about me

I cut off my hair and now I look like a boy. I did the same thing when I was twelve: cut off my hair. I looked like a boy then, too. I know that with certainty because when school started in the fall, a girl in my history class who was blessed with round, budding curves on every appropriate part of her body (she was only twelve along with the rest of the girls in class, so I don't know how she acquired those curves) asked me on the second day of school if I were a boy or a girl. So there was the proof. I felt embarrassed; she looked embarrassed. She honestly couldn't tell which one I was-- boy or girl.

The hair-cutting and boy-girl ambiguity happened before I started plucking my eyebrows; I've been plucking my eyebrows since I was thirteen. Debbie J., a roly-poly girl (she grew rolier and polier through the years) who claimed to be a friend of mine, plucked her eyebrows and that induced me to do the same. She was one year younger than me and lived down the street in a white house on the corner. Although the thought of yanking the hairs out of my upper eyelids had never once occurred to me before, I instantly knew, upon laying eyes on Debbie's freshly plucked eyebrows, that it was absolutely imperative that I do the same to the mono-brow across my forehead.

The mono-brow, I believe, is the reason why I looked like a troll-baby when I was thr-- uh... three... Oh... perhaps I will tell more of that story another time. Troll-babies look horrible in photographs...

So, hopefully now, at my present age, after all these years of plucking my eyebrows (there have been quite a few years gone by) people will sort of know that, in spite having super-short hair, I'm actually a girl, and not a boy.

-Kate Elisabeth Whitley
-Huntsville, AL, USA

Afterthought: My posted photograph was taken before I cut off my hair. If you want to know if I am boy-looking or girl-looking, you will have to discover the places where I rendezvous in the evenings, and meet me there.

favourite books

-Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

my websites