Every kid has a vision of her senior year.

Maybe she wants to be prom queen, maybe editor in chief of the school newspaper.  She might imagine her hunky quarterback boyfriend or her tortured artist “guy friend” who is secretly in love with her. 

Me?  I imagined I’d be a mock trial county champion directing a one-act play that would knock the socks off student audiences come May.

What I didn’t imagine, when I pictured my epic senior year, was that I would be a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Typical teenager that I am, the word “swollen,” like the word “rescinded,”  had an intellectual significance to me.  I understood the concept (bad) and the fact that this word could, should something unfortunate happen, apply to me. What I did not understand was that a doctor and a teacher adviser are two very different things.

When a teacher adviser tells you that you need to pay attention in math or you might be “rescinded,” this information is useless and should be discarded.  However, when a doctor tells you that after your orthodontic jaw surgery, you should not go to school for two weeks because you will be “swollen,” this information is true and should be considered much more thoroughly.

Big deal, I thought. So it’s a blow to my vanity. I’m a geek; no one cares what I look like.  I’ll just go to school, do my classes, direct my play and avoid mirrors.  I figured I’d look kind of bad-ass, like Edward Norton in “Fight Club” -- like someone beat me up and I went down swinging. 

Instead, I have become a Cabbage Patch Kid. My cheeks are huge, my eyes are glassy, and, yes, my nose has even gotten cuter.  But, unlike the dolls, I can’t smile. It’s a matter of not being able to move my upper lip.

Now that I know how a CPK feels, I wonder why they are always smiling.  It’s incredibly uncomfortable to have one’s face swollen beyond all genetically prescribed proportion. Poor CPKs.  I frown for you, who cannot frown for yourselves. I feel your bloated pain. I am your friend.

Had my eighth-grade self been given a choice of plastic model for my senior year, it probably would have been a Bratz and not a CPK.
Senior year is too epic, too important, too meaningful and too final to spend even three weeks of it looking like something that I was too old to play with by the time I was 5.

But rather than lament the transitory loss of my dignity, I wish to remember those whose faces are always comically and cuddly misshapen, from now until eternity.  Having been exposed to their plight, I will not hesitate to trumpet their cause to the heavens, from now until the swelling goes down.

I honor the CPKs.  The young. The round.  The adorable.  Frown for them who cannot frown for themselves, for they are doomed to be CPKs forever.

Rachel Wolf is a senior at Palo Alto High.