I Once Was Miss America

By Roxanne Gay

The Wakefield twins aren't real
Replace: are fictional
; they are the main characters of the Sweet Valley High series. I started reading the Sweet Valley High books when I was eight or nine years old. I was cross-eyed and wore thick bifocals.
Analysis: The juxtaposition here between her and the girls from Sweet Valley High is very apparent and very effective. She pretty much paints herself as the exact opposite as those girls, longing for everything they have and she doesn't. However, there are undertones of her being proud of her background and of her individuality, since individuality is something the girls from SVH don't have.
Other than my younger brother, I was the only black kid in school, so I was going to be noticed even though I wanted very much to go unnoticed.
Question: She says here that she wants to go unnoticed, but most of her longings and dreams involve her becoming popular. Isn't this a bit of a contradiction?
I was shy and awkward and didn't know how to fix myself. My hair was wild, stood on end, earning me the inexplicable nicknames Hair, Beard, and Mustache even though I had nether a beard nor a mustache. My classmates also called me Don King. I looked nothing like Don King. He's a man, for one. I was told my parents "talked funny," which I later realized was a reference to their thick Haitian accents, which I did not hear until they were pointed out to me, and then suddenly those accents were all I heard.
Transformation: One day, one of the girls from school mentioned that my parents "talked funny." This left me in a whirlwind of confusing emotions. I had never had someone say that to me before. I was confused- were they hearing something I wasn't? When I got home from school that day and my mother greeted me at the door, I heard it. I went upstairs to lay down. From that day on, it was all I ever heard.
I read books while I walked to school. I had the strangest laugh – somewhat halted and tentative – and a bit of a bucktooth situation. I regularly wore overalls by choice and didn't really know and curse words, so that should give you a sense of where I was on the social ladder – reaching for the bottom rung.
Feedback: This is a clever move as a writer to incorporate the visual of the "social ladder" to give her readers an idea of just how much she was struggling.

When I first started reading Sweet Valley High books, I wanted girls like the Wakefield twins to love me. I wanted the handsome boys who chased girls like those Wakefield twins to love me. I wanted the popular kids to pull me into their shelter of their golden embrace and make me popular too.
Expansion:I wanted girls like the Wakefield twins to love me. I wanted their long, sleek blond hair and their shimmering green eyes. I wanted the handsome boys who chased girls like those Wakefield twins to love me. I wanted them to long for me. I wanted them to think I was more special than any girl they had ever met. I wanted the popular kids to pull me into their shelter of their golden embrace and make me popular too. It was all I wanted.
Popularity is contagious. Many movies from the 1980s bear this theory out. I had hope, is what I'm saying, though certainly that hope was fragile.