Ginger Snaps
March 30, 2023 – Montclair, New Jersey, USA
The four ninth graders found a nice spot on the low brick wall in front of their high school. The wall was popular with freshmen and long enough so each little friend group could have some privacy. The warm spring temperatures meant they could eat lunch without wearing coats.
Amber, Brooklynn, Chantel, and Gloria referred to themselves as ABC and G. They found each other in middle school and clung together through the awkward years of braces, first crushes, and body transitions.
Three out of four of them were starting next week’s spring break early. They would skip school on Friday for family trips. Amber was flying to the Bahamas and Brooklyn to Ft. Lauderdale. Chantel was driving south along the coast in an RV. A, B, and C held out their arms to compare skin tone shades.
“You’re still pretty dark for not seeing a lot of sun,” Amber said to Chantel. “I can’t wait to lay out on the beach and get a nice base tan.”
“You have to ease into it,” Brooklyn said, as she stretched out her shirt to look at her shoulders. “Just a couple of hours a day to start off or I’ll totally burn.”
Chantel smiled proudly and said, “Not me. I just go out there and get browner and browner.”
Amber looked jealously at Chantel’s arm and said, “Lucky. I wish I had your skin.”
Gloria always felt like an outsider whenever ABC brought up skin tones. She made sure her arms were hidden by her sweatshirt and concentrated on the yogurt container in her hands. She knew she would not be ignored for long. Inevitably, Amber urged her to roll up her sleeves so they could compare arms.
“C’mon, I want to feel like I’ve already got some color,” Amber said, grabbing Gloria’s shirt.
“No. Go look at someone else’s arms,” Gloria replied, pulling away.
Gloria had grown used to being called a ghost or a ginger. She tried not to react when people asked her if she glowed in the dark or got burned by moonlight. She did not like any of the labels or the jokes, but she was used to them. Her friends were pretty clueless at noticing her non-verbal reactions. Whenever she called them out on it, they acted sorry and guilty and chilly. It took days for them to speak naturally and casually again. Gloria had decided it was easiest to brush the teasing off. Her friends were not perfect, but neither was she. Whatever. Move on.
Amber lost interest in Gloria’s arms when she realized Brooklyn’s soda can had tipped over and the contents had spilled on her jeans. ABC and G hopped from the wall, laughing and checking for wet marks on their clothes.
Gloria mostly forgot the aggravating conversation, but not completely. It was hard to completely ignore the topic when she saw her own pasty skin each time she looked at her hands. The freckles bothered her more than the underlying color. One of the little jokes she heard was that she might look slightly tan if only all the freckles grew together. Ha. Very funny. After staring at her hands and arms all her life, she knew the size and shape of every one of those thousand freckles. Each was a unique scar and flaw.
Gloria shared a bathroom at home with her younger siblings. The bathroom mirror over the sink was mainly where she viewed her own face. Sometimes she felt it would be better for her self-esteem if she never saw what she looked like. That contradicted all the messages she heard about accepting yourself and loving the body you owned.
On the afternoon of the ABC tanning conversation, Gloria found herself staring at the bathroom mirror. She practiced her smile and tried to love her face. Her mom found her stretching her mouth up and down.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at my stupid face.”
“It’s beautiful. Fair skin. Shiny eyes.”
“I hate my freckles. Even my eyes have freckles. My face looks dirty.”
“They’re so cute. You look just like your Grandma Gloria who we named you after.”
“Yuck. No one wants to hear they look like their grandma. And someone else can have the stupid freckles if they think they’re cute. I never want to see them again.”
Gloria’s mom patted her shoulder and stroked her auburn hair as if she was upset by a skinned elbow. Gloria grimaced as she continued to peek at her reflection. She was serious about exiling the freckles. She had spent her entire life wanting them gone. She wished they would disappear before blowing out every birthday candle. She prayed for them to go. Sometimes in the bathtub she would close her eyes, say a prayer, and count down from sixty before looking at herself. The freckles always remained.
The internet was a great place to find homemade cures for freckles. Gloria tried wiping them away with lemon juice, pickle juice, olive oil, and acetone. She drizzled them in egg yolks and egg whites. No matter if she tried the cure once or a dozen times, nothing helped. All she did was give herself rashes and pimples.
As she stood in front of the mirror with her mom offering comfort, Gloria did not reveal that she had finally found something which might work. It cost money and came in a cream from Ireland. Surely, the Irish knew about freckles. Gloria’s grandmother had plenty of Irish heritage. The cream had arrived two days earlier and now Gloria was waiting for spring break to apply it. Her plan was to return to school, transformed after one week. Her family did not have any exciting vacation plans to interrupt her cream application schedule. The most interesting place Gloria would be visiting was probably the library.
On Friday night, Gloria repeatedly read the cream’s instruction labels. She washed her face twice in lukewarm water and then dried with a cotton towel. She rubbed precisely two teaspoons of cream over her skin and stayed completely still for exactly ten minutes. Then she went to bed.
For the first time in her life, Gloria rushed to the mirror as soon as she woke up. She studied her face. She knew what every freckle used to look like and something had changed! The freckles were still there, but they had faded. The more she looked, the more she knew it was not simply wishful thinking. She could hardly wait for her next treatment.
Twenty-four hours at a time, Gloria followed the recipe with exactness. Each time she woke up, the freckles had faded a little more. By the fourth day, she asked her mom if she noticed anything different about her.
Gloria’s mom took a casual look before gasping. “What happened? Where are your freckles?”
“Almost gone.”
“How?”
“A miracle cream,” Gloria replied with satisfaction.
“But they’re a part of you. They make you look young and sweet. Like a little girl.”
“I don’t want to look young and sweet.”
“You will when you’re older.”
“Then maybe I’ll ask for my freckles back. Now I want them gone.”
Gloria spent more time than usual in front of the mirror, admiring her face. By the end of spring break, only faint traces of the freckles remained. Unless she stared very closely, her face looked clear and uniformly cream-colored.
Gloria had never felt so excited to return to school. She arrived wearing a hat which shielded her face from the sun and partially hid her transformation. She planned to unveil her new face to her ABC friends when they were all together during lunch. They met at an empty bench near the entrance to the cafeteria. A, B, and C wore shorts and tank tops to advertise they had been in the sun. When Gloria looked at their faces, she was horrified to see spots drawn on their noses and cheeks using an eyeliner pencil.
Amber used her phone as a mirror to inspect the artificial freckles on her sunburned nose. “I hope this looks right. I watched some videos on how to do it, but it’s hard.”
Brooklynn and Chantel held up their own phones to check out their pencil work. Gloria stayed quiet and did not mention that she thought they looked like clowns or girls dressed up as dolls for Halloween.
After a full minute of discussing her spots, a switch flipped in Amber’s brain. She turned to Gloria and said, “What do you think? You’re the freckle expert.” Amber did a doubletake when she looked carefully at Gloria’s flawless skin. “Hey, where did yours go?”
Brooklynn and Chantel leaned over for their own long looks. Brooklyn said, “Whatever you did, you have to reverse it. Freckles are totally in right now. Everybody’s trying to fake them. You’re so lucky they come naturally.”
Chantel added, “Yeah, now’s your chance to totally be on trend. Everyone wants skin like yours if you can bring the freckles back.”
Gloria’s mouth froze shut. This was not the face reveal she expected. After all the sniggers about freckles and pale skin she had endured, now everyone wanted to look like her? Had the world turned upside down because a few influencers posted something on social media?
Time crawled as Gloria decided how she should react. One internal voice said to rip off her hat, find some sunlight, and embrace her freckles. One good sunburn would bring them back and she could feel like a minor celebrity. But she knew it would not last. Freckles were in today but would be out tomorrow. She was reminded of the Dr. Seuss story of the Sneetches. One day they wanted stars on their bellies, the next day they did not.
Another voice in Gloria’s head said she should be outraged. She should scream at her friends’ hypocrisy. How dare they steal her natural look only temporarily? If they wanted freckles, they should get permanent freckle tattoos, not something they could wash away on a whim like a new color of lipstick. Fake freckles were insulting.
“Hey, Earth to Gloria. So are you going to bring them back, or what?” Chantel asked, snapping Gloria out of her trance.
When Gloria replied, she spoke slowly at first. Then her words came easier. She knew embracing real freckles or condemning fake ones would only end with someone upset. What would that accomplish? Her friends were not perfect and neither was she. But they were worth keeping.
“You know, I kind of like the way I look without them. I want to try it for a while. Maybe I’ll go back eventually.” Gloria concentrated on the three faces around her. “And if you want advice on how freckles should look, I can probably help. I’ve been studying them all my life. No offense, but yours aren’t very good.”
Amber quickly reached into her backpack for an eyeliner pencil. “She held it out for Gloria and said, “Here. Show us.”
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