Eyebrow growing back in nicely. Her chest bones are also markedly less visible than they were when her account started. She's having to pop her collar bones out now to look so thin. Not that she isn't thin - she is - but you could see the whole outline of her sternum back when the insta account started. Which brings us back to how big is Jessica Riley?
And then we see the jacket. OH god. The jacket. It's the shoes all over again, but this time it's a 30 year old garment that is only available on the secondhand market. This should be fun.
She posts this set of photos of her in a vintage American Girl varsity jacket from the mid-90s. And she posts the tag showing it’s a size small. Added detail, it’s been embroidered with her name by some other Jessie of yore, so we know it’s the same jacket in both pics and she can wear it. Not just
wear but have extra room. So the easy explanation, as always, is “it must have come in adult sizes.” Again, I know she’s very thin. We’ve seen her stick insect limbs in 2018, but we’ve also seen her fill out a bit since then and I
still just don’t believe she’s as short and small of frame as she wants people to believe. Skinny yes, but a size kids small is cut for short little limbs and torsos. Every other time there’s been some big evidence that she might be as small as she claims she is, we’ve found that it comes in adult sizes like the shoes, or it’s sized to grow with your tater tot until they’re adult-sized, like the stroller.
Armed with the newly-gained knowledge that there is a whole very strange universe of adult women who spend their days playing with American Girl dolls and taking them on outings, I set out on a quest. I remember the American Girl catalogue and how it was a legitimate cultural
thing for girls of certain demographics to pore over that thing when it came in. Surely one of these damaged women has saved them all and shared them with the world. And sure enough, there are whole blogs of scanned catalogues with women chattering about ‘unlocking core memories’ from viewing them, holy fuck. But finding
this specific jacket was difficult because these women only care about the dolls and their accessories so they often don't bother to scan the other sections of the catalog. I found a bunch that looked close but then i'd get "and then there's 10 more pages of fashions for girls." Here's the catalog ad for the original jacket from 1995. It only came in purple.
Ebay had my back. The Fall 1996 catalog shows the pink colorway of the varsity jacket and lets us know that the small is a girls' size 6x-8. No adult sizes. Well now.
(I have learned so many things on this journey. The current “historical” dolls available from this company represent the long gone age of 1999 and their accessories include a CD walkman, a 'zine, and tiny blockbuster tape. My teenage years are not just vintage now… they’re
historical. Thanks, Mattel. Unsurprisingly, the primary market for this doll are women of my age who are gushing about nostalgia in the reviews.)
Okay, so how does Jessie fit in this fucker? I think she can take advantage of generously-cut children’s clothing in the golden age of baggy potato sacks like the ugly dress she wore for 100 days. Something tells me a 30 year old jacket with a felt shell and quilted lining is not the one you can pull that trick with. Maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time and she really is as small as she claims. OR MAYBE. She cut the back of the jacket to make it look like she fits? Nah, she’d sooner come up with some excuse about her contracture arm not letting her put it on than destroy a precious doll artifact. Maybe she had a scaled-up reproduction commissioned? Her grandparents are loaded and think nothing of buying her a new $150 doll every few months, so why wouldn’t they also be willing to buy her a repro of her dream coat from the catalogue? I’m enough of a capeshit nerd to know that if there’s a costume, there’s a person willing to make it for the right price. Besides, it’s awfully pristine for a 30 year old jacket meant to fit a 7 year old, isn’t it? But I can’t find anyone offering repros of old American Girl merch in adult sizes, and the other real examples I found on Ebay like the pic below are in good condition - i guess the kids outgrew them before they could destroy them or whatever.
I am now entering some kind of tinfoil hat headspace where there’s two jackets, one in a small and one in a large and they just happen to both have been owned by girls named Jessie in the past and. . . that’s about when my friend says, “Kate, maybe she just
changed the size label.” If you zoom in on an ~authentic American Girl~ label in one of these jackets the size is embroidered on. A few minutes with a seam ripper and a needle and thread and you’ve made a large a small. Or a sharpie marker, for that matter. I know these are vastly different photos and she's using insta filters to blast the fuck out my retinas with the saturation but that S in the first pic (which I took from eBay or Mercari) is maybe a bit less robust than in hers.
But how can I prove this? The post is only from May 2022, so I might be able to find the closed auction for this exact jacket and then we will be able to see what size it was listed as when she bought it. But I can’t find a closed auction for a jacket sold with that name embroidered on it on eBay, mercari, Etsy, or anywhere else. And that is when I realized not a single jacket I saw in hours of searching was embroidered with a name. It wasn’t a service they offered. The logo on hers matches the real deal, but the name on hers does not match the logo. The letters are spaced differently, there’s subtle differences between the “e” shape, and the color of thread used to dot the I in the name is much lighter than the one used to dot the Is in the logo. It’s post-market embroidery. And since I can’t find a listing of a jacket sold with the embroidery, it’s entirely possible she is the one that put it there and could have also had a new size tag embroidered.
Or not. Some of the listings say this jacket did run pretty big. She doesn’t show us how it fits at the arms and torso so it could just be that she fits as long as you don’t see the whole thing. If you go back to the dress, the sleeves are pushed up in every photo that she isn’t wearing a sweater over it to hide that it doesn’t fit her. There’s a few listings that say they’re selling an
adult size of this but I think those people are just mistaken. This one says it’s a women’s medium and here’s the measurements.
Placement isn’t the same for the sticks, but here’s a child’s medium. Looks like about the same measurements if the sticks were placed the same. So I think it’s just that these ran kinda big and some people who find them at thrift shops or whatever mistakenly think they’re adult sizes.
And this brings us back to “how the fuck tall is Jessica Riley?” I’m gonna admit here that I was wrong about Kelsey, her sister who caught the genders. I found her dad interacting with a Kelsey on facebook, that Kelsey was local, of the correct age, and looked somewhat similar to Kelsey’s younger photos so I figured that was her and therefore said she was married with children. This is incorrect – that Kelsey seems to go to their church but isn’t related. So then I had to go find the real Kelsey. Spoiler: I couldn’t and the last photos I found of her from 2017, she was still gender LARPing. Dad hasn’t posted new pics of her in year. Now I’m thinking Jessica’s dramatic suicide post about one of her siblings was actually Kelsey starting hormones or something now that she’s flown the coop. Unless I can find her we don’t know, and she might have changed her name or dropped off the internet.
But what I did find was tons of pics of Jessica showing more of her early behavior. Like this one where they have her strapped to a kitchen chair with what looks like a pair of overalls which is maybe the most hillbilly thing I’ve ever seen and I love it.
Or these, where her neck tilt is way more pronounced that it has been in the entire time her insta's been active. "But she has a different head rest!" I hear you cry.
Except even using that, she can straighten her neck out just fine when there's presents to open.
How about one where she's so goddamned normal it's painful?
An even older, cuter pic?
Maybe one from the full skelly era.
Here's one where we can almost, almost guess her height. She's still hunched so we don't get a straight look, and she's in front of everyone so that probably makes her look taller than she is but she definitely does not look abnormally short statured compared to her family.
Here's a cute little family moment where only her cane gives away what we know, where she does look particularly short, but she's sitting on a bony little behind and hunched over as much as she can be where her mom is sitting on a fat ass, neck stretched up. Still, her legs look
longer than her mothers', side by side.
But the one I really wanted to show is the other one from this set, where she’s standing with her mother. She’s hunched forward and to the side, as was her style back then, but you can tell that if she stood up, she’s the same height as her mom. Mystery solved. She’s short, but not any shorter than her mom.
I also learned a little more about her mother while poking around for something else, including that she used to be a respiratory tech at the local hospital before quitting to be a SAHM when Jessica came along. I don’t know that she ever went back to work or if she’s getting some kind of payments for caring for Jessie – not even necessarily through the government but I can see Jessica’s wealthy, indulgent paternal grandparents paying Bambi to stay home with their “sick” granddaughter. But also I think the fact that mom had some low-level medical knowledge and worked in a hospital might explain why the family was so quick to medicalize Jessie’s entire life. I’ve seen a few munchies where the nurse mom starts to think she’s Dr. Mommy and way smarter than those dumb doctors who say her daughter has anxiety (but I also archived one recently who is screeching all over social media about how her nurse mom was abusive for not believing her super real zebra diagnoses.)
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