Attack of the Bleacher Creature

At the end of Grade 6, we were all 12 years old, and dying to start Grade 7 because most of our mothers had told us that once we started Grade 7, we could wear makeup. A little makeup. Just a tad.
I remember going to the mall with my friends where we spent hours agonizing over how to spend our allowances. I remember every piece of makeup I bought that day: One emerald green eyeliner, one dark blue eyeliner, one purple eyeliner, clear mascara (maybe the silliest invention ever, but very ’80s ), concealer cream for the black bags under my eyes that my friends insisted I cover (and we wonder why girls and women are so image obsessed) and foundation to shovel on my wrinkle-free, zit-free, perfect 12-year-old skin. (The beauty industry gets you early and gets you good.)
Pretty much every girl in my class looked the same on that first day of school, everyone that is, but Laura.
Laura was a weird girl. She came into Grade 7 with a bad rep because she’d allegedly made out with boys under the bleachers. (Years later when a group of us were reminiscing, we wondered: Our school didn’t even have bleachers, did it?) But what Laura did on that first day, sealed her fate as a weirdo: She came to school with the eyeliner on her lower and upper lids. It wasn’t that she used too much or put it on in a funny way – it was the colour. Her eyes were tomato red. She looked like she had a school’s worth of pink eye. It’s how I looked at Queen’s after I pulled back-to-back all-nighters to finish sociology essays. She had outlined her eyes in lipliner that must have had a name like cherry explosion or red-hot rouge.
I thought about Laura this weekend every time I looked in the mirror. Early Saturday morning, when I wasn’t really awake and hadn’t had any coffee yet, my son and I were playing in our living room. I asked him for a kiss.
He looked at me and smiled and came charging toward me. But instead of his lips connecting with my cheek, his chin smacked my eye (actually the black bag under my right eye). I don’t want to sound like a wuss, but it hurt. A lot. Enough to make me cry.
“I sorry,” my two-year-old cried as he saw a tear roll down my cheek.
I wiped away my tear and then felt another one coming. I wiped that one away too, a pink-tinged tear …
Blood!?
My bag under my eye was bleeding? (At least I wasn’t bleeding black.)
Hours later, for the first time in my life, I had a black eye. Spots around the bottom of my eye was purple, blue – and cherry explosion red.
I was asked the same question repeatedly over the weekend: “What happened to your eye?” (I actually thought it was strange so many people asked me this because what if my black eye wasn’t from a kissing accident with my toddler?)
I’ve also had friends and even a doctor once ask me about the number of bruises I had on my body. One, I’m sort of clumsy. Two, I’ve always bruised easily. Three, when you have a busy life and a toddler, you’re often rushing around, doing things haphazardly, too quickly, too fast and accidents happen. And now I have to do insane things to entertain my son like climb dirt piles and run up slides and give horsey rides around my kitchen.
There are so many more bruises to come.
But bruises disappear.
After a few days, my black eye was gone.
But I’ll always have the memory of my son running so fast, so hard, to kiss to me, that he turned me into Laura Red Eye, the Bleacher Creature.