There have been many moments in which it begins to haunt you. You Nair them an hour and a half before your Bat Mitzvah party. The Nair didn’t work so well. I mean, it worked, but not so well. You try and shave, but effervescent black dots give way to taint your plump, baby skin. You run downstairs to cry to your mother, who is getting her hair blown out by a woman who has turned your kitchen into a beauty parlor.
“I can tweeze it for ya, if ya want,” the beautician offers. You love this woman, you really do, but not enough to let her tweeze.
Years later, you shave five hours before your prom date arrives to fasten your corsage around your wrist. Big mistake.
Another year, another prom, and you thought you could outsmart your pits. You shave ten minutes before your date arrives. He’s a different date, so luckily he doesn’t remember the dog park you started to grow halfway through the last prom. You feel like you beat the beast. The next day, when your mother shows you the photos she took of you waving your hands in the air, so obliviously carefree, on her fancy ass DSLR Canon, you admit putrid defeat.
It’s time, you tell yourself.
Everyone says it will hurt like a mo-fo. Everyone says how impressed they are at your courage and stamina. Your mother tells you, Woah there Nelly, you need to grow it out before you can wax it off.
You use a ten day trip to Italy as “the period of growth.” You figure it’s your best bet, as everyone you meet you will never see again, no one you know is there, and they probably will think of you as a sexy European, anyway. The days go by, the heat index rises in Firenze and Venezia, and you start to resemble a prepubescent boy. You aren’t allowed to discuss it at mealtimes. You think about how great it’s going to be when they rip it all off, and when, after a month or two, you’ll probably never have to deal with it again. Can I get an “amen”?
You come home, and you get your first wax. All that hard work — days and nights of sweet cultivation — finally paid off. It didn’t hurt at all, either. And, most importantly, it’s all gone! Every little dot of it! Every prick, every thistle, every hair is gone! See ya!!!
A day goes by. Two days go by. A few days go by. And it still appears as though you have had a skin transplant with Rufus, the naked mole rat.
Summer is over. You go back to school. You can no longer ask your mom for cash every time you go to the salon. You thought you would be going twice a month. Sometimes, it turns out, twice a month is really three and a half times a month, if you average it. It also turns out that the salon at school charges over twice as much than the salon at home does. Some nights, you have to make a very conscious effort to keep your elbows by your sides when you wear a tank top to a bar.
Everything kind of goes to shit. When you’re stressed and crying alone in your room, you also are pseudo-hairy, which makes everything a lot worse. It seems the most rewarding part of the experience is the brownie points you receive from friends who are incredibly impressed with your high pain tolerance. This isn’t worth $20, three and a half times a month. You look good for three days, and then it’s like, you might as well have shaved for the next seven days after that.
So, you decide to stop. You decide to save your time, money, and good faith. You resort to the razor. Your five o’clock shadow comes back. You basically have to shave twice a day, which is very sad to admit. It’s very humiliating. You don’t, though, out of self-respect, but you should.
You want to calculate how much money you’ve wasted because you know it would contribute really well to this essay, but you don’t. The value is beyond frightening.
You begin to sympathize with the girl who Cady Heron criticizes during the mathletes championship for needing to shave her upper lip. But that’s another essay, for another time.
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