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When you are a grown woman, you will often find yourself being called a ‘girl,’ despite your age, despite your body, despite the demeaning quality of the word. There are days when you will hide inside your own body, childish and cruel, and think that maybe it has just been a little girl controlling you your whole life. But for now, you are just a girl.
It is the first day of seventh grade, and your homeroom teacher sits you down next to Jezebel. You’ve only just learned her name last year despite going to the same school for six. She has long dark hair that curls and spirals. It almost matches the color of your skin. You want to put your hands into it and see if the spirals would keep their curls around your fingers. You don’t do that, obviously, because that would be weird. You also don’t squish her cheeks. You don’t really want to do that, but your aunt says that’s just what people do to cute things whenever she squishes your cheek. You wonder if Jezebel knows that she’s a cute thing. Then, you wonder if you’re weird for thinking that.
It’s at recess when you follow her out to the field and lay in the grass that you decide it isn’t weird at all. She plucks an eyelash off your glasses and tells you to make a wish. Sure you’ve been happier, on a birthday or on Christmas, but those memories don’t come to mind when you are lying next to her with her finger in front of your face telling you to make a wish. You can’t think of anything, so you just blow. When she asks you what you wished for, you have to lie and say, “If I tell you, it won’t come true.” What else can you do? Not wishing for something would be weird, and worse, it may let her down. After all, she held out her finger just for you to make a wish.
It’s two weeks into the school year, and you are whispering small talk in homeroom. The teacher is talking, and you don’t want to stop, and that’s what makes the conversation feel big. You learn that her house is five blocks away from yours. That’s only one bus exit off, and so it makes sense that you have never walked home together before. Somehow this is a hard ask, but you want to know if you should get off the bus one stop early and walk her home instead. Then, you can talk without Jason, the a-hole behind you, listening. It’s right then that Jason, the a-hole behind you, hears the conversation and raises his hand. He tells on you, not just that you were talking in class but that he heard you say a bad word. You don’t get your answer from Jezebel, but you do get detention.
Detention SUCKS. The teacher, one for the eighth graders who you’ve never met before, talks slowly about respect and what it means. You have no idea whether this is specific to you and Jezebel or if it’s for the whole seven of you that landed in detention together. Tyler S. from a year below you is here, and he must have tried to set something on fire again. You haven’t heard the drama about it from Suzan yet, but there may be an assembly to talk about fire safety tomorrow. You hope there is because then you will walk over with your homeroom class, which means that you and Jezebel can sit next to each other. You plan on being just as disrespectful as you were in class today.
In detention, some fifth grader sends a spitball flying across the classroom where it misses the teacher and lands in a thump on the chalkboard. He has a lot of power with that straw but absolutely no aim. You feel like chucking him out a window. That teacher makes you stay longer because “someone” threw that spitball and none of you will admit to being the one who did it. Of course, you won’t tell her that it was the ten year old little twerp behind you. You aren’t a NARC, not like Jason.
Later, you think that maybe you should thank Jason or at least that twerp behind you because they made you miss that last bus. At first that fact really sucks, but then you get to walk almost all the way home with Jezebel, and that’s kind of really fun.
She tells you all about the solar system, then about horses, then about aliens. Unlike talking to Polly or Alexandra, you don’t just wait for your turn to speak. In fact, you barely speak at all because you’re too amazed at everything she has to say. She’s so smart and cool! You aren’t sure why she isn’t just the most popular girl in your grade. In fact, you aren’t sure why she isn’t the coolest girl in the whole school. In fact, you’re sure that she’s the coolest girl in the entire universe. Then, she tries to ask you what you think of aliens, and you feel like a complete flop. You don’t know anything about outer space or planets or UFO’s. She doesn’t laugh at you. Instead, she asks, “Okay, but imagine that the cosmos are infinite. There is life somewhere else, like a hundred billion light years away. What do you think they’re like?”
You say, “I think they probably suck.”
She asks what you could possibly mean. Obviously, they have to be cool. Cooler than people at least. Maybe they have slimy green skin, but that means nothing if they have teleporters.
You laugh. If they have slimy green goo on their skin, then they probably leave slimy green goo on the teleporters. Imagine getting covered in that whenever you leave the house!
But Jezebel is so smart; she says that if they live in an environment that requires slimy skin and if they are smart enough that they have teleportation machines, then they probably have ways to clean up their goo. And, okay, maybe it would be cool to meet an alien. As long as they don’t shake your hand of course. It’s at that decision when Jezebel splits off for her house, and you are left alone to walk four more blocks west while she walks one block north.
That’s four blocks to prepare yourself for what happens next. Your mom will be home tonight, and that is never good, especially not when you are coming home late, especially when you didn’t call. You walk home, dread overcoming you, and thank the wind that you had Jezebel with you so that those last twelve blocks didn’t seem as bad. If anything, they were pretty good. Maybe they were even worth it.
You get home, and Mommy isn’t there. That’s what your dad says. So, you tell him why you were late: you missed the bus and had to walk home. It was okay though; you had a friend with you for most of the walk. He smiles. He’s so happy you have a friend. Maybe you can bring her home one day, you know, for a playdate. You have to tell him that you are twelve years old now, a seventh grader. You don’t have playdates anymore. You hang out now. He laughs and puts up his hands, sure thing, you’re right, of course you are, you’re always right in his eyes.
It’s three months into the school year, and Jez—that’s what you call her now—is coming back for a sleepover. Your mom won’t be home for another three days, and that means that dad will be there to make dinner for you. It’s pork chops with Shake ‘n Bake on them, and he hands the bag to Jez to shake before he bakes. Your dad lets you stir the pasta where it swirls in the salted, boiling water.
It’s some time around eight-thirty when your dad sends you upstairs to finish your homework. It’s some time around nine-thirty when you finish and exactly ten when Jez finishes. You pull out the trundle bed for her. You know she wants to sleep over, and it won’t be the first time that you want her to do so, but it was the first time that her dad let her. The first time her dad picked up the phone to say that yeah, sure, his daughter is free to sleep over there any time. You didn’t hoot and holler when you heard that, but only because it would be a weird thing to do, not because you didn’t want to.
She spends three minutes looking at the trundle bed then about thirty seconds in the bed itself. While she does that, you crawl into bed. She can be weird all she wants as long as you can go to sleep. Except, after those thirty seconds, she climbs onto the main bed right next to you with the excuse that it’s uncomfortable on that thing. The blanket is scratchy, and the whole bed is as hard as a rock. You offer to take the bed, and she says no. If it’s uncomfortable for her, it will be even worse for you. You’re kind of a baby that way. You didn’t think you were a baby, but maybe compared to her, you are. Besides, if you don’t have to give up your bed, you won’t.
She tugs at the blanket you’ve wrapped yourself in, and you let her into it. In the night, she steals it away, and you wake up cold. You pick up the scratchy—she was right about that—blanket from the floor and wrap yourself in it. It’s okay if it’s a slight bit cold because soon you’ll be as softly asleep as her. It’s true. You fall straight back asleep in only an hour and wake up again in six more. You wake up to a face full of that curling hair, and you think she’s asleep so you twirl your finger inside a ringlet, and it clings to your hand as if it wants to keep you there. You earn a hum from Jez. She’s starting to wake up and you pull your hand back out of her hair.
“You can keep doing that,” she tells you, and so you do, putting your other hand in her hair and unraveling a curl just to put it back together around your finger.
You giggle at each other until your alarm goes off and you have to get up and deal with the day. You turn away as you get dressed. Dark skin hides bruises better, especially when they’re close to healed, but maybe Jez will notice. She has a burn on her bicep that she has never talked about. You turn back to see if it’s still there, and Jez grabs a shirt from her backpack and puts on a bra under it. You haven’t gotten one of those yet. You watch as she puts it on, clasping it behind her back in a way you have never seen before. You tell yourself you are just watching to see how it’s done, this foreign thing. You don’t realize that you are doing something far less foreign to you: watching her. You do it often, don’t you know? You will when you are older. You will when you think back with a mixture of shame and something far more sinister: love.
It’s almost the middle of the school year, and the winter is bitingly cold. The bus driver doesn’t ask why you get off a stop earlier than you get on, and you convince yourself that there is no reason why he would. Your mom comes home tonight. She would have your father make chicken pot pie. Despite the peas (which you don’t actually hate) you like it. That being said, you are going to have Mac ‘n’ Cheese tonight for dinner. It comes in a box and doesn’t go bad, so Jez always has it at her house. She has butter too but no milk. It’s okay, because as she first explained to you and as you now know from experience, it’s still gooey and cheesy without it. Jez also makes scrambled eggs and pasta. She knows how to make ratatouille and promised to show your dad one day when you guys go back to that house.
She doesn’t have a trundle bed under her bed frame, but you assume that you wouldn’t use it even if she did. After all, those tiny mattresses are hard as a rock, and Jez would never make you sleep like that. In the early fall, you slept back to back, but now it’s cold so you have to huddle for warmth. Sometimes you still wake up with hair in your mouth, but that’s okay because sometimes Jez does too. She bitches about it, and she admits to that. She admitted once that she likes to bitch about things, and you like to hear her do it. She even got you to say something mean about Katie M. who you used to be kinda close with last year until she got a boyfriend and hung out with him all the time. You didn’t tell her that, you just said that Katie M. tried to copy your homework last week (which is fine because you and Jez copy off each other all the time) except she argued with you about the answers and then got them wrong. She’s! She’s so stupid! Jez doesn’t get why you were ever friends with her! But it’s okay because now you’re best friends with Jez.
Jez tells you that you’re best friends as you swing on the playset in her backyard. Her parents bought it when she was five, and now she’s slightly too big to play in the whole thing, so she has to stick to the swing set. That’s fine though because when you turned ten you decided that you were a big kid which meant not playing on playgrounds, and now that you are twelve you know that you are almost a high schooler. You’ve seen TV shows; even adults go on swing sets. They do it on dates (which you aren’t on) but if adults can do it, then it’s not weird for an almost high schooler to do it.
You’ve been everywhere in her backyard except for the pool which she has asked you to go in, but you always say no. She figures out why—the same way she figured out why you hate going to that house (your house)—but she never makes fun of you for it. You wouldn’t be mad if she did. After all, you made fun of her for plucking her eyebrows too short the other day. Still, you’re grateful that she doesn’t.
It’s seven and a half months into the school year, which means it’s early spring, which means it’s almost summer, which means that you should walk all the way home instead of suffering through whatever the bus will be like. It smells like feet and boy-stink once it gets warm. You walk ten blocks before you admit that maybe this was too early in the year to start walking home because your fingers are cold to the point that it hurts. She breathes on her hands, then rubs them together so that the friction heats them up, then puts them on your hands to warm them up again. When you say that they’re still slightly cold, she holds your right hand with her left and you think about how someday there will be a ring on that hand. Would it be cold against your fingers? Will it heat up between you and burn? You can’t imagine you would be anywhere else than holding her hand even when you become grown-ups.
You keep the idea going. The boy-stink on the bus is too much to handle, but your hands get cold. And maybe they aren’t cold enough for what you say, so you struggle through the aching cold for ten blocks until you feel safe to complain again. It happens every day. You keep your hands held all the way to her house. Every day that you go there, you hold your hands when you turn the corner. When you see your house, the days that only your dad is home, you drop her hand to run, racing her from the sidewalk to the door. It’s a game. Get it? A game? What else could it be?
The first day you see a car in her driveway you drop her hand like it burns. That has to be the weird part. Girls hold hands all the time, and you are both just girls. You walk into her house where her dad is home, and he greets you. He asks your name, and you tell it. He tells you how nice it is to meet you. He says that he’s heard of you, but that doesn’t ring as true as it does politeness.
“All good things, I hope,” you say.
“Of course,” he replies.
He cooks you dinner, ratatouille. He makes it delicious, peeled tomatoes stacked with round cuts of zucchini and eggplant. He tells you both to wait up in Jez’s room until dinner is ready. You get the feeling that Jez doesn’t want you to be there. You have no idea why. Your dad likes her, and her dad seems to like you.
After the first time you saw a car in her driveway, she’s more hesitant to take you home. Something about that house started to feel like a home, just the two of you, and now it’s gone. She relents only when you walk all the way home to your house and see your mom’s car in the driveway. You cry so hard that she takes you away from that house. She doesn’t call you a baby, doesn’t make fun of your tears. She doesn’t ask you about your mother, and you assume that it’s because she doesn’t want you to ask about hers.
This weird struggle over whose house to run from only lasts a week because
It’s eight months into the school year, and you haven’t seen Jez in a week.
It’s eight and a quarter months into the school year, and you haven’t seen Jez in two weeks.
It’s eight and two-fifths months into the school year, and you decide to check on Jez. You don’t take the bus home, but it’s warm enough that your hands are getting clammy, so maybe it’s better that Jez isn’t here for this walk. You feel guilty for thinking that. Of course, you do. How could you not? Everything is better with Jez. In fact, sleeping is harder without her. School dragged on without anyone to tell how stupid Mrs. Gradgar was today. You aren’t lost without her. You know the way to school and the way back, but you don’t have to be lost to be without control.
When you roll up to her house, you freak out. You have to walk to the park to cool off. You do a lap. You do a second lap. You do breathing exercises as you walk back to her house again. There are two cars in the driveway today. Jez comes running out long before you can walk up to the door. She drags you to the back gate and into the backyard, dropping your wrist the second that she gets you back there. You want to go on the swings, but you don’t say that. You don’t say anything. She walks over to the pool. The lights dark there, and it feels like talking as you lay in bed together. Closer to the feeling at the beginning when you didn’t touch yet but the dark hid you enough to say what you meant.
She tells you she’s getting out of here.
You don’t ask what that means.
She doesn’t say anything.
You talk.
“Take me with you.”
It’s so, so many hours into the school year. You have to think in hours at a time because just an hour ago you were convinced that everything would be okay. Jez says, “No.” You can’t come with her, not because it’s improbable or even impossible but because she doesn’t want you to. But you know her. You can convince her. You do the only thing you can do, and you put your two hands on either side of both her cheeks. You kiss her.
She throws you in the pool, the deep end. You can’t swim, and she knows that. You scream and scream, first her name but when that doesn’t work just incoherent, gargling of the word ‘help.’ She stands there, her face wet as if she’s been splashed. Though, if you look closely, you can tell that she’s crying, her arms still held out from where she pushed you. Her dad comes running. This is the second time you’ve ever seen him, and he jumps in fully clothed. He doesn’t look at you ever, just her, and thank God his eyes are turned away from you. You are dripping when he pulls you out. Your white shirt is glued, gooey to your skin, and your mom still hasn’t taught you how to wear a bra, and everything clings to you slick to your skin. Except for her. She feels a mile away. You hear her words: “You’re gonna tell Mom.”
It’s still only eight and two-fifths months into the school year, and you see Jezebel at school. You watch her from the bus when her dad drops her off in the parking lot. You watch her in homeroom when she stares forward at the chalkboard the whole time. You watch her in pre-algebra when she writes an equation on the board. She gets it correct, of course. She isn’t Katie M. after all.
When you go to recess, she goes to lie in the field like the first day you ever laid with her. When she sees you approaching, she lets you come but with no acknowledgement. It feels good. You reach out your arm, and she doesn’t take it, but you can feel the heat radiating off of her. The bell rings and she waits for you to get up before walking back into the classroom. If you are staring, no one comments on it. If you want to smile, no one asks why.
When the bus comes, she doesn’t get on it. You walk home, waiting the ten blocks before she takes your hand in hers. You hadn’t even thought to try and reach out again. You hadn’t even thought she would. But you take it. You feel like you have met an angel and she has given you a miracle. You feel elated and something else far outside the weight of what you are able to carry.
You get to her house, and one car is in the driveway. She drops your hand and walks forward again. You follow. She walks farther, looking into the front kitchen window. Someone is in there, someone you have never seen before. The woman looks at Jezebel. The woman looks at you. Jezebel looks at you, and Jezebel draws back her arm. You feel a sharp pain before you hear a crunching sound. You feel wetness on your face before she even draws back her arm. You are on the ground, and you don’t know it.
She walks inside and you think, “I hope her mom is safer than mine.”
Soon, it will be the last day of the school year, and you won’t see her.
These are the kind of relationships you will get into again and again, ones where you drown, ones where you burn, the ones where you still make sure no one else is too toasty when they light you on fire. Just because you chase it doesn’t make it your fault. You will be a teenager, and then an adult, and then a woman. Somehow, woman comes last. As a teenager, you will learn how to be alone, and you will mourn Jez. As an adult, you will learn how to respect yourself, and you will hate Jezebel. As a woman, you will learn to love yourself, and you will love Jezebel for everything she taught you, for everything she gave you, for everything drop of chlorine that burned your lungs. That doesn’t mean you stop hating her. This is when you will fall in love again, a love just as real as yours for Jezebel and just as fitting as your love for yourself. You will be good because you were always good. You will be okay because you were always okay. You will be loved more than you were ever loved. But for now, you are just a girl, hungry and angry and ready to meet the world head on. So do it harshly, and one day you can do it proudly.