Blue Days

I squirmed in my seat waiting for Mrs. Kauffman to call my name. As she ticked down the list, she stopped to look up at me.

"Diana Meeeeans." The new art teacher raised her eyebrows to look down her long nose. "Emily Means's sister?"

I sighed. "Yes."

Emily Means was my non-artistic, athletic sister in the grade above me. This woman might know Emily, but she obviously doesn't know me, I grumbled to myself. Mrs. Kauffman spoke in third person, and Mrs. Kauffman didn't know that Diana Means was an artist.

When I cracked open my yearbooks, I always turned to my page first in the hopes that my horrible school pictures looked better small. In seventh grade, it didn’t matter how my picture looked. Next to my seventh grade face, my sister's name. Oh, the horror I felt when I saw the association in ink! I flipped forward to the eighth grade class and looked for her picture. Sure enough, Emily Means. In the index, the list out from her name is two lines long. My name was nowhere. This is an outrage! I thought. Like I didn't even exist this year! I was horrified that such a thing could happen and that everyone in the school had a record of it. Not Diana, but "Emily's sister."

We are close in age, but far enough apart that we have separate friends. Far enough apart that no one should mistake us. From looks to hobbies to personalities to blood, we could not be more different. She is a baby-fine blonde with a bubbly personality; her hair tosses with an enviable ease. I, on the other hand, have always wrestled with thick chestnut curls, emotional outbursts. Emily makes friends everywhere she goes, whereas I am of the shy and awkward variety. My few close friendships run deep. She's now 23; it doesn't look like she'll ever pass 5 feet. Her friends at camp called her "Fun-Size." And I have, for a long time, been able to rest my chin on top of Emily's head. I reached 5'4" early and stayed there.

I blame our differences on "the adoption grab-bag." It is easiest to describe my sister in comparison to me. Our differences made me curious about my origins. Looking out the windows of the minivan, I gazed at every "Adopt a Highway" sign. I convinced myself that the same group brought me to my parents. It seemed that Emily and I were adopted from different worlds.

My father, the sports-lover, hoped to adopt boys who would become star athletes. Emily lived for sports while I lied to get out of practices. She mastered the game; I made my first masterpieces.

My first experience with abstract art happened in Lion's Park while my parents cheered for my sister's softball team. I sat on the bleachers with my back to the diamond and my butt where feet go, using the seat as a drawing table. I scribbled loosely, enjoying the connection of head to hand to paper. I colored inside the loops, varying the shades of graphite.

I felt drawn to making sand designs with my cleats, not manning my "position" as backup behind first base. Once in basketball, much to my surprise, I found myself with the ball in my possession. I dribbled towards the away team's basket. Each time I dribbled the ball, I dribbled it all the way to the ground. My truly defining moment came in a game of tee-ball. As I ran from third to home, I stopped to pick up something that caught my eye. It turned out to be a cow tooth. I wrapped it up in toilet paper and put it in my shadowbox, unwrapping it every few days for examination until I moved on to the next distraction.

The performance aspect of sports is perfect venue for proving oneself, and after the yearbook mix-up, I felt that need burning with the fire of hormones. I have to find the short road out of anonymity! With an angry, foolish head, I reasoned that the best way out was joining the football team.

It was spring, and I felt feisty with the new energy of the season. Spite kept me stone faced as boys snickered during the call-out meeting. Everyone will know how tough I am inside, then they'll know my name. That summer I ran on the treadmill in the basement twice with the TV tuned to the Colts pre-season games. I struggled through twenty minutes each time, but dammit, I needed to buff up on football.

While I ran, my attention drifted away from the game to my inner chatter. Pre-season means August, and this meant that August was the first time I made a move since the call-out meeting. I imagined all the middle school boys who would love the fair chance to pummeled a bull-headed hundred pound girl. My motives came into question, and, and I never went to the tryouts.

I determined that the best way to avoid the problem was to go directly to the source. I joined the yearbook staff, and in the first few pages, I sneaked in a few pictures of me with my friends. Someone nominated me for "Most Likely to become an Author" and I received it. Success! My name, my picture, not Emily's, sits in the middle of the "Most Likely" page.

In September of my freshman year, I told my best friend I was going to cut my hair short like Keri Russell in Felicity. She gasped in horror, so I told her I was joking. But I wasn't. I searched the internet for photos of women with short hair, and I longed for an easy, funky pixie cut. I was ready to define my own look and to make my mornings easier. I called around different salons in town looking for an appointment, finally settling with Sherry, my mom's stylist. The two weeks were just in case I change my mind, but I didn't waver a bit.

I went in clutching a photo of a woman with short, straight style. It was a total mismatch for my hair type. Sherry cut all but two inches off of my thick, curly mop and assured me it was what all her college clients were sporting. It's just hair, I told myself.

I rode my bike home and let the wind ripple through to my scalp. It felt so free, weightless, effortless. By the time I got to my neighborhood, my hair was totally puffed out from my head like a big brown cotton ball. I stopped by my boyfriend's house to show off my new style. Alex, then my boyfriend of two years, lived less than a block down the street. His little sister was outside when I arrived. He came outside and didn't recognize me underneath the freshly cut halo. And when I went home to show my father, he said, "I always wanted a boy." His comment stung me, and I shrank into myself.

The next day at school seemed like the longest ever. I had no idea how to control the rug of curls I had just created. Everyone stared at me, though few commented. That's how I knew I had a bad haircut.

I looked to the CVS beauty aisle for a solution. First, I tried a stiff gel. This wasn't quite funky enough, and I had a habit of crushing the spikes while I leaned my head against my hand in class. This ruined the tough look I was going for. I soon found myself in Hot Topic picking out a rich shade of blue. The bottle sat in my bathroom cabinet for a few days. I promised my mom I would wait until after our annual church directory pictures. Within minutes of returning home, I was bleaching my hair in preparation for the dye.

Blue Velvet, it turned out, stained everything. After a shower, the dye dripped out of my hair and onto my neck and forehead, staining them for a week. Splatters from my wet hair stained the yellow countertop, yellow towels, and cream bathtub permanently. A little splotch got on the wall above the bathroom light switch. I tried matching it with paint, but the walls were so light and the dye so dark that my cover-up job was obvious.

My hair turned out a dark blue that was glorious in the sunlight. The stain soaked into the dry skin around healing pimples on my forehead and matched my braces, but I was happy to be the only person in our conservative high school to sport blue hair. Proud, even, to defy stereotypes by keeping up my grades.

"Love the color, Means," Principle Eggers said in the lunch room one day. It's Diana, I thought to myself. But he had made note of me, and that was step one in making a name for myself.

Making a name for myself, yes. But I was, as I discovered, also confusing people. "What a nice young man," an Alzheimer's patient said as I helped her in the retirement home the next summer.

My ten minute Great Clips haircut fooled more than those with memory loss and dwindling eyesight. "What can I get for you, sir?" a Starbucks cashier asked. I responded in a high pitched voice; his face fell.

"I'm going to let this young man have the window seat," a woman said on an airplane. Her daughter whispered loudly that I was a girl.

At first these instances offended me. Can't these people see my D-cups pointing right at them?! I eventually found comfort in the realization that they weren't focused on my chest. Some students thought my short hair meant I was a lesbian, which was an association I hadn't considered. I dismissed it as ridiculous, though I experimented with combining boys' jeans with baby tees. Before too long, Alex broke up with me. Sources close to him told me, "He didn't like your hair." The breakup empowered me. I found a boy with the same haircut as mine and I asked him out. He said yes. We dated for the rest of high school. I figured anyone who still thought I was a lesbian was crazy.

I scoffed at the misinterpretations of a simple haircut, but I secretly took joy in shocking my classmates, most of who I had been in school with since kindergarten. I spoke out more, tried new things, unleashed a woman with balls. The Harbinger, our school newsmagazine, wanted to print my thoughts. My boldness grew with each article I wrote. I became passionate about myself, my beliefs. With one friend, I protested George Bush's second inauguration. The intersection was busy and we found ourselves clenching our jaws in response to arbitrary insults from adults in our town. Oh, the nerve they had to stop traffic! I felt so strong when I came home from the protest. I sat down to write about it.

Though people sometimes confuse our ages, no one mistakes me for Emily now. I can't imagine that anyone would ever purposely put the wrong name next to my picture. The mistake was a finger pointing right at me, poking at a fear of being eclipsed. It was a match on a pile of insecurities. Unwittingly, it moved me to liberate myself from anonymity, and to a degree, my shyness. There is no hiding when you have bright blue hair, pale skin, and large breasts. If I can't hide, I said, then I won't ...