I Have A Dream - Part I

You know how in the movie Girl With A Pearl Earring, they used an actress (Scarlett Johansson) who looked like the painting?

Last night I dreamt there was another famous historical person, and when they made a movie about "it," I thought to myself, "They ought to use J., she looks exactly like her!"

The History, part I

J. was a girl I knew in high school. Half Irish, half Portuguese. She was so unusually put together: her skin was pale but tan, like very light cocoa powder. It looked like she had foundation on all the time. A color I'd never seen before, nor since. That's also true for her hair: black, and I mean jet black. Not dark brown, not black like a Japanese person, I'm talking India ink. When she was a freshman she was into sort of a rudimentary melange of the whole "alternative" style thing mixed with British "mod", so that meant dyeing your hair black as tar (or bleaching it crispy white). Well, her hair looked dyed, but it wasn't.

One of her cutest features was the gap between her front teeth. Nice body, but I don't really remember it from high school.

We went to a very liberal private high school, so you didn't really have to attend classes or be someplace at a specific time. Some people were boarding students (like her; her family lived about an hour away) and some were day students (I lived about an hour away as well but hated the idea of living at school). It was a lot like a college campus.

Anyway, I started hanging out around her when we were usually alone; I could just go up to her room, or if I saw her sort of hanging out at the Commons we'd spend time together. She seemed to like me. For example, one afternoon we dyed my hair purple with temporary dye - just having her run her fingers through my hair, just she and I in a bathroom, and having her pay attention to me... well, it seemed like she wouldn't have done that with just anybody from school. But I could never tell whether she really liked me because I sensed a sort of... social butterflyness about her. Such as, she liked to be close to cool people, but not too close. Or rather I guess... exclusively close?

After the first two years of high school there I left. I didn't make a big production out of it; in fact, I didn't even tell anyone, including my friends, that I wasn't coming back the next year. I just didn't show up. I also didn't tell J.

I wanted to go back to public school, but why is a different story.