Girls on the Playground

Content warning: This essay contains descriptions of sexual assault.

I was out sick for my elementary school’s single day of sex education, and no one would tell me what I’d missed. Years earlier, my mom said women became pregnant through prayer. After nine months, a woman’s belly button unraveled like a grocery bag, her baby tumbling into a doctor’s arms. It didn’t hurt too badly, my mom promised, and afterward, the doctor tied your belly button back into a knot. You could even request what kind you wanted, innie or outie. I stopped believing her as I got older, but didn’t do any research of my own. Maybe I suspected that clarity would mean shipwreck.

I was nine. A chronic bedwetter, I loved the Backstreet Boys and had debilitating separation anxiety from my parents. All I heard about that day was that the boys and the girls had been sent to separate classrooms, given care packages of deodorant and maxi pads, respectively, and told to shower daily, because soon we would all start to stink. From then on, our teacher asked us to raise our hands if we hadn’t showered the previous night. Presumably, her goal was to publicly shame anyone who hadn’t. Idiots, my mom said. Does she need to know how often I shave my legs, too? I wasn’t as bothered by my teacher’s interrogations. Lying to adults about my body had become second nature, as easy as scattering dandelion fluff.

What I remember most about that year was hanging out at my best friend’s apartment. Let’s call her Vera. Vera was popular. She was tall and had movie-star hair and the beginnings of an hourglass figure. I was in the tenth percentile of height for my age and stuffed my sports bra with makeup remover pads. Vera had perky bubble handwriting and the most impressive gel pen and mechanical pencil collection I’d ever seen. She was funny and domineering, the kind of elementary school queen bee who had two or three codependents trailing her at all times. Her parents packed the best snacks—whole bags of Pirate’s Booty and beef jerky—and sometimes, after sparing me a small handful, she demanded I dispose of her trash. At her apartment, we ate SunChips and watched slasher films and three-way called our crushes to bait them into steamy confessions. We changed out of our school uniforms into slinky camisoles dotted with rhinestones from Limited Too. Vera glossed her lips in opalescent pink sparkle; I did mine in her mother’s red lipstick. When we were done, we went out looking for the building’s handyman.