Holy earlobes! That had to hurt

cash register over to the corner of the store (about 8 feet away), which was apparently the ear-piercing corner. She started showing Ellie and Kennedy the options for starter earrings and the bottles of cleaning solution, for aftercare.

Wait, I thought, this is who’s performing the procedure? Somehow,

I was expecting someone older, maybe a doctor with white hair and a mustache. At least a lab coat?

BRIAN MCMILLAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

I was shocked when my daughters both eagerly jumped in the back of the car so they could get a ride to Claire’s to get their ears pierced.

As we drove to St. Augustine, I kept looking up at their faces — 13-year-old Ellie and 8-year-old Kennedy — in the rearview mirror, to gauge their state of mind. Did they not realize their earlobes were about to be mutilated? Holes punched through their flesh — permanently?

Then again, I’m known in my family for getting queasy around blood and needles. My wife, Hailey, is aware of my wimpiness. Sometimes, a little too aware.

“You don’t have to come into the store, if you don’t want to,” Hailey said as we parked.

“No, it’s fine,” I said, swallowing hard, following my girls across the blacktop like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. “I can handle it.”

We entered Claire’s, which was, incongruously, adjacent to the food court. Such a brutal rite of passage should be done on a mountaintop, surrounded by the smells of incense, not in a shopping mall surrounded by the smells of Colossal Dogs and Burgers.

Somehow, inside a store that’s about the size of some people’s walk-in closets, they fit 5.27 million different pairs of earrings, not to mention false eyelashes, false nails, “skin gems” and hair brushes that fold up to look like boxes of Nerds.

“We have an appointment for ear piercing,” Hailey told the young lady behind the cash register.

Very friendly young lady. Probably a high school student, summer job. But how qualified do you have to be to sell plastic jewelry, right?

With a smile, she walked from the