There was no way he’d missed the exchange. He probably thought I was being catty, that I was a bitch. It wasn’t true. It really wasn’t. I tried not to give other girls a hard time. We had it tough enough. Hormones. Periods. Underwire bras. Double standards. Douchey guys. We needed to stick together, not stick it to one another. I really believed that. But . . . there was always a but, wasn’t there? I couldn’t help my instinctual assessment of other women. Giving them the once-over, trying to determine who they were, with what kind of agenda, and where they ranked in our invisible hierarchy. It seemed so petty to put it like that, and it wasn’t that I was comparing them to me—more like I was comparing myself to them.

Ruffly shirt girl was prettier than me. She had beautiful clear skin, slender hips, and long legs. Her hair was amazing. She dressed to flatter herself, to bring out her best features. I dressed in what was clean(ish) or what was on sale. I wasn’t competing with Katie, Barbie, or whatever her name was. (Okay, that was bitchy.) I really wasn’t. First of all, she was in a totally different league than I was, and second, her target was my brother. That was clear from the get-go. So this comparison thing, this competition . . . it wasn’t about guys.

If it was, why would I compare myself to the girls on IG or on TV, like I did when Madelaine Petsch looked out at me from the screen? She was flawless. Even with my ultra-high-def TV, she had the smooth skin of a porcelain doll. Not a blemish, not a spot or bump. It almost made me want to go vegan, if that’s what it did for you.

I thought about this sort of thing a lot. I tried to figure out where it came from. Where all my insecurities came from. I really didn’t care that guys looked at other girls more than they looked at me. It was just that some girls made me feel less than. I couldn’t explain it, not really, but it was hard to get out of my head. And the thing was, I knew it wasn’t just me. I thought about Elodie, beautiful blond Parisian Elodie, with her pretty cheeks and doe eyes. She’d sit with a mirror in her lap, picking at her face, saying how horrible her skin was, that her eyes were uneven, and her nose was off-center. Did all women do that?