The Girl Who Saw Through Jem

Ellis: Monday Mornings (edited)

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Chapter 1

Monday Mornings

Ellis

The problem with being so short was that nobody took you seriously.

I hit my growth spurt when I was eleven, just a few months after my birthday, and I shot up to 4'9, which doesn't seem like a major transformation but it was pretty big for an Asian girl. All my life I was always picked on the front of the shortest to the tallest line. All my life I wore heels to everywhere I go in order to gain some form of self-confidence about my height.

What was worse was my total lack of...chest. When I was thirteen, my mother and I shopped for my first bra. I was an A cup and I've remained the same ever since. I was not the submissive type that will succumb to the soul-sucking black hole of puberty where you're suddenly insecure about everything that included your body. Suddenly, it was all about the big bra sizes and plentiful curves and I prided myself on being too smart to be caught up in that but I had my moments- especially since everybody was rapidly transforming into full-figured bodies while I was stuck in the appearance of a nine-year-old boy.

I had friends, Astrid, and Calista, who were both blonde, tall and beautiful- the typical All-American Beauty. I, on the other hand, was black-haired, exceptionally short and well...shockingly average. But to me, those were just looks and beauty fades. What was important was my academics and them, if I had a chance to say, was abundantly superior to my peers.

However, I was not going to let negativity dragged me down into a pit of drowning disappointment and inferiority since it was the first day back to the second semester of the year and all the results were being announced from the mid-terms' the previous semester before.

That morning I woke with a fresh, brand new perspective of the semester: I was going to rule it. It was halfway through the junior year and it was a brand new semester and the time was ticking by. I was steadily advancing my way to an early acceptance into Harvard Medical. Besides, what better time was there to promise me to make the rest of the year perfect? And perfect in the sense of Ellis Chan's standards.

I threw my Egyptian cotton blankets away from my body and hopped out of bed, humming my favourite song of the month: Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballad as I jumped into the shower. Slipping my body free of my silk nightgown, I let the cold water rinsed through my chopped long bob. Once I was finished, I put on the outfit I've laid out yesterday: a plaid skirt of an appropriate length, a sheer white blouse with a modest white camisole underneath, a pair of Tory Burch black ballet flats and of course, my customary satin red headband, customized by Tiffany's with the 17-carat diamond embedded onto the band.

Red, because it was my signature colour. Diamonds because diamonds were a girl's best friend. And headbands...well, you know how Queens had crowns?

I had my headbands. With them on, I felt like Michelle Obama.

I continued my relentless humming as optimism plagued my gait on the way down the spiral steel stairs of my beautiful, modern house. It was remodeled last summer- with brand new tiling of marbles imported from Italy, new watercolour paintings from Shanghai, my father's hometown, the lights were fixed and changed, the kitchen was torn down and built anew with an added gleaming obsidian counter top, white cupboards and another stove. The dining room was rid of that horrible shabby Persian rug my parents bought from their Arabian honeymoon ages ago and the walls were repainted into another shade of white, which in my opinion honestly didn't make much of a difference despite the claims of the familiar tones of eggshell white and a pearl white.