Julia

“Who are you?” the man asked of the woman standing in front of the office building, looking up as if it were a dragon to be slain.

Julia is not ‘stunningly’ beautiful as most heroines tend to be. Neither is she ‘striking’, unless of course she happens to be striking you. No, Julia is none of that. She’s ‘odd’, not falling into any category or stereotype. With her round white face, pink-purple lipstick, and dead black hair, you might start with ‘punk’. However, the pink button-down shirt that might almost pass for traditional—but not really—screws that perception up pretty well, although the strangely patterned and oddly colored over-sized scarf flung over it might make you pause again. No. ‘Punk’ doesn’t fit yet.

The ragged, torn, and apparently dirty jeans doesn’t bring you back to ‘punk’. Now it’s more like ‘unkempt’. But, not really. The cowboy boots? Well, aside from the fact that they match her hair, your brain might start to frazzle in its attempt to make any sense out of this. Her ‘just a little plump’ body does stretch the denim a little, but ‘it works’, she likes to say. Looking at the 26-year-old woman, you might disagree with that assessment, but on closer examination of the interplay of textures and colors and patterns, you might nod your head and think that maybe it does work.

Julia sees her body as a different kind of rack, something that just holds her art, her clothes. Okay, you think, maybe she’s a designer, or maybe she got lucky that day.

Many people give up trying to understand and classify her right about now—usually about ten seconds into the first encounter—and that’s just fine with Julia. Who she is, is known to, and understood by, her and her alone. Again, that’s fine: people may not like what they find if they start to probe too far; there are things that people simply should not know. They will find out eventually, but not at this point.

If people get beyond the initial failure to classify her, the next thing they notice is the eyes: deep, dark, crazy green, set in her face like outlined emeralds painted on a china plate. But, on closer examination, there is something else, something like a beam that emanates from them: a tractor beam, hard to pull away from. If you stay too long, you’ll see an intensity that is frightening, unless it isn’t frightening, unless you want to be pulled in; unless you need what her eyes promise; unless you are short on what she seems long on. The more you need, the closer you get. Very few people get that far: fear starts right about halfway—or desire, and that’s the critical difference. The ones that venture farther expect reward for their courage. Some may get what they expect. Most won’t.

If people looked even farther inside those eyes, they would see a fire, a burning intelligence and… is it anger? Drive? Ambition? Then they ask: ‘where did this strange young woman come from’?

The answer could be: ‘around the enemies, over the bad guys, through the obstacles’. Or just: ‘from nothing to something’. Or maybe a better question is: ‘Where is she going?’

Julia started with nothing but the belief that creating fashions for Barbie dolls would lead to a life of creating fashions for models. In high school, when other kids said mean things, Julia instead heard praise from a man on stage in a spotlight. When other kids pointed and laughed at her mismatched clothes, Julia saw an elegant woman pointing and shouting ‘this is the future of fashion!’ When kids made fun of her tossed-together outfits with no labels, Julia saw a model gracefully sliding down the runway to applause; the neon sign above the runway carried her name on it.

She looked at the rear-view mirror of her life and never saw the poor girl, or the struggling seamstress, or the tired young woman showing her designs to yet another buyer. But Julia could clearly see the man who crushed her father and tried to crush her spirit. And she could plainly see the executive who said she was a genius; the one that believed in her as much as she did in herself. All of these conflicting/harmonious threads were woven into the fabric that made up who she was, a fabric whose patterns and colors and cuts were as unique as the woman herself.

She turned and looked at, no, into, the man who asked the question: ‘Who are you?’

Who, indeed?

“I am Julia, sir.”

(Julia is the main character in a new novel by Timothy Freriks, due out in fall, 2017)