A wallflower is a shy or unpopular woman ignored at dances or clubs. I suppose it’s meant to be some kind of reference to flowered wallpaper. You know, that’s attached to the wall. Or flowers that grow beside a wall that can’t leave the wall. Or just shy girls who can’t leave the safety of the wall.
I can’t say I was shy or even unpopular necessarily. I certainly wasn’t picked on, but my high school was kind of artsy and I think the general school culture prided itself on not picking or bullying people (though I’m positive that must have happened…it happens everywhere else). But whether one is actually unpopular doesn’t really matter. Most of us felt unpopular and that’s how I felt. I wasn’t shy exactly, but I was self-conscious and certainly not very confident in myself. Which was a shame really because I had all kinds of confidence in grade 8. I was in love with a boy who loved me. I had started shaving my legs and they never looked better. This boy and I used to slow dance to Sarah McLachlan’s Ice Cream and this was when we were just ‘best friends’ and would spend hours on the phone at night, talking and talking. He wrote me the first and only love poems anyone’s ever written me. He was the first boy I really kissed (like, with tongues), the first boy who made me feel truly special, the first boy who held me and comforted me and called me his best friend and his lover (which was super pretentious, given that we were as far from sleeping with each other as two people could be…but we were lovers because we loved each other, right?).
Oh, and he was gay.
I mean, he didn’t really own that yet, though he did come out as bisexual, which I was cool with (and now that I think about it that was kind of progressive of me. I thought it was hot to be into a bisexual boy). All of this was fine until we broke up after ten months of being best friends and five torturous weeks of dating and being ‘in love’. He was a year behind me, so I started grade nine incredibly lonely and terribly heartbroken. And my confidence…well, it shot so far down it was practically digging its way to China.
I remember being at my first high school dance and making myself ask a boy I thought was cute to dance. It was just about the most awkward experience of my life. He ended up asking my friend Natalie out a few weeks later. Natalie, with her gorgeous freckled skin and her light orange hair and her ballerina’s body. How the hell could I compete with that.
It took about fifteen years for me to get my confidence back after grade nine.
1. Tara was always the wallflower. Always the one on the sidelines, watching all her friends get noticed.
2. Beatrice stood at the back of the gym, blending in with the flowers in the wall.
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