How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea Read Free Book Online Page A

sisters.
    â€œIt’s fake!” I hissed at them with a wink and a smile. Like,
You could have one, too!
Fake designer fashion is political! It’s the great equalizer! No more class hierarchies, not if my thirty-dollar Louis Faux-ton buys me the same class deference as a two-thousand-dollar “real” one! And who is to say what is “real” anymore? I didn’t go to college, but I have a feeling that some people have written some papers on this subject.
    But the Cineplex girls gave me stink-face when they learned my purse was not legit. Why would I brag about such a thing? Ugh! One even snorted at me. “Fake!” Then they all turned andlaughed at me.
Well, at least I’m not making minimum wage at the mall!
I thought, all class solidarity evaporated before you can say
reality television
.
    Annie helped me get closer to fashion in other ways as well. Once, on a road trip, we drove straight across the country, anxious to get the rental car back before we got charged extra. This meant nonstop driving, a brutal and dangerous game in which we sort of lost our minds. We drank Red Bull and chewed caffeinated gum and rolled down the windows so the wind could smack us in the face. And we read fashion magazines.
    For miles and miles, I held pages of
Vogue
or
Elle
or
Harper’s Bazaar
open to Annie, who would take her eyes off the road to gaze at the goods on each page. We played
What is the ugliest thing on this page
,
Guess how much that purse costs
, and
What on this page is the most “me”?
Also, desperate to get as much mileage as possible from each magazine on our journey,
Who would you have sex with on this page and yes, you absolutely have to pick someone.
    By the end of the trip, I was hooked on fashion magazines. I was hooked on them in the way that a person gets hooked on things when repeatedly exposed to them while being deprived of sleep and nutrition. I remedied this new need by getting fake subscriptions to all of them. A fake subscription, by the way, is when you put a fake name and a real address on a subscription card and check “bill me later.” You’ll get a handful of magazines before they cut you off. It’s stealing, basically, a sort of benevolent scam well known to the broke and fashion obsessed (in the eighties, when I was broke and music obsessed, I ran a similar scam with the long-defunct Columbia Record and Tape Club, gettinga bunch of Van Halen and AC/DC tapes for a penny). For the scam, I came up with the pen name Angelica Ford—clearly a rich woman who had been raised right in this world, raised with privilege, who had probably modeled before marrying a shipping heir from a country that still had a monarchy.
    My magazines came pouring in, regenerating a love I hadn’t indulged since back before the days of radical feminism. In my youth, in high school, and in the early nineties, I had loved high fashion. Madonna had paved the way for me to know Jean Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood was the perfect bridge between the world of the Sex Pistols and the world of Chanel. I was thrilled to reacquaint myself with both designers, and to learn about a whole bunch more.
    My new morning ritual was to read the magazines with a French press of coffee. This was less than a year into my sobriety, and the novelty of mornings had not worn off. Alcoholics don’t get mornings. Waking up without nausea, without a splitting headache, without the shakes, sitting in a kitchen that is actually clean, and cute, and paging through fashion magazines while starting the day—it was marvelous. How I loved starting my day with fantasy, with luxury! Even though I was still relegated to shopping at thrift stores, the education the magazines were giving me had sharpened my eye. I couldn’t afford that black-and-gold Miu Miu cocktail dress, but when I saw the eighties version of it hanging in Thrift Town, I knew it to be a fantastic approximation.
    As my