“You look like a man with that unibrow!”  The taunts passed as I ran from the gym.  I sought shelter in the girl’s bathroom and locked myself in the smallest stall.  I let my tears soak the sleeves of my shirt as I attempted to muffle my sobs with my arms.  It’s not my fault I look this way, I thought angrily, Mom doesn’t let me do anything to my eyebrows.  I sat like that for at least ten minutes, contemplating whether anything my parents told me about how beautiful I was was a lie.  Finally, I unlocked the door and stepped out into the hallway.  There, sitting calmly on the dirty tile floor, was my best friend Natalie.  We didn’t have to say anything to each other for me to know she had been waiting for me.  Being friends for five years definitely helped in understanding each other.  She stood up and wrapped her arms around my neck as I wrapped mine around her waist, and together we walked to homeroom.

“How was school, pumpkin?”  My mother asked quietly when she walked through the door.  When she used this tone of voice on me, I knew she was too tired to listen to my stories.  Right now, the couch was calling her name for her daily siesta.

“Fine, I guess,” I responded, and retreated upstairs before I annoyed her too much.  I shut the door and laid down on my bed.  As I stared at the ceiling, trying to figure out if that yellow stain was always there, or if I should let Dad know we had another leak, my thoughts steadily turned back to the events of the day.  I felt fine almost all day.  I loved my teachers and the subjects, plus I had chorus today which started the day off on the right foot.  Somehow, despite how appealing the environment around me seemed, the other sixth graders seemed to find me as appealing as a worm that just crawled out of its muddy home.  The day had gone on almost regularly, but last period was when it all went rotten.  For gym class, we were required to change clothes, and me, being the smart kid I am, opted for shorts on the hot, summer afternoon.  I guess it was a bad choice.  All period I received insults from the other girls, who claimed I had man legs.  12 year old me was scared of razors, so I hadn’t started shaving yet.  I didn’t mind what they were saying, I was hit with mostly the same words daily.  Today, however, they decided to hit below the belt with some new choice phrases.  The insults slowly moved from “man legs” to “fat idiot,” and eventually to “mustache girl” and “Captain unibrow.”  Nobody had made fun of me like that before.  Looking back, I had always been in good shape,  Weighing in at 100 lbs, I was doing soccer almost year round, and I tried a new sport almost every chance I got.  Looking pretty was always something I had never thought of.  However, as soon as the girls started with those insults, even some of my closest friends, both male and female, began to join in the laughing.  I remember that that was the first moment I wrapped my arms around my stomach, as I began noticing I was fatter than other girls.  I was nearly as big as an elephant!  This day was the very day that I began to be eternally self conscious about my weight and how I looked.  Not a day goes by now when I don’t look in the mirror to check if I’m still as big as I feel.  Finally, after countless jeers and never ending laughing, I ran out of the gymnasium.  Never again would I feel fully comfortable in my body.

That night I left my spot on the couch to shower.  As I was washing my hair, I spotted my sister’s razor.  My mind raced back to earlier in the day.  Well, I thought, I could always fix one thing right now.  And without a second thought, I grabbed the razor, and swept it up between my eyebrows.  At least, I thought it was between my eyebrows.  I put the razor away like nothing happened, got out of the shower, and dried off.  I was so excited to prove to the girls at school tomorrow that I didn’t have a unibrow anymore!  I couldn’t wait to see my new look, so I took my towel and rubbed the mirror free of steam.  As I looked at my reflection, my heart fell so far it bounced off the floor.  I certainly didn’t have a unibrow anymore.  I didn’t even have any eyebrows at all!  I had completely shaved off half of my eyebrow.  I sprinted into my bedroom and locked the door.  Frantically, I started combing my hair, looking for a way to part it so it didn’t show.  It was no use.  In order to cover it up, half my face needed to be covered as well.  Humiliated, I crept downstairs and revealed my new masterpiece to my mother.  She gasped, looking horrified, and pulled me up to her bedroom.  I collapsed into tears, explaining what had happened and how I thought that razors covered a lot less area than they actually did.  The whole time she sat and listened, with a grave look on her face.

“Please, there has to be some sort of make up that will cover this, Mom,” I begged.  She pursed her lips as she stared down at me, as if she was making a difficult decision.

“I’m sorry sweetheart, but we can’t do anything but wait for it to grow back.”  I shoved my head between her goose-down pillows and began sobbing once more.

Three months was the amount of time it took for my eyebrows to grow back fully.  By then I wasn’t ashamed anymore.  Natalie took extreme liking to my new eyebrow, or absence of one.  She joked with me, saying she had always looked up to my bold fashion statements.  As I longed for my eyebrow hair to return to me, I realized that none of this would have happened if I had just ignored those girls.  I realized that it didn’t matter what others thought beauty looked like.  It only mattered that I thought I was beautiful.  Although I’m still struggling to accept myself today, I’m glad I was able to learn this lesson sooner rather than later.  Now, three years later, I realized that my mother had lied to me.  She heard how much those girls affected me, and saw that I didn’t think I was pretty anymore.  There is a make up tool called an eyebrow pencil.  My sister uses it every day to draw in her eyebrows, and my mother was well aware of this opportunity to save myself from humiliation.  Some may call it malicious of her to keep it from me, but I think she was trying to help me.  If she didn’t lie to me, I wouldn’t have learned that I am worth more than looks.  I learned it the hard way, but this way it resonated with me instead of going through one ear and out the other.  I went through a great deal of embarrassment,but it shaped me to be the girl I am today.  So, in a way, I guess it was a blessing that I shaved off my eyebrows.  I learned that beauty comes from within, not from what I see in the mirror.