August 2009 Junior Year
“Paige, how does my hair look?” I ask my bestie over the song “Suga Suga” by Baby Bash and Frankie J playing in the background
“I love the poof,” she says, eyes wide.
You can never go wrong when combing your bangs backward into a poof. My long hair is already hard to manage. When I tease my bangs and clip them out of my way, it helps manage my hair a little better.
“B, what should I do with my hair?” Paige keeps running her hands through her hair with a frown on her face.
“Do a poof like mine!”
“I didn’t want to copy you.”
I smack my lips together to get the lip gloss to go on evenly. Victoria's Secret has the best lip glosses. It shines so bright, and it’s so sticky—which is good because it lasts all day.
“Since when do you care if you copy me? We buy the same clothes and even wear them at the same time.”
My best friend and I share a lot of the same features. Brown eyes, long lashes, long dark brown hair, and we’re both five foot two. People have even asked if we’re sisters. I’ve never fully seen it, but I can see why they speculate.
She shrugs her shoulders and reaches for my teasing brush. “You’re right.”
“Do you have any more of that Maybelline Mousse foundation?”
“Yeah, it’s in my bag.” We use the same color of foundation even though Paige’s skin is a little darker than mine.
Once our hair and makeup are done, Paige and I head to my closet to pick out our outfits. I pull on a pair of low-rise bell bottoms and pair them with a white tank top and a light-blue shirt. The white tank top shows a little cleavage when paired with my V-neck shirt. I slip on my white Vans, which are sort of blue now from my pants. The jeans are rubbing against the white canvas material and staining them. I don’t mind because the bell bottoms hide it.
Paige grabs a black-and-white tank top and stacks them on top of each other. Her bell bottoms hover over her purple Vans.
Paige and I look each other up and down, and our smiles rise. “We look so hot,” she says.
“Yes, we do.” I put my BlackBerry phone inside my back pocket and head downstairs. “Your mom is okay with us using her car, right? Because my mom is going to ask how we’re getting to the mall and back.”
Paige and I both turned sixteen over the summer. Her birthday is June 20th, and mine is June 30th. When we met back in seventh grade, we instantly became best friends. I don’t know what it was, but we connected so easily. It was unbelievable when we discovered that our birthdays had only a ten-day gap. Since then, we have celebrated our birthdays together.
“Mom!” I yell.
“In here,” she says from the kitchen. We walk into the small space that’s decked out in apple decor.
“We’re going to go to the mall,” I say as I watch her eat dinner with my little sister, Brynlee.
“You guys don’t want to eat dinner before you go?” she asks while looking between Paige and me.
I shake my head. “We’ll get something to eat there.”
“No, thank you, Brooke,” Paige says.
Paige used to call my mom Ms. Leigh. My mom constantly begged her to call her Brooke. Ms. Leigh was “too formal” and she didn’t like that. So, Brooke it is.
Speaking of names…
For some reason, my mom wanted to keep us girls with B names: Brooke, Blakely, and Brynlee. Sometimes I get embarrassed when she introduces us three to people. Because who does that?
“Who’s taking you guys to the mall?”
“My mom let me borrow her car.”
My mom narrows her eyes at us. When Paige and I were fourteen, we took Paige’s mom’s car out for a ride when her mom was sleeping.
