Begin Intrductions

Begin introductions.

05.31.04 12:24 pm



Tamara's mother gave her up for adoption, when she was 16. Apparently, the woman/monster had 10 kids and wanted to remarry unfettered by responsibility, so she unceremoniously gave all 10 up to adoption/foster care and moved on. I found this out the first week of school when I walked Tamara to the Keybank on first hill to cash her financial aid check. She is a thin white-looking girl (she insists that her dad is black, but if its true, there is NO telling it by looking at her) who began the year with 3 inches of brown roots at the bottom of long yellow bleached hair. She swoops her bangs down over her forehead almost to her eyebrow and renders them immobile with an outrageous amount of gel. Her teeth are crooked and she tries to hide them when she laughs, which is loud and frequent. She is an interesting mixture of obnoxious and painfully shy. She prides herself on being ghetto, with things like hair and style but doesn’t realize the ways she really is disadvantaged by her class. At the same time as she really wants to fit in and have everyone love her, she has moments of real self-direction and independence. She was released from jail the day before school on promise that she would stay in her group home and have regular attendance at school. So far, so good. She is really dedicated, she comes on time every day on the bus from greenwood and although neither the written part nor the practical styling part come easily to her she sticks with it. Another thing she sticks with is me. She discovered me the first week of school and would call across the room for me to be her partner in every exercise. I think she knew I would always be sweet to her. Of course I will. She’s adorable, and reminds me of my kids in the Checkpoint program. She and Jazmine, another 18 year old girl in our class, got in a Springer style fight all up in each other's faces outside the school. It wasn’t really about anything, just that Jazmine thought Tamara had been acting different since Jazmine had started hanging out with Bintu. Really childish. THESE ARE MY PEERS HERE PEOPLE, MY CLASSMATES. I went into work mode of course and intervened, pried them apart from each other, etc. It didn’t really work and I realized it wasn’t my responsibility, nor did they think of me as an authority figure, so I dipped and watched Ms. Belle try to settle them down. To their credit, they’ve never beefed since that day and are very civil to each other. The next day we all changed seating arrangements, and Tamara and I are, mysteriously seated next to each other. Its good though, I don’t mind helping her and it killed me to see her getting the cold shoulder from Jazmine, or not getting picked as anyone’s partner. Plus she talks to her mannequin heads as she’s doing their hair like she’s playing with Barbies. It’s adorable and more than a little sad.
Bintu is 24 I think. She is ½ Ethiopian Christian and ½ Eritriean Muslim, and completely beautiful. I remember she took the stupid, stupid placement test at the same time as I did and sat right across from me. Her hair is pressed, she is about 4’10” and weighs about 95 lbs. She has a perfect heart shaped face, big almondy eyes and perfect teeth. She smokes Newports, has Vitilago and wears pointy black stiletto boots almost every day. Of all the girls in our class, she and I get along the best. She is really quiet but when she speaks up, she’s right on target and very incisive. We go out to Ethiopian food after school sometimes, she drives this huge explorer type SUV and it makes her look even tinier. She was showing me some of her pictures in the car once, and when I got to the back of the album there were all these soft porn modeling shots of her. One was of her in this sparkly bikini top and jeans from a hot rod calendar, she was checking the oil on a 66 mustang. Then there were some red panties shots. I said something about how it wasn’t fair that someone that tiny could be so well endowed in the boob department and she looked at me like I must be kidding and said hilariously matter-of-factly “They’re fake, did you think they were real???” I had thought they were real, or maybe I never thought about it. I don’t know, they looked real enough. She said she had it done when she was 19. I asked her if she ever regretted it. Yes. “I’ve already had them made smaller once,” she said. It killed me, how unaffected she was about it. She is a really talented hairdresser already. She and Jamilah taught me how to braid. She did Nathan’s long hair in perfect cornrows in about half an hour and already does flawless fingerwaves.
More introductions next week. Until then…xoxoV