Then I had to help her get her sweater back on. I tried to be dispassionate about being so close to a barely clothed female, but it wasn’t easy. Thankfully, I didn’t do anything to hurt her or offend her.
Esther and I were both ravenous, and we tore into the sandwiches. We were sipping our coffee when she looked at me curiously and said, “I didn’t know Ginny had a tattoo.”
“She doesn’t,” I said. “What made you think that?”
“I woke up during the night and had to go to the bathroom. When I came back to bed, I noticed your wallet had fallen open to a picture of her. It looked like she had a tattoo on her neck.”
My depression came back in a rush. “That’s an old picture,” I said flatly, “and it’s not a tattoo, it’s a port wine stain.”
Esther must have picked up on my tone because she raised her eyebrows and asked, “Want to tell me about it?”
Ginny and I went to the same high school together. She was bright and cute and slender, and I was crazy about her. But I was shy and nerdy, so I could never work up the nerve to ask her out. Anyway, Ginny was born with a port wine stain on her neck. She was very self-conscious about it, and unfortunately the other kids teased her about it unmercifully.
One day I was walking down the hall when I saw a group of them surrounding her and taunting her. “Ginny jelly,” they called her birthmark, and that must have hurt because she was crying. Suddenly I was running as fast as I could, and I jumped in front of them, my fists clenched and my face red and distorted. “You get away from her!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “You leave her alone! She’s beautiful and you’re just too dumb to see it.”
Any one of the guys could have mopped the floor with me if he’d wanted to, but I was in such a rage that I didn’t care, and that must have cowed them. Finally one of the girls on the edge of the group tugged on a guy’s arm and said, “Come on, leave her alone,” and suddenly the little group of harassers dissipated.
I turned to Ginny, who was watching all this through red, weepy eyes. “Come on,” I said, “let’s skip class and get out of here for a while.” I led her out to the football field, and we climbed up into the stands.
“Why did you say that, Thomas?” she asked hesitantly. “Why did you say I was ‘beautiful’?”
“Because you are, Ginny,” I said earnestly. “You think your birthmark makes you look ugly, but I think it makes you unique and special.”
“But it’s ugly,” she insisted. “I see it every day in the mirror and I hate it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I insisted. “You look at yourself and the stain is all you can see. I look at you and I see a beautiful, special girl. You focus on your birthmark, I see the whole you.”
She looked at me in wonder and then suddenly reached over and kissed me on the lips. That was the start of our relationship. We wound up going to college together and getting married after graduation.
But the thing was, Ginny never really believed that she was beautiful. That mark on her neck was always on her mind, and she continued to try to conceal it with make-up or hide it with the clothes she wore. Anyway, after we graduated and she got a job, she wanted to use her income to get the port wine stain removed. I loved her the way she was, but she was determined and went to a specialist to explore getting laser treatments.
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