She tried to make me tougher. The universe had made me soft, too quick to sniffle, and she saw it as her duty to make me better prepared. We used to play this game.
“I’m going to plant a garden,” she would say, running her fingers along the tender skin of my inner arm. Her nails were like a caress at first, a tickle of sorts, but as the game progressed, the friction intensified. “I’m going to rake my garden,” she would say, digging into my skin and scraping, leaving pink trails. “I’m going to plant seeds in the garden,” she would say, twisting up a corkscrew of flesh between thumb and forefinger. What a strange game, a femmy version of “uncle.” Girls can be so sideways with their aggression. Why not just punch each other and get it over with? Instead, we inch into the bizarre eroticism of inflicting and accepting each other’s pain. I could never beat Kimberley—but I gnashed my teeth, gulped down my tears, and tried.
I wanted to be like her: tough and foxy. I wanted to borrow her brassiness. What are you looking at? Who gave you permission to look at me? How exciting to barge through the world, never apologizing for your place in it but demanding everyone else’s license and registration.
But the summer of 1984 wasn’t like the ones before it. I was nearly 10 years old, and Kimberley was 14. When I arrived, she greeted me in a tight magenta leopard-print tank top. Her eyes were lined with electric blue, and she wore hypnotic pink discs in her ears that swirled when she shifted. Men watched her as she crossed a room. She didn’t smile much anymore.
She’d transformed, like Olivia Newton-John in the last scene in Grease, though she wasn’t nearly as bubbly and fun. I was afraid of that leopard-print shirt. It was a costume change I didn’t request. But on afternoons when Kimberley was gone, I would slip it off the hanger and onto the frightening curves of my own body, and I would admire myself in the mirror, enjoying the electricity of high school before I’d even started fifth grade.
SOMETHING ELSE TERRIBLE happened that year.
A few days into fifth grade, I was on the living room floor with my legs splayed open like any girl who is young and unencumbered. Mom and I were laughing about something, but she went silent when she saw it: a dime-size dot of rust on the crotch of my favorite shorts.
There was a rush to the bathroom. And an inspection over the toilet. And my mother’s hands, smoothed along my ruddy cheeks.
“This is all very natural,” she said, although we both knew that wasn’t true. I’d just turned ten. I stared at the drain in the bathtub and watched my childhood go down it.
My precocious puberty had been coming on for a while, but the changes had been manageable. When breasts bubbled up on my chest in fourth grade, I smushed them down again under heavy cable-knit sweaters. When hair began to appear on my privates, unwelcome as the first whiskers of a werewolf, I ran my mother’s razor along the skin to keep it smooth and untarnished. But bleeding once a month required a new level of hiding.
My fifth-grade teacher called my mother at home one night after becoming concerned about my slouch. “Sarah should be proud of her body,” she said. “She’s blessed to have such a shape.” What the hell? She was supposed to be grading my math quizzes, not my posture. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that adults might also have opinions about my body, which meant everyone did, and I hated feeling so powerless. You could hunch and smother yourself, you could shove all your shame into unlit places, but somehow, some way, some gray-haired lady could still spot your secrets from across the room.
My mother came into my room later that night. She thought it might be time to shop for a bra. And I tried to be patient with her, but didn’t she understand? That was the worst idea in the world. Fifth grade was a torture chamber for any girl who dared to confirm her development. Boys would sneak up behind me and snap my bra. Girls would whisper behind my back. I might as well show up to school wearing a bull’s-eye on each areola. I might as well take a Sharpie and draw an arrow to my crotch: now bleeding.
So my mother smoothed my hair and kissed my forehead. My mother’s hand is still my favorite hand.
That was the year I started encouraging girls at sleepovers to sneak sips from the liquor cabinet. I wanted to make them tough, too. And I liked playing ringleader in our coterie of spelling bee champions. I taught them dirty jokes and cusswords I’d learned from watching Eddie Murphy films at my cousins’ house. I got the genius idea to pass notes in class and archive them in a plastic index cardholder inside our desks, which is such a boneheaded girl thing to do. It’s not enough to break the rules. Apparently you need to scrapbook the evidence.
We returned from P.E. one afternoon to find our teacher sitting behind a desk piled with a mountain of our misdeeds. I was a real show-off in the notes. I called her a bitch. I talked about how goddamn nosy she was. It was a grudge I’d nursed since she had called my house.