A girl stood in the middle of a fluorescent room with fingers untying a purple, magenta bathrobe — eyes on the gray floor where feet pressed naked against the cool surface. Who was that girl, I wondered, as she pulled her shoulders back and let the robe slide from her shoulders so that air slapped bare skin.

Wearing only my pearl earrings I became a girl I never expected to be.

I stepped into the middle of the room, and 13 students circled around me with their pencils and blank paper clipped to their easels. The professor gave me the OK to begin the lesson. The subject for that day: me.

I began with six, 30-second action poses so that the students could draw legs crouched in a lunge, arms bent like tree branches and muscles braided into twists. The sketches unfolded into quick lines and rough scribbles that captured nothing more than the shape of each pose.

I watched the students as much as they examined me, their gaze never meeting mine.

Wondering what they saw, I occasionally glanced at my body, and in those few glances, the word I thought was “smooth.” My skin — uninterrupted by a bra strap cutting across my shoulder, a short’s hem dividing my legs or the bunchy fabric of a T-shirt falling in folds — was simply smooth. Shades of brown slid into white and whiter still as the only disruption across my bare canvas.

Once I was naked, it became a way of being — like wearing a skin-colored stretch suit. The transition from naked to clothed and back again, however, was the challenge.

For each brief break, I was allowed to put my robe back on. The few steps from the center of the circle to the edge, where my purple robe lay draped over a chair, were arduous. With each butt-jiggling step I was reminded of my nakedness. Because although I had splayed my body — legs, arms, torso going in different directions — the full extent of my vulnerability washed over me as soon as I had the option to cover it up, to hide. Then I slipped the robe off again, the process of unwrapping it from body more difficult than standing there naked.

Throughout the class the poses became longer — from 30 seconds to two minutes to 10 minutes. The time cramped my neck and made me more aware of the chemical assault of Sharpie and my own lingering scent of sweat mixed with deodorant. I could hear frantic pencils and markers scribbling across the paper with the occasional squeak of a Sharpie that took an abrupt turn too fast.

The longer sketches began to take shape into something human-looking, but not quite Natalie-looking. My favorite sketch outlined curvy hips, thighs pressed together and full breasts in loopy, loose strokes — it looked nothing like me. One student gave me a giraffe neck and a pudgy-looking stomach while another drew droopy breasts outlined like slices of pizza.

Some of the other students had the beginnings of my left leg and the twist of my torso, but regardless of how accurate or precise, their drawings would always be influenced by their own perceptions and the creative twitch of their fingers.

I wanted to know how they saw me — beautiful, ugly, misshapen. But then I realized, regardless of their perceptions, they were never really drawing me.  

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