Unless you tell a joke to my fat-tongued Auntie Pam.
“Just sit down, Haylah. We don’t need a dramatic entrance, thank you,” bellows Mrs. Perkins.
“Nice curtsy, Pig,” says Chloe with a giggle as I sit down next to her.
Yep, so there’s something I can’t keep hidden from you any longer: everyone calls me Pig, OK? I’m all right with it, so you need to get over it quickly so we can move on. It was kinda my doing anyway.
It started when we were all new to “big school” and trying to figure each other out. Year Seven is like the birth of a dystopian society. Still suffering the aftershock of the cataclysmic event of finishing primary school, we’re thrust into fending for ourselves in an unknown and brutal gated community. All individuality is suppressed as, dressed in the Regime’s standard-issue uniforms, there’s a mad scramble to assign everyone to predetermined categories: geeks, populars, bullies, losers, brains, princesses, and so on. Our past lives are forgotten and in this new dog-eat-dog world we must find a place for ourselves, and fast, otherwise we’ll be left alone, friendless, and hopeless in the dusty wasteland of the astro turf.
And, when you wear what people see as part of your personality on the outside, like I do, people are quick to jump to conclusions. I was big, so the conclusion drawn was that I was a loser, easy prey for bullies who wanted to get ahead of the game and prove their own strength and superiority over their classmates.
It was standard name-calling at first: Fatso, Fatty, Chubster, Big Fatty Boom Boom—you know, the predictable wit of the underdeveloped Neanderthal brain. But it wasn’t long before one of them made the link between my surname—Swinton—and swine, meaning pig, of course. I started to hear people snorting and whispering “Pig” as I walked down the hallway. Chloe and Kas said I should just ignore it, but I decided on a different approach. So one day I asked them both to start calling me Pig.
“What? Seriously?”
“Yeah. I actually think it’s pretty cool,” I said. “I’m rebranding myself with a one-word name, like other awesome women before me such as Beyoncé or Pink. Or God.”
“Erm… God’s not a woman,” said Kas.
“Oh, come off it! Handmade and ran an entire universe while single-parenting a polite and well-behaved son? There’s no way a dude could pull all that off.”
“Fair enough,” said Kas.
“Yeah, but PIG?” Chloe said.
“What?” I’d replied. “They’re intelligent, cute, and they taste amazing—I can live with all that.”
After that, I made everyone call me Pig and whenever I heard someone whisper it in the hallway I would turn to them, offer to shake their hand, and loudly say, “Yeah, that’s right, my name’s Pig. Did you want something?” And they’d realize there was nowhere else to go with the joke. As they shrugged and walked off, my friends would laugh as I threw my hands high into the air and proudly yelled, “That’s right, I am Pig and don’t forget it!” It worked. The bullies gave up on me and moved on to the next obvious prey as I’d made it clear I was no victim. I make the jokes. I am not the joke.
I do remember though that the first day I decided that I was going to be Pig, I cried myself to sleep.
Now I’m just used to the name. I don’t mind it. Not really. At least it’s a punchline I wrote.
“Right, class, it’s a school assembly now so gather your things up and walk QUIETLY down to the hall, please!” booms Mrs. Perkins.
We all take note of Mrs. Perkins’s request for quiet for around two seconds, but, as the sound of chair legs scraping the floor and bags being zipped up increases, so too does the laugher, chatter, and eventual hysterical yelling at each other across the classroom. Unsurprised by her defeat, Mrs. Perkins trots out of the room, rolling her eyes, as the class begins to trickle out after her. That’s the cool thing with a crappy school like mine—the teachers are about as interested in enforcing the rules as we are in following them.
I notice Chloe’s still sitting down, doing her makeup. She wears a lot more than the rest of us. To be honest with you, we still don’t really know what we’re doing with it. The last time I tried to put on eyeliner, I sneezed and headbutted the mirror so hard Mum had to take me to the ER with a concussion. That was bad, but not as bad as Mum rambling on in the car about how the wearing of makeup goes against our feminist principles.
“You’re perfectly pretty as you are, Haylah,” she muttered. “I don’t know why you’d want to plaster your face with that crap just for the sake of what boys might think of you! I mean, come on, we’re all about girl power in this family, and then you go and knock yourself out trying to make your eyes look ‘sexy’ because heaven forbid if a boy looks into a girl’s eyes and she’s not at least wearing mascara. I mean, shock, horror! However would the boy recover from such a gruesome sight!”
I didn’t point out to her that if you follow her argument through then surely we shouldn’t do anything to look more attractive to anyone. We shouldn’t wash or wear a bra or get our hair cut or wear nice clothes, because true feminists should just present themselves as bedraggled, grotesque, stinky, hairy, saggy scummers. Problem is you can’t really expect anyone to want to be near you then, let alone like you.
But I didn’t point that out or the fact that I hadn’t actually been putting makeup on to attract boys. I was just bored and was also going to eyeliner on a little Jack Sparrow-esque beard and mustache before sending a selfie to Chloe and Kas with the caption, “You guys always say I should try wearing more makeup, is this right?” But instead I just softly groaned along to the throbbing in my head.
My mum’s a nurse so the injury must have been really bad for her to take me to the hospital—you’ve got to be pretty close to death before she’ll give you a bit of aspirin, let alone bother her colleagues with your suffering.
Chloe really knows what she’s doing with makeup though, even if she’s doing it for dubious reasons (in Mum’s book at least). She models herself on her older sister Freya, who’s training to be a beauty therapist and is also an actual model. Well, I mean, she says she’s a model, but all she’s really done is posed for a flier for a local garage and done some dodgy stuff online under the name “Booty McTooty.”
Anyway, Freya taught Chloe everything she knows about foundation, contouring, multi-masking, muck-spreading, and steamrolling. OK, so I made those last two up, but I mean, what the hell do I know? Feminism and the risk of brain damage aside, until they invent a blush that makes my cheeks look less like two hippity-hops squashing a ping-pong ball, there seems little point in me wearing makeup.
Chloe always looks gorgeous though. Well—a bit tarty, but gorgeous. Underneath her perfectly styled short blonde bob she has cheekbones you could crack an egg on, and her eyebrows are a work of art in themselves. Like two elegant wings of a dove, rather than my unplucked beasts, which look like two hairy caterpillars gearing up for a fight.
While Chloe piles on the eyeshadow, Kas produces a hairbrush almost the size of a tennis racket from her bag and starts brushing her long dark hair. Kas isn’t knock-out gorgeous like Chloe and she doesn’t think she’s pretty either, but everyone else does. And yeah, I guess she has a slightly larger than average forehead, but her little chin makes her face heart-shaped, and her permanently narrowed eyes make her look like she’s always on the verge of bursting into hysterics.