Read Online Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong by Sophie Hudson - Free Book Online

sunburns over the course of my life   —most accidental, some the result of pure-dee stupidity   —so any situation where I’m actually in the sun tends to feel like it’s fraught with peril and angst. It’s better now that I’m older and have come to terms that I cannot walk outside my house unless I’m wearing a sunscreen with SPF in the double digits, but back in my college days, the sun and I had not yet made our peace with each other.
    That didn’t do a single thing to diminish my deep and consuming desire to look like someone in a Hawaiian Tropic ad.
    Now if you have ever seen me in real life, you can attest to the fact that the good Lord did not make me with tanning in mind. As best I canremember, my hair is naturally dark blonde (thanks to Carla, my hairdresser, it’s been a while since I’ve seen my hair in its natural state), and my eyes are light blue. For the longest time I was convinced that I didn’t have a trace of melanin in my skin, but about four years ago I realized that I could in fact turn sort of a muted pink after spending about thirty consecutive days at the pool while slathered in sunblock.
    But my freshman year of college, I was still harboring some misguided notions that with a little planning, the perfect tan was within my reach. During the fall and winter I had no problem putting my sun-kissed dreams on the back burner, so to speak, but I never let go of the dream that once spring arrived, it was going to be my time to be tan.
    Delusion is a powerful thing, my friends.
    It didn’t help that Elise, Tracey, Daph, Marion, and so many other folks seemed to tan with little to no effort. They could sit outside at the Chi O house on a sunny afternoon and look like they’d spent the weekend in the Caribbean. On top of that, they didn’t burn at all   —a feat that was utterly inconceivable to someone (um, ME) who once spent the majority of a van ride from Panama City to Myrtlewood vomiting repeatedly after a particularly wicked case of sun poisoning.
    I was young and stupid. I had no idea that those UV rays poking through the clouds were the most dangerous rays of all.

    By the time March of my freshman year rolled around, I was more convinced than ever that a tan was in my immediate future. Sigma Chi’s annual Derby Day was fast approaching, and I knew it was going to force my tanning hand. My sorority was wearing red T-shirts, and someone who was clearly much tanner than I had decided that we needed to pair the red shirts with white shorts. Suffice it to say that fear and trembling filled my soul, because when you are melanin deficient (that is not an official term, but it sounds almost troubling, doesn’t it?), white shorts are perhaps the most unflattering garment that you could dream of wearing against your glow-in-the-dark legs.
    Honestly, the only positive thing I could come up with as far as thewhite shorts were concerned was that my veins would have never looked bluer.
    So, since I didn’t have the power to fight the sorority dress code, I figured I needed to be proactive and, you know, finally make a trip to a tanning bed. Oh, I could have settled for some self-tanner, but it was the late eighties, and the only thing self-tanner did, at least for me, was tint my skin an orangish hue that could not, be found in nature. To my way of thinking, the tanning bed was my only choice.
    The day before Derby Day, I made an appointment with a local salon that had five or six tanning beds, and a couple of hours later, I drove across Starkville so I could meet my tanning destiny out on Highway 25. Unbeknownst to me, some beds had stronger bulbs than others, but since I didn’t know that, I just picked the one with the cutest name and ended up in a bed called Bora-Bora.
    Perhaps that should have been my first warning sign.
    In hindsight, there are many things I wish I’d done differently. I wish I hadn’t felt the pressure to be tan. I wish I hadn’t waited until the day before Derby