If You Told Me To

Sarah had been contemplating the idea for the past three hours, staring at her all-too-familiar reflection in the small mirror stationed on the bureau across from her bed. She had been trying to occupy her attention with other things, watching videos on YouTube, searching miscellaneous things on Google, drawing a picture of her overflowing trash bin in the corner, which turned out really awful, and reading a book she had to get finished by the beginning of school, but nothing worked. She still found her eyes shifting sideways to sneak glances at her face, the same face that graced her toddler pictures, only with thinner cheeks and more freckles.

But her major issue with her face was that it was, at least to her, boring. There was nothing exciting about it. She couldn’t imagine meeting someone and having them walk away saying, “Wow, that girl Sarah had a really nice ____.” It just wasn’t necessarily captivating, memorable, interesting.

Not that she thought she was ugly. She wasn’t a self-loathing, constantly-questioning teenage girl who was convinced she was ugly or stated it as a fact all the time so everyone would grace her with enthusiastic compliments. She just didn’t find herself particularly beautiful or anything.

And since plastic surgery wasn’t exactly an option at her age or with her lack of resources, she couldn’t help but throw the idea of makeup around in her head. She knew girls at school had been wearing it for at least a couple of years, and she’d always admired how their eyelashes always looked so long, their complexions flawless. Sarah wondered if she could create the same illusions on her face, or maybe even get better results. A girl couldn’t help but dream.

As she climbed to her feet, she couldn’t hide the small smile threatening to take over her face. Her heart pounded in her chest as she fretted about asking her father to take her to buy something that was going to make her look different than he was used to seeing her, and she was almost positive she was going to get the “Oh, stop, Sarah. You’re absolutely beautiful the way you are. Is this about this Harry boy?” speech. Which she really didn’t want.

And it wasn’t about Harry. It was about her own self-confidence. At least, that was what she repeated to herself a million times in the short hallway between her bedroom and the living room where her father was watching baseball at a decibel almost too loud for the human ear.

"Hi, Daddy,” she greeted, trying to will her voice not to shake. She could only remember being this nervous when she had to tell her father that she’d gotten her period and she needed him to run out and buy her pads and tampons before she bled through all of her clothes and all over the house.

He immediately leaned forward to take the remote into his hand and muted the television. But when he turned to Sarah, his eyebrows knitted together in concern, showing that he’d picked up on Sarah’s anxiety, which only made her feel more uncomfortable about the situation. “Are you okay, honey?”

She swallowed and nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay. I was just wondering something. How’s the game?”

Jake’s dark eyes flicked over to the television briefly before shrugging. “It’s only the first inning. Not much has happened. Why are you twisting your hands together like that?”

Sarah glanced down at her hands, which were knotted together as her subconscious mind struggled to soothe her pumping adrenaline. Without another thought, she let out a breath and let her arms fall to her side before deciding her stance was awkward and folding them in front of her chest instead. No more stalling, she chastised herself. Just blurt it out, you coward.

“Daddy, I want to get some makeup.”

At first, Jake looked shocked. And then his face closed back up, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Is this about that Harry boy next door?”

“No!” she exclaimed, just a little too emphatically to be accepted as complete truth. “I just…I’m starting high school in September, Daddy. I think it’s about time I started trying to figure out how to wear makeup so that I can look the part. How can I expect to be appreciated as a mature woman if I don’t even know how to put on simple eyeliner?”

Sarah had no idea where the explanation had come from, and she blushed when she realized she had delivered the statements a little too harshly, but she stuck by what she’d said without apology. Hopefully, it would make her father understand where she was coming from a little better.

“So are you doing this for you, or are you doing it to be respected?” Jake looked more confused than concerned, and Sarah hoped that was an improvement of sorts.

“Both,” she replied honestly before nibbling on her bottom lip. “I want to try it to see if I like it, but I also want to become good enough at it that I can look older and…” She let her voice trail off with a shrug of her shoulders, as she had absolutely no idea where she was supposed to go from there. She was just making it sound worse and worse, like she felt like an outsider who was desperate to blend in, and she knew her father wouldn’t be thrilled with that kind of an explanation.

There was a short silence that was completely filled with silence before Jake finally sighed and ran a calloused hand down his once-handsome face. “Alright, fine. Put on your sneakers. Let’s go now before the game gets interesting.”

Sarah couldn’t keep herself from squealing and throwing her arms around him as he got to his feet from the worn couch. “Thank you, Daddy! I’ll be out in a second.” And with that, she darted into her room to put on her red Converse, trying not to exclaim with her well-won victory.



After returning from the drugstore, Sarah dumped out the bag of cosmetics onto her neatly-made bed, bouncing up and down with barely-contained excitement, sending the small mirror she’d taken from her bureau bouncing from side to side. She hoped that she’d gotten what she was supposed to, since her father had been no help; when she’d first asked for his opinion between eyeliner pencil colors, he’d given her a look of bewilderment that had made her laugh in the middle of the aisle.

The makeup had actually been much more expensive than she’d figured, so she knew she was going to have to use all of it in one way or another.

She was just about to open her mascara to try it out on her eyelashes when she realized that she had no idea how to put on some of the stuff she’d gotten. She’d figured the concealer was a given, since she’d remembered reading it in a book when she was a kid, but she had absolutely no idea how to apply it to her face. And when she pulled the brush out of the tube, it looked gloppy and thick and, frankly, kind of gross.

Instead of panicking about getting herself into something far beyond her control, she pulled her laptop off the floor and went immediately to YouTube, determined to look up tutorials from the best. Not that she would necessarily copy their looks, but at least she could find out the basics on how to apply everything. She hoped, anyway.

After she’d gotten a fairly good idea and started to follow some of the directions, she couldn’t help but wonder if Harry was going to like the change. What if he actually liked her natural look, and the makeup would turn him off completely? She strained to remember if he’d ever said anything about it in passing during one of their conversations, but she came up blank.

She shrugged and went back to making up her face to the best of her ability, just hoping that things would turn out for the best. After all, she told herself in the most optimistic mental voice possible, you need to live your life for you, not Harry. He’s only here until August. You’re stuck with yourself for the rest of your life.

“Sarah!” Jake called from the other room, disrupting her inner pep talk. “Make sure you show me what you look like after putting all that stuff on your face! I bought it, so I have approval rights!”

“Okay!” she called back, snickering to herself as she leaned toward the unstable mirror to apply the mascara to her eyelashes, only to whack herself in the eyeball with the wand.