It’s 1990 in Mrs. Silva’s sixth grade class and we are reading A Wrinkle in Time. We’re tasked with drawing Mrs. Murry, the mother of two main characters. She’s “a scientist and a beauty” with “flaming red hair, creamy skin, and violet eyes with long dark lashes.” 

I know immediately I will model her after the most captivating woman I know—my mother. Mom has curly dark hair, sparkling brown eyes, and va-va-voom curves. She wears a full face of makeup every day and stocks her closet with a rotation of florals and brightly colored dresses and heels. Every weekend she paints her nails the same shade of lilac. Depending on her mood, she wears delicate gold jewelry or large statement necklaces.  

To sketch Mrs. Murry, I will draw on what I know. I’m on the cusp of puberty and much of the available media is designed to titillate. Kim Basinger is all hair, lips, and heaving bosom in Batman. Cindy Crawford is postcoital with messy locks and cutoff shorts, her breasts straining against a white tank top as she throws her head back to drain a can of Pepsi. Kelly McGillis makes love to Tom Cruise in Top Gun, setting my ears afire. Pretty Woman’s Julia Roberts snakes one slim arm up Richard Gere’s pant leg. Madonna moans her way through Justify My Love. Everything is sex. 

I set to work drawing Mrs. Murry, confidence singing in my heart. I give her a luscious form—a large bust and curvy hips—and I finish her face with a succulent mouth. I adorn the beautiful scientist in a way I wish my mother would dress—in a skintight, cherry red, strapless gown with a sweetheart neckline that pushes her cleavage up to her neck. A long slit cuts up one delicious thigh and she wears matching red high heels. She’s perfect.

I survey the work of my fellow twelve-year-olds. My Mrs. Murry is inarguably the best.

“She looks hella hot,” my best friend, Rozina says. My classmates have put forth little effort, boredly coloring in long A-line skirts and shirts buttoned up to Mrs. Murry’s chin. I’m certain my Mrs. Murry is the sex bomb Madeleine L’Engle intended to depict. 

Mrs. Silva, large round spectacles perched on the end of her nose, says, “Oh,” when she sees my drawing and smiles in that way adults do when they’re obfuscating, when there’s something I should know but don’t. She tells us we’ll vote for the best Mrs. Murry, and as I gaze at my drawing, taped up on the wall next to the others, I know the contest is mine to lose. We write our choices in secret, scribbling them on small scraps of paper. 

Our teacher counts the votes, placing them in small piles. When she’s finally done, I straighten in my chair, spine atingle. She holds the winning pile aloft and smiles. 

“Congratulations Isaac!” 

Isaac is scrawny, with jutting ears and a long, stringy mullet. He’s a pest—he chases girls at recess and spits in his classmates’ milk at lunch. I dislike him intensely. In shock, I search his Mrs. Murry out on the wall and find it—a bland drawing of a small woman with a rectangular physique wearing jeans, a sweater, and sneakers. Her hair is limp and her smile just one simple curved line. 

Rozina looks at me with sympathy. “Maybe you made her too sexy,” she says. 

This seems unlikely. Mrs. Murry is a beauty, and this is what beauties are—outrageously seductive, plump with sensuality, oozing pheromones, and casting X-rated glances.

I look again at my classmates’ drawings. A red flush creeps up my neck and stains my cheeks. My drawing is the only sex bomb of the bunch. No one else envisioned the scientist and mother of four in stiletto heels and a sultry ball gown. None of their Mrs. Murrys have decolletage or Jessica Rabbit hips or pornographic smiles. Only I disregarded the wider description of Mrs. Murry as a harried scientist and mom.

Weeks later, we graduate from sixth grade. It’s a big deal because we’re moving on to middle school, so all of our parents come to the commencement ceremony. Afterward, they mill around the classroom, which, to my relief, Mrs. Silva has stripped of decor, having prepared the room for the summer. Parents snap pictures of us in our outfits, all neon and shoulder pads. I see Isaac’s mother, a petite, plain-faced woman shaped like a slap bracelet. A tingle of satisfaction hums in my chest.