Read How to Grow Up for Free Online Page A

was never going to provide me with the opportunity to wear the dramatic, decadent outfits I longed to dress in, and so mundane events would have to do. The occasional no-uniform days my Catholic school offered, for example. To a school-wide Christmas party in sixth grade I wore a striped mini-dress with actual ballet shoes as footwear and a feathered roach clip in my hair. A bean-shaped pleather Jordache cross-body purse cut across me on its ropy strap. The principal phoned my mother and asked her to please deliver a less-totally-awesome outfit for me tochange into, and so my pictures on Santa’s lap that year featured me wearing a patchwork sack dress straight out of
Little House on the Prairie
. And I loved
Little House
, but word of Valley Girl culture had reached as far as Chelsea, and I was trying to look less prairie, more galleria.
    The persecution was just beginning. By seventh grade I was taunted by classmates for my amazing hot-pink-and-black geometric-patterned sweat suit, jeered at for being “punk.” I was baffled—they said “punk” like it was a bad thing! A fight with Mom over what I would wear in my class pictures resulted in a photo of me red-faced, eyes swollen from crying, in a pastel sweater decorated with dancing teddy bears, the black-and-white-checked tunic with the spiked belt and asymmetrical-snap collar in a ball of defeat on my bedroom floor.
    My fashion sense nearly prevented me from graduating eighth grade, because I had the audacity to wear a strapless dress to the ceremony. The principal—a nun whose own sweaters were suspiciously tight—called the dress “amoral,” and declared that I did not look like the product of a Catholic upbringing. I wasn’t exactly sure what she was getting at, but I knew I
did
look like Cyndi Lauper, minus the orange hair (not for long!), and the only thing wrong with that outfit was the shapeless gold robe I had to cover it all up with to walk down the aisle. Sister Gertrude and I had spent the final months of my education in a ridiculous stalemate: Each morning, as the class pledged allegiance to the flag, she waited at the glass pane of the classroom door, glaring at me. As our childish voices chorused, “and justice for all,” she would swing open the door and march me to the bathroom tooversee the scrubbing away of my navy-blue eyeliner. Every morning I arrived at Our Lady of Assumption School with my eyes smudgily ringed in Wet n Wild, and within an hour I was rubbing it off with a scratchy paper towel. I couldn’t give in to Sister Gertrude, and Sister Gertrude couldn’t give in to me. When I graduated, she went as far as to create a new dress code handbook for every future student to ponder, complete with crude drawings illustrating what a “punk” haircut looked like (it looked, frankly, like a mullet).
    Starting afresh at my next Catholic school—high school this time, and all-girl at that—I dyed my hair black against my mother’s wishes. She feared it would make me look like my father, whose existence we as a family were trying to forget. It might have brought out that family resemblance if I hadn’t teased it into a sprawling inky mushroom cloud upon my head, with bangs that cascaded into my face, making it hard to see. This fantastic hairdo made my classmates at the all-girl Catholic school furious. I scooted out of class early each day to avoid a pummeling by the beefy Italian girls who were driven to rage at the sight of my tangles. Eventually the principal saw fit to put a stop to this bullying, dealing with it by kicking me out of school so that my classmates’ education would not be ruined by the constant distraction of my hair.
    I enrolled in the local public school, where I was shoved in the hallway for wearing, out of season, the Elvira-brand black lipstick sold at drugstores each Halloween. I became an acolyte of the darker operas of punk and Goth. The world