(You Were) Cute in a Handsome Way

A Story by furlong

Almost everyone goes through an awkward stage during the teenage years and they think that their awkwardness takes first prize in the Most Awkward Awards. Angela Quinn was no different, only while most people got over their awkwardness and the embarrassment that often accompanies it, Angela considered herself scarred by her gawkiness. For one thing her awkwardness had begun when she was still a tot. Looking back at her baby pictures she failed to see how anyone could ever have considered her adorable in any way. Her parents disagreed, of course, but parents will always find beauty in their children.

As she grew older, though, she showed signs of what promised to be some highly awkward and embarrassing teenage years. Unlike most girls who mostly only worried about pimples and their weight in terms of awkwardness, Angela had to worry about that plus the braces she felt took up half her mouth, thick glasses without which she was blind, bushy eyebrows which happily met in the centre, and a small girl moustache that occupied her upper lip. Besides that she was also hideously tall for her age and towered over not only the girls but most of the boys as well.

Her mother refused to let her wear contacts, claiming she was too young. She also refused to let Angela wax eyebrows into two or get rid of the moustache. By the time she graduated high school Angela considered herself a hopeless case and hoped (but doubted) that she would eventually grow into her looks.

Though she had given up all attempts to improve her gawky looks, she had not accepted them. Therefore, she refused to have any photos taken of her since she hit puberty. This was easy to accomplish with friends (which she had a fair number of because there was nothing socially awkward about her) who respected and understood her feelings, but never her family. Her mother, a big fan of photos of anyone and everyone insisted on photos whenever the opportunity arose. Her father was a professional photographer and though she admitted that she looked slightly better in his photos, she still did not feel she looked good enough.

It wasn’t until she was around nineteen and was living independently from her parents on her university campus that she decided to do something about her unhappy looks. Without her mother’s thumb hovering over her, Angela had nothing stopping her when she inquired with the campus optometrist about contact lenses, and searched the yellow pages for places to get a decent wax. Within a few months she was a new person to her friends. She was more confident and smiled a lot more (the braces came off shortly after graduation) and seemed to always be beaming with pride. She considered herself finally out of her awkward teenage years and was truly happy for once.

It wasn’t long until she had her first boyfriend, a classmate of hers named Tom, who she was absolutely mad for and who seemed to be mad about her too. They spent all their time together and spent nights in each other’s dorms (just sleeping together and nothing more because she wasn’t quite ready for that, yet); it was seemingly too good to be true. One weekend she invited him to her parents’ house to introduce them.

They went over for brunch and had had a wonderful time. Angela had been nervous that something might spoil everything, but to her surprise her parents were very accepting of Tom and Tom seemed to have gotten along with them just as well. Angela couldn’t see why she ever worried at all. That is, until Tom asked to use the bathroom. Angela directed him to the powder room down the hall and smiled as she watched him go. It hadn’t been a minute since he’d gone when suddenly there was a loud guffawing heard from the corridor.

“I’ll go see what’s up,” she told her parents and got up. She found Tom standing halfway down the hall looking at some pictures on the wall. Angela walked over to him and noticed that her heart had started beating a little faster but she wasn’t sure why she was expecting the worst. The photo Tom was laughing at, she saw, was her graduation photo which was a photo she could not escape from having taken. She had begged her mother to promise to never put it up, but her mother obviously had gone back on her word. Now the image of a seventeen-year-old Angela stared back at her frozen in a half smile that showed her braces and half squinted eyes above which her unibrow, and below which her moustache were hideously clear.

“I can’t believe that’s you!” Tom was just about rolling on the floor with amusement and Angela felt herself turn bright red. “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen. No wonder I never knew you were in that class with me. I remember that—“he pointed at the photo, “—but I never would have guessed you two were the same person!”

Angela felt mortified and was frozen in her spot, forced to listen to Tom’s insults (which he may or may not have meant to be insults). She was feeling warm all over and wanted to run up to her bedroom and lock herself there forever. It felt as if all the work she had gone through to improve her looks meant nothing—would forever mean nothing so long as photos of her hideous former self were still floating around. Frustration and fury boiled up inside of her as her mother stepped into the corridor to see what the commotion was about and Angela took the tears burning in the corners of her eyes as a cue to speed up the stairs and into her bedroom, shutting the door with a roof shaking slam.

After that day Angela came up with a plan. She phoned all her relatives who she thought may have childhood photos of her lying around and asked them to mail them all to her as soon as possible. She lied saying she needed it for a scrapbook she had to make about her life for one of her classes. All her relatives were happy to help. Her mother was reluctant but sent over some photos anyway. When Angela asked to be sent the graduation photo that had ended her relationship with Tom, though, her mother cleanly refused. They had an argument but her mother wouldn’t cave and every time Angela would call her mother or vice versa, the same argument would ensure. Sometimes her mother would say “Maybe,” other times just a flat “No.” It was a fight Angela continued to fight well into her early twenties.

The photos that she did have she collected in a large box and hid in the very back of her closet. She covered the box with clothes and other miscellaneous items not only so no one would ever think to search in there, but also because she wanted to forget that those awful photos ever existed.

When she was about twenty-five she began dating a man called Jonah whom she had met through a friend from work. They had hit it off right away and became an item almost immediately. They developed a habit of asking each other seemingly random, yet endearing questions mostly about their pasts. Questions like “What was your third grade teacher’s name?” while in the middle of watching a rented movie. Or, “What do you think of Pez?” during a lull in the conversation. Angela loved these questions. She loved both asking and answering them. But in the back of her mind, she always secretly dreaded the question which Jonah asked one day while they were eating breakfast: “How come you don’t have any baby pictures of yourself?”

Since the incident with Tom, Angela and her dad had convinced Mrs Quinn to take down the graduation photo which Angela hated so much. Her mother begrudgingly agreed so there was no more trouble when she brought guys home to meet her parents. All existing photos of her before the age of nineteen were hidden safely in her closet (except for the graduation photo which was kept in her mother’s dresser drawer) and the only photos that adorned the walls of her parents house now were of the new and improved Angela. The boyfriends all eventually asked why there weren’t any childhood photos of her around and Angela had stumbled through various lies until settling on telling them that they were all destroyed in a fire. She then would quickly change the subject.

She told Jonah the exact same thing when he asked and he looked disappointed, but nodded and continued with his breakfast. He never brought it up again.

Angela still continued to argue with her mother about sending her the graduation photo for her scrapbook, which had turned from a school project to a personal hobby. She insisted that she could not have a complete scrapbook of her life without her graduation photo and one day, to both their surprise, Mrs Quinn agreed to send it over. Angela was ecstatic. She came home one day to find it in the mail and beamed as a collector who had finally finished his collection would beam. She was just about to go stick the photo in the box in her closet when her doorbell rang. It was Jonah, and seeing him only increased the glee she was feeling. She forgot about the photo which was now sitting exposed on the dining table and told Jonah she’d be back as soon as she changed her top.

Jonah was about to make a beeline to the couch to wait for Angela when he spotted the photo on the table. He froze, almost in shock, and picked up the picture to stare at it more intently. He stared for what seemed like hours, completely fascinated at how different Angela had looked and how much she had grown into herself. A small smile began playing at his lips just as Angela came bouncing back in the room. She stopped short and her eyes bulged when she saw what Jonah was staring at. She kicked herself mentally and felt like she had just been robbed. All those years of working to collect those photos, all that time arguing with her mother to send that picture over, all just so she could hide her embarrassing past from everyone. And now, by no one’s fault but her own, the one person she never in a million years wanted seeing that photo was staring at it; and smiling, too. Vivid flashbacks of Tom laughing hysterically came marching back into her head as she waited for Jonah to let out the first guffaw, thus emotionally scarring her and ending the best relationship she’d ever had.

But he suddenly glanced up, as if just noticing that she was in the room. The smile was still present and he held the photo up.

“Do you have more?” he asked. Angela’s mouth hung open and she tried to comprehend whether he was actually serious or just pulling her leg.

“W-what?” she muttered.

“Do you have more of your old photos? Or was this the only one that survived the fire?”

“Th-the fire--? Uh, no, I have more, I guess,”

“Can I see?”

Angela’s mouth opened and closed silently and she nodded, then frowned, then turned to go back into her room. But she suddenly stopped and looked back at Jonah who was once again staring at the photo.

“Aren’t you surprised at what an ugly child I was?” she asked, almost shyly.

Jonah looked up and grinned.

“No, no you weren’t ugly,” he told her. “You were cute. Not conventionally cute, but cute … cute in a handsome way.”

Angela blushed with embarrassment, but not the awful kind Tom had made her go through, a different, flattering kind. She grinned shyly and then turned into her room to retrieve her box of photos. They silently cancelled their plans for the evening and spent it, instead, going through the photos. Angela was, for the first time, laughing and sharing stories about her childhood and Jonah wasn’t laughing at her, but with her. She embraced the feeling of having someone laugh with you about the embarrassing gawky years, and then later that week Jonah invited her over to look through some of his own gawky childhood photos.

After that Angela no long hid her photos in that box in her closet. She actually did make that scrapbook she always lied about making and she left it on her coffee table for all to see and enjoy. She no longer seemed to be ashamed of them at all.