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"  Zach, the popular, boisterous soccer team captain\u2014the foul-mouthed, magnetic, beautiful cutup\u2014picked me. Small, unglamorous, sassy but not sultry me. He&amp;#039;d pass me flirty notes during the English class that his grades had nearly kept him out of. Then he&amp;#039;d walk me, my arm linked through his, to the history class he didn&amp;#039;t make it into. Zach, guest star of every pep rally, picked me to fall in love with; to have a volatile, consuming, lust-, rage-, and hyperbole-fueled parents&amp;#039; nightmare of a relationship with. And all around us people wondered, Why her? I was sure I knew why. Zach was more interesting and interested than the soccer team, or cheerleading squad, thought. He was enamored of my curiosity. He wanted to watch old movies and analyze song lyrics and get letters from a girl who knew how to write them. He loved me obsessively, the way people love in high school. And then, after a long-distance freshman year of college spent cooing and fighting and surprise-visiting\u2014he dumped me. For a country-club pool girl who was lots of things I&amp;#039;d never be: tall, tan, blond. Gorgeous. That summer of my first heartbreak was the saddest and lowest I&amp;#039;d known. I had to keep hearing reports about the new girlfriend. Zach was taking her everywhere...that bitch. But one night that summer, he finally accepted my offer to hang out. I&amp;#039;d invited him to see Twelfth Night. Yes\u2014the play&amp;#039;s the thing! Shakespeare and I would remind him what kind of girl he&amp;#039;d discarded, and I would get him back. That night I put on the most deliberate outfit of my life: a short, tight, gray cotton skirt; a bright blue, skintight racer-back tank top; wedged heels that shot me up five inches; and a strapless bra, padded out to there and protruding skankily from beneath the thin, cheap blue fabric.  When Zach arrived, I watched his discomfort shift to pleasant shock. This was what I wanted, of course. But I knew it wasn&amp;#039;t me wearing that outfit: It was a girl with bigger boobs and five extra inches of height who had forgotten what she liked about herself.  Halfway through act 2, I felt Zach&amp;#039;s hand on my thigh. It was working. It would work! Zach would forget about Poolside Barbie and remember why he&amp;#039;d loved me. But after the curtain came up, after a heated talk and impulsive kisses, I found myself asking, pleading, Why can&amp;#039;t you break up with her? And being met with shifty-eyed ambivalence and a pitying smile. He wouldn&amp;#039;t...he couldn&amp;#039;t...he didn&amp;#039;t want to. I doubt it would have stung so much had I not been sitting there in my honorary Slut of the Month Club uniform; had my desperation revealed itself minimally\u2014forgettably\u2014instead of screaming from the very fibers of my clothes. How had sexy turned humiliating in just a few tears? Looking back, I can&amp;#039;t help but see the moral that Shakespeare, master of mistaken identity, might have proffered. Costumes may dazzle with the promise of alchemy, but where we fail in fooling others, we end up deceiving ourselves.   Do you have a fashion story to tell?Enter our Love, Loss, and What I Wore Contest for your chance to win a trip to NYC and a $1,000 Ann Taylor wardrobe! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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