meant to be like these sandwiches for the rest of my life and nothing new and exciting was to ever happen to me. I would work in my parents catering business for the rest of my life, never to be saved by a prince charming, but only to be greeted by a toad named Earl that drove the orders to where they had to be.
I was doomed.
My brother had gotten a scholarship to the local university because of his ability to play rugby and never end up dead. I was jealous of him because he wasn't completely average; he had this talent to never be hurt unless he himself was inflicting the pain. You would think that a 21- year-old man would know that breaking a real beer bottle over his head might cause a concussion. Though I think that I was more jealous of the girls that flocked around my brother because they weren't average, but yet similar enough that they should have been categorized as average to one another. Either way he is the pride and joy our parents, a son, that's all they wanted. My mother called me her little bonus, because now she could put to use all her old cloths. Though don't get me wrong I had nothing against rugby, I enjoyed going to the games because after wards I would get to serve all the snacks my parent's provided, free of charge, and sometimes the players would remember my name even if my brother couldn't. He called me Frank because it was his middle name and he could remember that, though over the years Frank mutated into Frankie.
My real name was Mara, sounds simple enough to remember, but it was the meaning of this name that set me apart from the Christi's who's names meant follower of Christ, or the Nicole's who's names meant peoples victory, my messily little four letter name meant bitter sea. I was cursed with this name; I would be a sea of bitterness for the rest of my life because it was my name. I was only given this name because I was born on the same day my great aunt Mara committed suicide. She was 8 and had given up on the world and drowned herself in her namesake. You have to be a rather unhappy 8-year-old to want to die that way, and so in hopes that the name could live for once in this family I was named Mara. It could have been that the name was what was cursed and rubbed off of the beholder the more it was said and if that is the case then call me Frankie.
My father's name is Frank and my mother's name is Carry, and together with my brother Alex they make the perfect image of a family, not to mention our dog a fully-grown Scottish wolfhound named Puppy. Always I was a taint in the family portrait that was sent out every Christmas. I would stand next to my mother who was sitting next to my father and I would smile at the camera watching the diluted reflection of us in the lens thinking that that was really what my family looked like. Mean while the real photo would show up on a viewing screen and my mother would always ask me why I looked as if I had no control over the muscles in my mouth. That was the point when I would walk out of the photo place and walk home in the dress my mother had forced me to wear. It was all choreographed by the time I was 18 which is now.
I am in my finale year of high school facing graduation in two days, after walking across the stage there will be a dinner dance where my parents will be supplying the desert buffet and I will be wearing a dress that I have yet to purchase. Today I am stuck in a car with my mother as she complains about how unprepared I am though still maintains this giddiness that can only be explained by her joy in dressing me up.
I had ticked off ten shops already that we had been to and didn't even offer anything in my dress size. Kindly I asked my mother if I could phone some shops and ask if they had anything that would fit let alone anything I liked, but she told me this was an adventure for her and I to share.
I felt like she was a hunter creeping through the jungle and I was the elephant she was going to kill.
Store after store we went to which I was rather amazed that so many dress shops existed, and then she gave up. It was in between a store that could order something in that might fit and a store that had a second hand dress that fit like a sack that she threw down her purse looked up at me and started crying. She was frustrated because she had the perfect son but not the perfect daughter, not the daughter that should have been hers.
Once on that note I checked whether or not I really did belong to my parents. But in the hospital records I was the only girl to be born on that day, which seemed rather discouraging since babies are always being born of opposite sexes.
I had never brought my mother to tears not even when I sat on my bike riding it for the first time with out train wheels and yelling that I was never coming back. Not even when I had cut all my hair off in the sink to prove that I could be more of a Frank then a Mara. Not even when I told her last year that if she died that very day I wouldn't cry for her, ever. And here she crying because I could never look as pretty as she did, or had.
I was amused with the idea of looking pretty, thought it was bitter ugly amusement that trickled through me like a poison that would soon enough kill the idea that maybe I could be pretty. It wasn't as if I wanted a dress, or that I even wanted to go to any of the celebrations for my graduation. Simply I would have much rather liked sitting at the beach watching the world stand still.
My name may have given me my bitterness but it had also given me the sea.