You could give her any diagnosis you wanted but the fact is, Mandy was inextricably, inexorably, fatally shy. Her early 20’s were her most uncomfortable time, because she forced herself to mingle.
“Come on,” she’d coax herself in the mirror when preparing for a social function. “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
Mandy would wear clothes that didn’t seize attention but exuded classic style. She’d put on makeup and seen sometimes dared to wear a red lip. She recalled a quote by Audrey Hepburn she’d come across: ‘There’s a shade of red for every woman.”
She’d go into a party looking, and nearly feeling, like an ingenue, the kind of quirky girl who meets her match in a handsome jock with a thoughtful side. Some kind of “She’s All That” or “Benny and Joon” scenario.
As soon as Mandy spoke, though, the house of cards didn’t just tumble down. It exploded like confetti. She’d get nervous, start sweating, and then to develop some kind of verbal tick–never the same twice. She’d adopt a catch-phrase of sorts that her frightened psyche and twisted tongue grasped at like a cane.
Once, at a party featuring games like cornhole, an over-sized Jenga board and beer pong,Mandy began to pepper her response with the phrase “as it were.” The crisis peaked when a cute guy in a Built to Spill T-shirt started chatting her up.
“I grew up in rural Indiana, as it were,” she shared.
“Yeah,” she responded. “I’d love it if you’d get me a beer, as it were.”
–Sarah Torribio
See more flash fiction by Sarah Torribio HERE
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