147. Pretty

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Now that Eliza Harrowitz was thirteen, her mother had agreed that she was ready for this. She was a woman now, after all.

Every Friday, her family had the same routine of trekking through their local megastore after dinner. Eliza always enjoyed these shopping trips because they gave her an opportunity to browse for new books or toys or games, and sometimes her parents might even buy her something. But this trip was different. She had been looking forward to it for a while now. She knew exactly what she was going to buy with the money she had received from her bat mitzvah.

Once they were inside the store, Eliza headed straight for the cosmetic aisle. She loved that word, cosmetics. It sounded so glamorous to her.
All of the celebrities wore makeup, and it made them even more beautiful. She admired the faces of the women advertizing the cosmetics. They were all so pretty. And now, she would be pretty too.

Of course, her father had always told her she was pretty, but dads had to say stuff like that to their daughters. She examined her face in the mirror. Was she pretty? Or did pretty come in a bottle?

She looked around her, trying to decide what to buy. There were so many choices and she did not know where to start. Mascara was the stuff that women wore on their eyelashes to make them longer and darker. She would like that, but there were at least twenty different kinds of it.

Blakely Rhoads wore mascara, and she had the longest eyelashes in the seventh grade.

All of the boys liked Blakely. They went out of their ways to get her attention and try to impress her.

Eliza wondered what that kind of attention felt like. She imagined herself walking into school the next day with lashes even longer than Blakely’s.

Then the boys would think she was the prettiest girl. And she would just bat those mile-long lashes at them and laugh at their jokes and silly antics.

She chose a tube that promised her maximum volume and length and moved on to lip color. As if there weren’t enough kinds of mascara to choose from, there were twice as many options for lips, in every shade of red and pink imaginable. One label said “kissable.” Huh.

Eliza had always wanted to know what kissing was like. She’d seen it done in the movies since she was a little kid. She imagined a dizzying whirlwind of romance and passion. Maybe if she went to school with “kissable” lips she might find out. Her cheeks flushed as she imagined the boy that she wouldn’t mind finding out with.

She picked up the “kissable” lipgloss in a shade of reddest red. None of the boys would miss lips that kissably red.  They would take one look at her and see that she, Eliza Marie Harrowitz was indeed a woman now. She would walk into that school with her made over face and her head up high a new person. A glamorous person. A mature person. And most of all—a pretty one.

“Eliza!” her younger sister, Lainie, groaned, interrupting her fantasy.

“We’ve been in this aisle FOREVER! Makeup is so BORING! Can we please go look at toys now?”

“Okay,” Eliza agreed cheerfully. “Let’s go look at toys.”