Pretty Girl ?

Pretty Girl?

 

By Shorngirl

 

If I’d heard it once, I’d heard it a million times. ‘Ohh, you’re such a pretty girl’ or, ‘You are sooo beautiful.’ I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I hated being the pretty girl everyone admired. Just for once, I’d wanted to blend into the crowd and not be noticed.

My name is Stacy, and I’m the one all the boys chased after in school, and the one all the other girls hated for being, well, just the way I was. It was a blessing and a curse.

Ever since I was little, my mother always told me that I was special. Something should have clicked when she had entered me in one little miss beauty pageant after another; winning handily without even trying.

Fortunately for me, the beauty pageant thing stopped when I turned ten and I lost my four front teeth in a bicycle accident. Of course, my mother was heartbroken, but the magic of modern dentistry took care of the issue once the sockets were healed.

Eventually, the dentist wanted to place implants there, but for the time being a removable bridge was made. It drove my mother crazy when I would slip my teeth in and out with my tongue.

At the age when I lost them, I happened to be missing my canines, naturally, so the look was a bit shocking until the pointy ones came in. It looked like I had no teeth at all.

At night I would dutifully place the bridge in a denture cup and clean it thoroughly, heading for bed without them. Eventually, I got used to the empty feeling my tongue would encounter as it slid forward over my gums.

As I got older, the thought of someone seeing me with my teeth out, or even a slip of the bridge was horrifying to me. For this reason, I never let a boy French kiss me, earning me a reputation as a prude.

I would start using adhesive to keep the bridge in place and was careful not to smile too widely, lest the gap be noticed between the bridge and my natural gums. It was the one chink in my armor, my mother always said. Enough on that.

So, to get back to my dilemma. I was eighteen and in my senior year when something happened that would change the course of my young life. Apparently, I had annoyed another girl a year below me, when her boyfriend started coming onto me. It wasn’t a welcome advance, but she was pissed, nonetheless.

One morning after gym, I was changing in the girl’s locker room when three girls came up behind me. I was half-naked at the time and was shocked that they came so close. Without warning, two of the girls grabbed me by the arms while the other was suddenly brandishing a pair of scissors.

“Maybe you’ll think twice before you mess with a boy that’s not yours.” She lunged at me, the scissors managing to sever a long hank of hair from the right side of my head.

I screamed, which brought the teacher in short order, but not before she managed to lop another healthy chunk out of my hair. Oh, she got in all sorts of trouble, but I was left with hair that was unrepairable. The nurse took pity on me and called my mother, who was livid over the incident.

As I surveyed the damage the girl had wrought, I knew that it was going to be a short haircut for me. My once glorious blonde hair had been nearly to my waist. Now a section over my right ear was hacked to mid-lobe and on the other side, well…very nearly to the scalp.

This was the last straw in a battle with my looks that had been raging since I started high school. Now I had very nearly been injured by a girl, for nothing more than inadvertently being found attractive by her unfaithful boyfriend.

My mother promised to take me to the salon so that they could salvage something out of the one side. At best, I might end up with a pixie. No, this was not the way things were going to go. I put my foot down.

“I want to deal with this on my own, Mother,” annoyed. “Just give me twenty bucks and I’ll get this evened out myself.”

It was Saturday, and after my mother had left, I set about putting my plan into action. First things first, the hair had to go. I stepped into the bathroom; a pair of kitchen shears clutched in my fist. My palms were sweaty as I began to chop away at what remained of my hair.

By the time I was finished, the bathroom floor was covered in a puddle of blonde hair, and what remained on my head could best be described as a haphazard crop. I took a washcloth and scrubbed away any makeup on my face that remained from the day before, the faithful Friday that would reshape my future.

Between my anger-driven hairstyle and my raw, reddened complexion, I looked almost male. I threw on a rough t-shirt and some jean shorts, being careful to bind my breasts to my chest. The illusion had to be complete. Speaking of which, I reached into my mouth and removed the bridge holding the illusion of my four front teeth. The last to go were the diamond stud earrings, which I deposited on the kitchen table next to my bridge.

Smiling in the mirror, I imagined only one word to describe the look. Hideous. A tingle ran through my core as I grabbed the twenty dollars my mother had left on the counter and headed into town on foot.

I didn’t worry about anyone recognizing me. There would be no way anyone would. The lovely Stacy was gone, in her place a gruff-looking youth that looked as though he’d been in one too many tussles.

My upper lip curled in, now that my teeth were missing, giving me a rather odd appearance. It was when I stopped in front of Paul’s Barbershop that I started to wonder whether my ruse would be complete enough to fool any of the barbers inside. I didn’t waste any time, pushing into the place and sliding into one of the chairs that lined the one wall of the old shop.

“You’ll have to take a number there, young man.” One of the barbers called out. With that welcome misgendering, I knew that I had succeeded in casting the illusion I desired. I watched as several men and young boys went before me, all getting variations of the same short haircut. Only one went as short as I intended to go.

He was a boy I recognized from school, although his name escaped me at the time. I watched intently as the barber peeled the hair from his head, the clippers leaving nothing but stubble in their wake. This was what I wanted.

The barber ran a hand over the barely perceptible fuzz, asking if it was short enough for the young man. He nodded, tracing the barber’s hand with his own, and smiling in the process. The blonde mop he had sported when he had climbed into the chair, nothing more than a few whisps of hair on the linoleum floor of the shop.

To my delight, the same barber called out my number and I quickly obliged him by climbing into his chair. “Well, somebody made a mess out of this mop, son.” He chided, scruffing what remained of my once glorious mane through his fingers. “Hope you’re not looking for anything too fancy with what you’ve got left.”

In the deepest tone I could muster, I reiterated what the boy ahead of me had said a few moments before. “Skin it.”

“You got it, kid.” The barber offered, lifting the same ominous clippers from their hook and dusting off some errant hair that still clung to the metal blades. Without so much as a twitch, the buzzing blades were flying over my scalp, sending anything that remained of my hair rolling over the cape and onto the floor.

It didn’t take long at all, and I was sporting that same, next-thing-to-bald look. I smiled, forgetting about my missing teeth and earning a chuckle from the barber. “Boy, you look like you’ve been through the wars. Well, at least you’ve got the haircut to match that puss of yours.” As he had with the boy, he ran his fingers over my crown, the sandpaper coarseness totally foreign to me, but not unpleasant at all.

I stood from the chair and offered the man the twenty, which he made change for. I pocketed the seven dollars as I ran my fingers over my scalp for the first time. The large mirror at the entrance only confirmed what I suspected. The pretty girl was long gone now.

As I walked down the street, people were looking at me, but realized by the expressions that it was more out of pity and disgust. The same tingle ran through my core, but centered more toward my sex. Was I really enjoying this that much?

By the time I got home, I was in desperate need of relief. I quickly ran for my bedroom and lowered my jean shorts, revealing the only thing that might give me away as a girl. Looking in my bedroom mirror I quickly came, smiling widely to display my toothless maw, and rubbing my stubbled head for all it was worth.

I had set out to destroy the beautiful girl which everyone had fawned over for years and years, and I had succeeded in spades. There was no explaining my sexual excitement, only to say that the grotesquely odd fetish had rooted itself firmly in my subconscious.

My sexual appetite satiated, I went to the kitchen to retrieve my bridge, only to find it missing. Panicked, I searched the house. Finally, I discovered just what had happened to my dental appliance. My dog had somehow managed to snag it from the table and had chewed into an unrecognizable mass of broken teeth and gum-colored plastic.

At first, I was upset, and understandably so. I still had to go back to school on Monday. It would have been hard enough without my long blonde hair, but now, it was going to be a nightmare. I looked at the chewed-up bridge and finally managed a laugh. “Well, you wanted to blend in, Stacy.” The thing was, there was a huge difference between blending in and standing out, not because of my beauty, but for my ugliness.

I thought about how I was going to manage the stares and ridicule that would undoubtedly come, not only from those that would call me a friend but others who had wished me ill. How they would be in their glory now, the high and mighty beauty fallen, and fallen hard.

Of course, my mother was beside herself. When she saw my shaven skull, she practically wept, but when she learned what happened to my teeth, she wigged. “Do you realize how expensive that damned thing was?” She scolded. “How could you be so careless?”

“I wasn’t really thinking about it, mother. I just wanted to get rid of the hair.”

“Well, you sure did a good job of that. Where the hell did you go for them to do that to you?’ She asked, incredulously.

“Paul’s,” I answered, meekly.

“Paul’s? As in Paul’s barbershop?” My mother seemed ready to dash out the door and give them what for. “Couldn’t they tell you were a girl?”

Then I showed her how I had bound my breasts to my ribs, and the real reason why I had pulled out my bridge. “I just wanted to ditch the ‘pretty-girl’ thing for a while.

“Pretty-girl?” She laughed. “Well, it’ll be some time before anyone thinks of you that way, Stacy. What were you thinking? I mean, you’re practically bald.”

I ran my hands over the minuscule stubble and shrugged. “Yep.”

“Well, you dug this hole, missy. You can damned well climb out of it on your own. You want another bridge? So, you can get a job and pay for it yourself.” She smirked.

“How much was it?” I asked, remembering how much I had in my savings.

“Thirty-two hundred dollars.” She spat.

“What? Mom! That’s crazy.” I was shocked at the amount.

“You should have thought of that before you left it around for the dog to get ahold of. I imagine between your bald head and your toothless grin, you’re going to have no trouble at all ditching the ‘pretty-girl’ look, as you called it.”

When Monday morning rolled around, all I wanted to do was crawl under my bed and die. Instead, my mother was insistent that I get dressed and face the music. Gone were all the titillating sensations of the previous two days, reveling in my newfound fetish for ugliness. Now, there was only fear.

I normally walked to school, but as my mother felt I might just ditch, she drove me right to the front door. “Chin up, Stacy. Remember, you’ll always be pretty on the inside.” Her words sounded almost vindictive.

My tongue slid over the seemingly vast area of toothless gums that were normally so well hidden and I cringed. The air was crisp and cool that morning and as the cold breeze caressed my naked scalp, the full effect of my actions hit home in a wave of humiliation.

The reality of it was so much worse than anything I could possibly have imagined. Every corner I turned, every face I stared into was a painful reminder of what I had done to myself. Most were shocked, but some found humor in the stark contrast between beauty and ugliness.

I was that hideous example of extreme self-destruction that one sees every once in a while. You know, the ones that make you shake your head and shudder out of misplaced empathy before detaching. Turning away, because it’s too unimaginable to put yourself in that position for more than a few seconds. That was me.

Each day grew just a little easier, as I faded into obscurity, the bridge too extravagantly expensive for me to afford. I became that hairless, toothless kid that no one talked to. Every Saturday, I would show up at Paul’s for my weekly scalping, the zero blades taking me back down to sandpaper stubble, again and again.

Eventually, I scraped together enough for another bridge, but always found an excuse for not going to the appointment. Slowly, the money I had saved was spent on other things. I was a complete loner by then, resorting to frenzied masturbation; any idea of being with a boy, a distant, unattainable memory.

I had lived so much of my young life as a ‘pretty-girl’. Now it was time for the fetish that persona had induced within me, to shine in all its brutal ugliness. And, you know, a fetish can be a very powerful thing.