Dungarees

Once she was a little girl in her bright red dungarees, you know the ones, with the teddy stitched onto the front pocket. With her thick striped woolly jumper keeping her warm underneath. In her mother's frantic rush to get her ready one of the buttons on the dungarees wasn't buttoned up correctly, and she ran around most of the day with one shoulder undone. She didn't care about that of course. She was more excited about being first on the playground that day and beating her friends up the ladder. Jack and Caleb, her two closest friends, she had little tolerance for girls. They held hands in circles dancing or playing hairdressers... What silly girls.

But now she stands in front of the mirror, with her denim wash dungarees on and laddered black tights, one shoulder of the dungarees hanging off and a thin striped jumper on underneath. It doesn't quite look the same though, no it's not the colour of the dungarees. She can see it, we all can, now she's the one playing hairdressers, spending ten minutes on one strand of hair. She's the one fussing over the length of her eyelashes and the thickness of her eyeliner, the correct balance between messy and tidy, giving off an effortless look. No longer does she run around in the mud with her knees grazed and her hair full of twigs. No longer does she collect flowers and keep them in dozens of glasses all over her bedroom floor. No, she cares too much for that nonsense now.