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girlfriends, work had become
not only my livelihood, but also the sole source of my social life too.
    “I don’t know
how you work with her in the office every day and manage not to cuss Penny
out,” Jenna said. We were browsing through Rowe, a chic, expensive boutique on
High Street. I looked at a display of folded pashminas and listened to Jenna
complain about Penny’s latest offenses. “She literally walked right past me to
say hi to Ryan when she walked in yesterday. It was like I didn’t exist. She hates women. I don’t understand it. I
know Ryan’s hot, but Jesus, would a hello to little old me kill the woman?”
    “Wait. You think
Ryan’s hot?”
             “Totally,”
she said emphatically. “I mean, in, like, a hot boss kind of way. I like that
authoritative vibe he gives off.”
    “Hmm, I never
thought of him in that way.”
    “Oh yeah, all
the girls in the restaurant love him, including One Cent.” I couldn’t help but
chuckle; Maureen’s nickname for Penny had gone viral.
    “Maybe something
happened in her life that caused her to be such a mean person.”
             “Maybe
she’s just miserable because she has the worst clothes I’ve ever seen.” Jenna
said.
             “That’s
not the point. She could be Anna Wintour, but would it change the way you felt
about her?”
             “No,
but I’m not really an American Vogue fan. And I really don’t understand why you’re defending her. She’s meaner to
you than she is to anyone else.”
    “I try not to
let people like that get under my skin anymore. When someone is as ruthless as
Penny, it’s more often than not because they’ve got some fucked-up mental
baggage. She’s probably harder on herself than she is on any of us.”
             “Well
she’s obviously jealous of you. Everyone thinks you’re the pretty girl, and she knows that,” Jenna said.
             “That’s
ridiculous.”
             “It
is not. It’s the truth.”
             “Well
I don’t buy it.” I replied.
             “Why
not?”
             “Um
. . .” I was reluctant to tell anyone about my unfortunate past as a bullied
teenager. I feared that they’d judge me for the loser I once was instead of
seeing the person that I’d become. “I was different when I was younger. Reallydifferent. I was so shy in high school.
And definitely not the pretty girl.”
    At seventeen
years of age, I couldn’t wait to graduate and break free from the lonesome
identity I had somehow acquired; and I vowed never to attend a high school
reunion. More recently, I used Facebook to spy on the girls who had once made
me hate my life; I took a very guilty and silent pleasure in noting that many
had gotten less attractive while I’d finally come in to my own. They’d worsened
with age, while I’d improved.
    The one perk of
being an outcast in high school was that you had nowhere to go but up. I wasn’t
the girl who peaked in adolescence—quite the opposite. And as a teenager,
I’d assumed that I would always be a loser and never imagined that anyone would
ever consider me “pretty,” as Jenna suggested. The self-loathing I’d once
possessed kept me from bad-mouthing people like Penny, even though I sometimes
had to bite my tongue.
    It took my
entire twenties to learn what some people were born knowing: it didn’t matter
what anyone thought of me and that I, like all people, was worthy of happiness
and could succeed in spite of my past. I finally felt I'd been given something
of a reprieve when I arrived as a freshman at Ohio State. It was my second
chance. But I still had deep-rooted social anxiety, and I couldn’t completely
accept that I deserved joy simply because I was born into the world. I’d been
programmed in high school to believe that it was my lot in life to be an
undesirable outsider. But with each passing year of my twenties, I felt more of
a shift. And I knew that anyone