Smelly Ellie?

I began writing this piece, as I do so many others, one word after the other, just for practice. I picked a name and wrote the first line, without a plan as to what would follow. Here’s the result.

Ellie was unsure. She always had been unsure. Her current state had begun early on, when she was only ten and had worsened as the years passed. It had started with Benny Black. “Ellie, smelly, fat ass like jelly,” he would holler every time he saw her.

Benny, who was already a rather rotund teenager himself, repeated the taunt daily and each time, Ellie believed. The image she conjured became a weight she could hardly bear. At the sight of Benny she automatically tucked in her chin and stared down at herself in shame, and that in itself was a shame for Ellie was far from fat. She was ten, a little girl still. Her figure did not begin to develop for four more years. She was a late bloomer. When the time came for bras and feminine hygiene products she was just short of fifteen. All of her friends, one after the other, proudly had announced that they were women, looking at Ellie as if she were a bit abnormal, an anomaly who did not quite fit in with the rest of them. She heard the giggles of girls who should have known better. She watched silently as a would-be pal covered her mouth and whispered much too loudly into another’s ear. “Something must be wrong with Ellie. She’s not normal.”

 As became her habit, Ellie would bite her lip, look away, lower her eyes, and wish she could disappear, anywhere, but like the jeers that followed her, vanishing was out of the question, so she simply existed, wounded and insecure.

When finally it was her turn, Ellie’s body seemed to change overnight. Her hips widened, her waist narrowed, and her breasts grew. She was truly a lovely and quite a voluptuous young woman. The eyes of admirers and there were plenty, tailed her. Yet Ellie saw herself only through her mind’s eye, colored by the childhood insults of Benny Black and her misguided classmates. She was unable to look into a mirror without wincing; critical self-talk became the norm and any compliment was met with a smirk of disdain.

I’m not sure what might happen to Ellie. In a world of bullies, she has not faired well thus far. In a longer piece she perhaps could find a way to see herself in a more positive light. I’d like to think that.