The whole grade gathers on the roof. Waiting, we smooth our skirts. Retie our ponytails. Girls look at each other. Girls look away.
The headmistress claps her hands together. To celebrate Women in Engineering Day, she says, normal classes have been suspended. Instead, a competition: building tents from twigs and bedsheets. The winning team will receive a non-uniform day.
As the staff divvy us up, there is a bristling; we are twelve, and we like who we like. Yet we shuffle, wary but pliant, toward the cliques made for us. In mine are six girls I have no strong feelings about, and Miri.
Miri—though she does not know this, does not know me—is my nemesis. Each morning, Miri struts to the front row and claims the center desk. Each morning, she is flanked by girls whose gel pens are name-brand, girls who ride the same Tube home to the same nice neighborhood, girls whose parents pay the school fees, who don’t have to ask Grandpa to cover what the scholarship doesn’t.
As the contest starts, I eye Miri, eye her messy curls pulled into a tenuous bun. When our tent tumbles, we both giggle. It falls again, and we laugh more. We catch eyes, and I see something I recognize, some fury, some disdain, and as our teammates plead, we laugh together, laugh and laugh, laugh at their earnestness, laugh at the destruction.
Our team finishes last. But the next day, and all the next days, I join Miri in the front row.
Miri’s power thrills me. Our new history teacher cracks the register, asks, “Does anybody go by a name other than the one written here?”
“Yes, sir,” says Miri. “Call me Mizzles.”
“Mizzles?” he asks, silver mustache twitching over pale jowls.
“Mmhmm,” she nods.
Our textbook tells of Tudor feasts: roasted boars, music from virginals.
“Hey, sir,” Miri says.
“Yes, Mizzles?”
“What’s a virgin?”
“A virginal is akin to a harpsichord—”
“No,” Miri says. “What’s a virgin.”
He coughs a wet hack. Twenty twelve-year-olds simmer with conspiracy, bud mouths set.
“It’s—it’s a person who has never had sexual intercourse,” he says, eyes down.
“Oh,” Miri shrugs, peering around the room. “Well, surely no one here is still a virgin.”
Just a handful of us have had a period, a first kiss. But we stay silent, quivering with the power to make a grown man blush and brush chalk dust from his tweed.
When the lunch bell sounds, Miri and I troop through the building, elbows hooked like chain link. We march laughingly up to the art rooms, down to the basement pool. We peep through the swinging doors at Charli—the lifeguard, the dyke—who keeps watch as girls swim laps. Sometimes, Miss Gold, the pretty netball teacher, sits beside her.
“They’re fucking,” Miri says.
I nod, clench, stare.
In swim class, we crash from diving blocks into the shock of chlorinated cool. Each fourth stroke, my head lifts left. I gasp a breath and gaze through my goggles at Charli, at her veined hands and wide stance.
Miri bobs beside me in the deep end as Charli booms instructions: “Hinge at the knees, girls, else it’s a screw kick.”
“A what kick?” Miri says, her brown eyes all mischief.
“A screw kick,” Charli says. “It kills the thrust.”
“The thrust? The thrust in our breaststroke?” Miri says, two separate words.
“Alright, Miri, very good.”
Charli rolls her eyes and combs her fingers through her hair, cropped and spiked into the style of our favorite boyband singers.
After class, Charli leaves us just minutes to dress. We take soapless, ten-second showers, then rub our limbs with the mildewed towels we store in our lockers and never wash.
Miri fusses with wire and lace, spritzes Impulse body spray everywhere. Beside her, Naima, my second-best friend, pulls on a gray Calvin Klein sports bra and smooths her hair, short just like Charli’s.
As I button my shirt, I gaze at the red non-slip runners whose bobbled plastic stabs our feet. I eye only briefly Naima’s stomach muscles, the curve of her neck as she dabs on cologne. But the waft of her CK One lands in my legs, just as it does in French and Spanish as we conjugate verbs together, je voudrais in our throats, me gustaría on our lips; just as it does in Chemistry, when we sizzle zinc nuggets in hydrochloric acid and hold hands beneath the bench.
The bell sounds.
“Alright girls, let’s pick it up!” Charli says, marching through the changing room.
We scream, covering ourselves with our hands.
“What the hell!” Miri shrieks. “We’re naked!”
We howl in laughter. Naima, eyes on the tile, does not laugh.
On weekends, I ride two buses to Miri’s preened brick house. Sometimes Dad drives me, to apologize for the screaming or hitting. But most Saturdays, I clamber alone up the double-decker’s stairs. With Xtina’s Stripped whirring on my Discman, my forehead smears on the window as I think about Charli and Miss Gold. I picture them outside of school, cooking together, watching TV on the couch. Maybe Miss Gold leans against Charli, maybe they kiss. I imagine the feel of Charli’s short hair under Miss Gold’s fingers, imagine Charli’s neck smells like CK One.
Once Miri’s parents retreat to their own wing, we bake packet-mix brownies, belting along to Stripped and licking batter from our fingers. In Miri’s bedroom, we hunt Xtina videos on her computer: old Mickey Mouse Club episodes, ballads crooned on American talk shows. Xtina is all noise, no apology, and the roar of her throbs in our bellies. My favorite, though I don’t say so, is the VMAs, with Madonna, with Britney, with the kissing.
Finally, Miri draws the blackout shades and we settle in front of the TV: Miri up on her adult-sized bed, me down on the plush cream carpet that eats up my thighs. We watch four hours, five hours, six, of our show, Bad Girls, about a women’s prison. Together, we rewatch the scenes Miri likes, like when the corrupt screw gets a hand job from an inmate in the laundry room. The scenes I like, the scenes with the women, I rewatch alone, back home.
School nights, I fidget on the spinny chair as the dial-up shrieks. On the desktop, I finish my homework. I chat to Miri and Naima on MSN Messenger. Then, I read stories strangers post online about Bad Girls characters. Fan fiction, it’s called, and if Dad doesn’t need the computer, doesn’t slap the keyboard from under my hands, doesn’t yank me off the desk chair, I read for hours, trawling Ask Jeeves for more. My LimeWire downloads—“1,000 Miles” by Vanessa Carlton, and “Everywhere”by Michelle Branch—loop as I scroll through story after story, rolling the nub that parts the mouse’s lips. These unspeakable words—mounds, wetness—make me clench. I like the words, but even more, I like the very idea that you could make the story go a different way.
I read until my eyes sting, until my limbs ache, until I’m so tired that perhaps, when I get into bed, I will simply fall asleep, dodging the panic that lurks when I close my eyes. The panic is a wildness: thoughts of death, of the endlessness of space, of my own obliteration, thoughts that snatch my breath and make me tear at my hair. Of all the things I can’t talk about, these thoughts feel the loneliest.
A new PE teacher arrives. We decide—after seeing Charli jog behind Miss Gold on the way to the staffroom, hissing, Wait up—that Charli must have cheated.
Miri laughs at the thought: “Charli totally fucked the new one.”
I laugh, but I feel, for a reason I can’t name, distraught.
To drag my nighttime mind from the wild thoughts, the terror of death and nothingness, I think of mounds and wetness. I think of Charli apologizing to Miss Gold, of the fury relieved between bodies.
Sleepover weekends, a gaggle of us cram into Miri’s downstairs living room. She tells us to hump pillows, to “be the man.” She’ll judge who thrusts the best. We do it, wildly bucking. But when she suggests we practice giving head—flashing a sealed pack of strawberry-flavored condoms and retrieving from the kitchen frozen kosher sausages—we refuse.
“Whatever,” she shrugs. “These are too cold to feel like real dicks anyway,” she says, tossing the sausages onto the sideboard, as if she knows, as if she’s touched one.
But Miri understands more than most of us what we are becoming. Sex orbits Miri, like the electrons we learn about from the physics teacher, the one who smells like men’s soap and stale staffroom coffee, the one who—as Miri bends to reset a wobbly lab bench—leers, piggy-eyed, at the slip of skin exposed between her uniform trousers and shirt. Perched on his desk, he gawks down at the bubblegum slice of her thong. “Now we know what kind of girl Miri is,” he says, sharing his unspeakable thought with the room. “Don’t we?”
Miri stands, smooths her shirt, rolls her eyes.
Miri has things I don’t: a credit card, her own bathroom. As I take notes in D.A.R.E and stockpile merit marks, she gets a taste for cigarettes and starts straightening her hair. Still, we share something powerful: a hot, unspoken rage.
We don’t discuss our furies. Instead, we scream at each other. In class, on the street, on the phone, we bait each other: arouse, release.
One evening, sprawled on my sofa, I knuckle the landline’s coil. Miri tells me her parents are renovating their Australia house, preparing for their retirement.
“Owning two homes should be illegal when some people are homeless,” I sneer, sanctimonious.
“It’s not like anybody has to be homeless,” Miri says. “Some people just don’t want to work.”
“You think people want to sleep outside? You have no idea!”
“No, you have no idea!”
I slam down the silver phone, thighs pulsing.
At school, I have an ally: Mr. Ratliff, our form tutor and French teacher, who lives in my neighborhood and whose cockney accent, all dragged vowels, sounds like mine did before I became friends with Miri and Naima. Mr. Ratliff, with his long straggly hair, is loud with his politics, which I share, both of us opposing private schools like the one in which he teaches me.
“Raise your hand if you think society is fair,” he says during one morning thought exercise.
Some timid hands hover; Miri thrusts up her arm.
“Okay, Miri,” he says. “Let’s say you’re designing society from scratch. You’ll be born into the world you design, maybe rich, maybe poor. Would the world you’d make look just like this one?”
“Well, no, obviously—” Miri says.
See? I want to say. I smile at Mr. Ratliff, throbbing and smug.
As England stomps to war, Miri and I snarl over foreign policy we don’t understand. We parrot our parents: hers, pro-Bush Zionists who edged their windows with duct tape in case of an anthrax attack; mine, labor union leftists. We prattle half-grasped soundbites about WMDs, out of our depth. But facts aren’t the point. The point is an anger that is ours.
The first night bombs rain on Baghdad, Miri and I pause Bad Girls. Side by side on her bed, we watch white-green flashes cut the desert gloom.
“Woah,” we say, cowed.
One night, lazing on her grownup bed, Miri laughs about a girl in the year above.
“Naima’s totally in love with her,” Miri says.
My thighs clench.
“Naima’s not in love with her,” I tell Miri, defensive. “They’re just friends.”
In love with a girl is not an okay thing to be. There is one couple at school, and they’re accepted because Dez—5’10, in baggy pants—is basically a boy, and besides, Callie quips, for the few months they date, I’m not a lesbian, I’m a Dezbian. The lesbians are freaks, like Poppy Johnson, with her buck teeth and bottle-bottom glasses, who got suspended for writing and uploading graphic Harry Potter stories on the school computers. Gay wizard porn! girls had jeered, heaving violent laughs. Fan fiction, what even is that?
“Whatever,” Miri says. “Let’s go outside.”
I follow Miri out to her patio, where we climb onto the picnic table and lay on our backs. Instinctively, I close my eyes; I hate the night sky, how it taunts me with my own temporariness. But for a brief moment, Miri’s warmth makes me brave. I gaze up.
Vertigo rolls my gut.
“Space really freaks me out,” I mumble.
“Oh my god, me too,” Miri says.
“Really?”
“Yeah like, how can the universe be infinite? What does that even mean?” she says.
I turn to face her. “I think about that all the time!”
We both push up to sit.
“So do I,” Miri says. “I think about dying.”
“You do? You really do?”
Our eyes lock through the deep black. We share our cosmic, mortal fears, find words for this unspeakable terror that holds all we cannot grasp. Our understanding is a breathless intimacy I have never known.
To my delight, Mr. Ratliff continues to rib Miri for her views about people who are poor or homeless. In turn, Miri ribs him back. Her joke, which becomes our joke, is that Mr. Ratliff, who hates hierarchies, is secretly sexist. We print photos of Germaine Greer and Andrea Dworkin in the computer lab and tape them by his desk. We blare the “Can’t Hold Us Down” music video on the classroom desktop when he arrives to take the register, Xtina and Lil’ Kim thrusting against hose pipes. He rolls his eyes, half smiling.
One afternoon after registration, I’m late for Chemistry. I grope around my locker for the textbook as the classroom empties.
Suddenly, Mr. Ratliff looms.
“Oh!” I say. “Hi.”
He leans on the locker beside mine, cocks his head. I glance at the door, a reflex.
“Do you hate men, Jasmin?” he asks.
“What?” I clock the laminated posters conjugating tenses of French verbs: to be, to have, to want.
“You’d be like a lot of other women in this school, if you did,” he says.
I shrivel, thinking of Charli, Poppy Johnson, the freaks.
“No,” I stammer, hot with shame. “I don’t!”
I close my locker and back away.
In the lab, I heft my bag onto the bench between Naima and me. I cross my arms.
That night, I paste new photos onto my homework diary, the one Mr. Ratliff signs each week. Over Xtina and my favorite Bad Girls characters, I stick pictures of Ryan from The O.C. He has the same short hair as Naima.
The next year, school shuffles up our classes. I have new labmates, new partners for language practice. I barely see Naima and hold nobody’s hands.
With no fanfare or conflict, Miri and I find ourselves in two distinct cliques. Instead of lunchtimes trooping together wildly through the building, Miri smokes behind a wall with her new friends as I join mine in the cafeteria, picking at salad—iceberg, no dressing—on plastic plates. Some days, I swim laps in the empty pool. Charli sits on the lifeguard bench, but I don’t turn my head.
Naima tells me she’s leaving on MSN messenger; her parents are sending her to an even fancier school, one that’s co-ed and sends more students to Oxbridge. I say what I am supposed to say. I say, Aw! We’ll miss you! It’s barely even wrenching.
Then Miri’s parents decide that it’s time. They’re retiring, back to the Australia house. She begs them to wait two years, let her finish school. She fights them. I picture her in their marble hallway, yelling, making threats—against herself, probably, since what else does she have to harm?
But she’s fifteen, not yet her own. They take her.
On Boston’s bone cold nights, I sleep in my high-school graduation hoodie. It’s faded, now, and soft from five years’ wear through college and the start of graduate school.
One morning, as my clock radio bleats “Pumped Up Kicks,”I stand, stretch, and lumber to my desk. Blearily, I check my email, then open Facebook.
Miri’s name throbs bold in a message. She’s visiting New York from Sydney, she says. If I’m not too busy with grad school, can I make it down?
I head to the kitchen, set the kettle to boil. Shaking a tube of Trader Joe’s grounds into the French Press, I imagine a reunion after all these years. Would we squeal and hug, cheeks flushed with connection? Would we recall our young fights, our sanctimony? Would there be anything to say, at all?
Back at my desk, I type, I’D LOVE TO SEE YOU. I open a new tab and buy with my debit card a thirteen-dollar Greyhound ticket from South Station to Port Authority. Then I text the OkCupid boy I’m seeing, the one who drives me in his car with heated seats to dinners that he pays for, the one who grunts Take it while I lay as still as the pillows we humped in Miri’s living room. I CAN’T MAKE OUR DATE, I write. CAN WE RAINCHECK? I apologize, add smiley faces.
The I-90 blurs by, grass and tarmac. I toe my scuffed boots into the seat in front.
Forehead smearing on the glass, I picture Miri and me as girls, all demand and expectation. I picture our uniforms, the thumb holes we scissored through our sweaters, needing to both fit in and stand out.
I remember Miri’s thong and the physics teacher, how we later “accidentally” set his classroom bin on fire by dumping ticker-tape embers still glinting from the Bunsen. Smoke curled, teasing, before flames flickered and swelled; the teacher leapt from his desk and heaved the extinguisher from the wall, bracing it against his crotch and blasting out fluid. As ash and smolder plumed through the room, other girls ran for the windows to breathe fresh air, but we clutched each other, Miri and I, laughing so hard I nearly peed, laughing like we’d never stop, our bodies barely our own, right there on danger’s edge.
I catch sight of Miri outside the M&M store, Times Square a gauche backdrop for the poise of her straightened hair and beige wool coat. I want to run to her, but we’re no longer girls. Instead, we smile and wave. When I reach her, we embrace, and although my cheap puffer jacket lets in January’s bite, I am warm.
I follow Miri to a department store, where she plans to buy a purse. Miri inspects stitching and zippers as I hover by the cosmetics. I scan the alphabetized perfumes—Armani, BVLGARI, Chanel—glass gleaming beneath images of women’s necks and wrists and other soft things my hands have never touched. One bottle, CK One, I lift to my face. The smell and the clench are both familiar, years after Naima and I last spoke. I reshelve the bottle and rejoin Miri as she slides a black credit card to a clerk, who wraps her purse in paper and ribbon. She takes her bag in a bag, and we brace back into the day.
Outside the revolving doors, a man sells buttons on the sidewalk: 2012 and Four More Years, each O Obama’s rising sun. Miri and I meet eyes. We grin at each other, a knowing, but we don’t reach for the thrill of a fight. I wonder whether our politics have inched inward or whether the instinct is gone; one of many things lost or taken from us, replaced with a temperance we know as womanhood.
Instead, we talk. We start with old classmates, sharing what happened to themslike it’s over already. There’s a little gossip, but mostly there are just girls with jobs and boyfriends, girls doing what they are supposed to do, following straight paths laid by our shelter, privilege, and desire to please. As we walk—up to the Met, down to Union Square, a hundred city blocks, shoes springing on seamed concrete—we talk about college, graduate school, boys, roommates, work. We talk about sambuca blackouts, sleeping with the wrong twin, an affair with the boss.
“God, we sound wild,” Miri laughs.
I laugh, too. Privately, though, I think that the real wildness came earlier. It was marching, breathless and defiant, through school, arms hooked; it was quaking with tiredness in her room as the sun came up, unwilling to give in. It was the headrush of baring ourselves, of love not yet tamed.
We walk on.
A few years from now, I will make more sense of things. I will finally feel my furies and give them names. I will accept the wants that my best efforts—my diligent dates with men, my acquiescence, my shrinkage—all failed to subdue. And when, aged thirty-one, I am for the first time in bed with a woman, I will remember Mr. Ratliff, tormented by something about us, about me, and the next day, I will remember Naima and cry.
But not now.
Now, on a cross street that smells of honeyed cashews, Miri turns to face me.
“Do you still think about it?” she asks. We catch eyes, and I know what she means. She means our thoughts, that night on the picnic table, our kinship of terror.
“Sometimes,” I say.
“Me too,” she nods.
“It’s not so bad, anymore.”
“I know,” she says.
She links her arm through mine, and we walk on.
***
Rumpus original art by Samantha Wang
