SKEETER:

I was not a cute baby. When I was born, my older brother, Carlton took one look at me,
and declared to the hospital room, its not a babyits a Skeeter. And from there, the name sort
of stuck. I was long, and leggymosquito thin; a record breaking twenty-five inches at Baptist
Hospital. The name grew even more accurate with my pointy, beak-like nose as a child. Mother
spent years of my childhood trying to convince people to use my given name: Eugenia. Misses
Charlotte Boudreau Phelan does not like nicknames.
By sixteen I wasnt just not pretty, I was painfully tall. The kind of tall that makes you
stand in the back row of pictureswith the boys. The kind of tall that makes your mother spend
her evenings taking down hems, tugging of sweater sleeves, flattening your hair for dances you
hadnt been asked to, and finally pushing on your head as if she could actually shrink you back to
the years when she had to remind you to stand up straight. By the age of seventeen mother would
have preferred I suffered from apoplectic diarrhea than stand up straight. She was five-foot-four
and first runner up for Miss South Carolina. And she figured there was only one thing to do in a
case as drastic as mine. Misses Charlotte Phelans guide for husband hunting rule number one:
a pretty, petit girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture-- a tall plain one, with a trust
fund. I was five-foot-eleven but had twenty-five thousand cotton dollars to my name. And if the
beauty in that wasnt apparent, then by god, he wasnt smart enough to be in the family anyway.