“I can’t believe you left me for such a homely girl.” The wide-eyed font of Harrison’s phone gave a certain fake innocence to the text message, as though it were mocking me with its too-broad serifs and blocky vowels. I sat stunned for a moment as he took back his phone.
He hadn’t left his ex, Tiffany, for me; they’d been separated for a while. Not that it mattered. She’d commented on a particularly unflattering Facebook photo of me with Harrison, him as gorgeous as always, me with a vaguely drunk expression, hair frizzy from a muggy Southern night, my lips parted too much to be sexy and too little to be a smile. “Oh my GOD lol wow, ew” she’d said. I knew she wasn’t talking about him. I’d posted the photo because I felt happy in it; after her comment, I took it down. I wish I could say I didn’t care about what Harrison’s obsessive ex thought about my appearance, but that simply wasn’t true.
It’s hard dating a conventionally good-looking guy when you’re not conventionally good-looking yourself. I found that I was constantly fretting about my appearance, wondering what the whispers at the restaurant table next to ours were about, feeling miserable whenever I had a fat day and his chiseled jaw was as Adonian as ever.
I’d been ugly my entire life, although my parents insisted otherwise. I know, I know, beauty in the eye of the beholder and inner beauty and…
