You have a mustache!

I was thinking about other people's words the other day after I finished the post about my words.   Isn't it funny how I can remember the exact words spoken to me 25 years ago and I can't remember what my kids asked me to buy at the store today?  I can remember vividly the day that a classmate told me in the lunchline, "You have a mustache."  And the sad part was it was true.  I'm a hairy girl.  I have dark hair and I have a lot of it.  I had a mustache.  I hated it, and now I had to do something about it.

At that time when I was in junior high, I was fortunate enough to have my cousins living just a half mile down the road.  They moved there when I was in 5th or 6th grade and it was sooo great.  My cousin that was the same age, we'll call her "Danielle", and I became very good friends.  (And even those pesky little brothers of hers were fun to have around.)  Well, "Danielle" and I are related, we have similar genes.  She may kill me for this, but she shared her beauty secret about the upper lip problem, "Just bleach it."

And so that is what I did.  I shut the door to the bathroom right next to my bedroom upstairs and I mixed a concoction.  Now I knew what bleach could do and I had heard that an older girl at school used peroxide to bleach her teeth, so the combination of bleach and peroxide would have to be double the bleaching power, right?

Wrong.  What bleach and peroxide mixed together will do to a 13 yr old's soft skin above her lip is not good.  No, it did not lighten anything.  It probably did kill a few hair follicles, but who could know because the mark that it left was horrifying.  I had a strip across my upper lip that was probably almost as big as a normal-sized band-aid and it was red, not just an, oh-my-that-looks-sore-red but more like a OH-MY-THAT-LOOKS-BLAZING-HOT-AND-HAS-TO-BE-BURNING-YOUR-FLESH-RED.  And that is what it was doing, burning my flesh.

So when the burning flesh process stopped, it began to scab.  Now, you know how normal people (as Jay says) scab.  I have an olive complexion.  For some reason with that olive complexion comes these weird colored burns, bruises and scabs.  What is normal for me can look just awful to someone else.  This was horrifying to me and to anyone that had even just one eye still functioning. 

Now, there is just NO way on this earth you can hide or cover a thick scab that is perfectly over the top of your lip...no way.  But I decided to come up with a story...you know how good those are (pine tree, mower, dog).  So here goes:  We had stairs in our house and they were not carpeted, they were wooden and if mom had cleaned and polished them, they were slick.  One day when I came flying down the stairs, I slipped on a magazine, went flying across the carpet and got a carpet burn on my face...well, actually just the strip underneath my nose and right above my lip...my face had no other damage.  (And it is amazing that my nose was unharmed in the process, huh?) The magazine was placed just right at the bottom step that my foot caught it and sent me flying.  Honestly, could I have come up with a worse story?

And here's the thing, I repeated that story several times...that was my cover to everyone except my mom, who freaked out naturally when she heard what I had mixed together in the bathroom, and my cousin "Danielle" who died laughing at me because that wasn't exactly what she meant by sharing her beauty tip.  But those words from that boy in Junior High nearly crushed me, "You have a mustache," and I was determined that I could not face him again until I took care of it.  Well, ha, I showed him, huh?