by Arin Andrews
Once we got back to the house, she took me into my bedroom. I stared at the wall as Mom explained that in addition to breasts, I was going to start my cycle. She did a good job of giving me all the biological reasons why it was going to happen and why it was natural and normal, but I was stuck on one detail. Blood was going to come out of my vagina.
Somehow this part of the female body experience hadn’t been covered by my cousins’ sex talks.
“Will it hurt?” I asked.
“No, but sometimes when it happens you’ll get a tummy ache. Not every time, though.”
My jaw dropped.
“What do you mean, every time?” I asked.
“Oh, no, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry if you misunderstood. It’s not just a onetime thing. Once it starts, it will happen every month for most of your life.”
I burst into tears. No matter how much she tried to assure me that it would mean I was becoming a woman, and that it happened to everyone and was perfectly normal, I kept crying. Blood pouring out of your body was not natural as far as I was concerned. Especially down there. And if it was something that was supposed to happen to girls, then it definitely wasn’t supposed to happen to me. But I was still too young to even know what that thought actually meant. It wasn’t that I hated having a vagina. I just wanted a penis. With the exception of the peeing-while-standing issue, it had been pretty easy up until that point to pretend that my vagina just wasn’t there. But now that I knew what it had in store for me, I wanted nothing to do with it.
• • •
It turned out that Mom had been right on time with her talk about boobs, because not long after, I woke up with a sore chest. It started as a weird achy feeling, like I’d been hit really hard by a basketball at practice. Soon after that I noticed that small knots were forming under my nipples, and they began to protrude. I’d hold my hands over them every night, lying on my stomach, trying to keep them flattened. It didn’t work. The sides began to fill up and out as well, and before I knew it, there they were. Two bumps that looked like a weird set of googly eyes staring back at me from the mirror whenever I got out of the shower. I’d cover them with a towel as fast as possible.
I realized that if I hunched over, I could make them disappear somewhat into my shirt. I started to walk with my shoulders forward, which only increased my boyish stomp. I refused to wear a bra. I couldn’t even say the word, it felt so embarrassing on my tongue. There was no way in hell I was going to have one of those things touching my skin. It was bad enough that I was forced to wear things like skirts and bows on the outside—wearing a bra hidden under my shirt, pressed tight against my skin, felt like a betrayal to myself, like admitting defeat. And I wasn’t ready to do that yet. I was in such denial about my chest that I’d wear loose tank tops at home, totally oblivious to the fact that my breasts would pop out the sides whenever I’d climb a tree. Red-carpet celebrity nip slips have nothing on what I was unintentionally flashing that year.
The girls at school all started to develop around the same time as well. Unlike me, they were psyched about it. The bold ones would pull their shirts down over their shoulders when the teachers weren’t looking, to show off their newest bra colors to their friends. The more subtle way of announcing to the class that you were finally wearing a bra was to pull your shirt tight against your back while sitting in class, so that everyone could see the strap outline through the cloth. I would defiantly pull my polo tight too, to show everyone that I wasn’t wearing a bra. I was asserting myself, desperate to stay as physically separate from the girls as possible.
It started to get really bad in basketball. I couldn’t hunch when I ran, and so my breasts would flop up and down like small water balloons. The girls on the team started to make snide comments, and after one particularly aggressive game, Mom came up to me afterward and said, “That’s it. I’m getting you some bras.”
The next day I was sitting on the couch watching television with my cousin Tye when Mom came home from Target. She held up one of the bags, and as if in slow motion, I saw her mouth start to open. I realized with horror that she was about to announce that she’d bought me some bras, and I refused to allow Tye—the provider of all my boy clothes—to know that I was about to become the owner of a bra.
I leapt up from the couch and reached her just as she started to say, “I got you . . .”
I tore the bag from her hand and saw that there was a box of candy canes on top of the pile of cloth. I yanked them out and held them high.
“Candy canes!” I yelled, finishing her sentence for her. “Thanks, Mom. I love candy canes!”
I tore upstairs as fast as I could and sat down on my bed, tossing the candy aside. I pulled one of the bras out of the bag. It was white, with pink piping that ran the circumference of each cup. Mom appeared in my doorway, and I held the offending garment up to her.
“This is hideous,” I said.
“Well, no one has to see it, now, do they?” she said.
“I have to,” I muttered.
From that point on we compromised on black sports bras, which at least managed to flatten my chest some. But it was a small consolation.
The only thing that managed to cheer me up those days was motocross. I’d gotten my first dirt bike when I was eight, a blue TT R 90 Yamaha, and Dad had helped me clear trails back behind our house for me to ride on. My asthma had continued to get worse, making basketball and track harder and harder. The combo of physical exercise and being outdoors would trigger awful attacks. But on my bike I could travel faster than I could run, with none of the same physical exertion that triggered my lungs. What I had loved so much about running was the feeling of flying, of leaving myself behind as I pushed farther ahead. Motocross not only moved me more quickly away from the starting line, but I caught air whenever I rode over a hill. For split seconds at a time I could feel myself above the ground. Some people take drugs or drink in order to get out of themselves, to forget their lives—for me the exhilaration of leaving the earth’s surface gave me the same sensation. All of my bodily discomfort, all my insecurity, all my anxiety, would disappear. It would just be me, alone in the air, weightless, even if for just a tiny instant.
• • •
But those moments were too few and far between. In addition to school, sports, and dance, Mom decided to tack on yet another activity. Pretty much everyone—Mom, Dad, Susan, my grandparents—began to notice how uncomfortable I was getting onstage during my dance performances. They couldn’t understand why I was so active and social at home with my family but withdrawn and shy when out in public. Mom kept trying to build me up, telling me how pretty I was, not realizing that it was exactly the wrong thing to say to me.
And so she had the brilliant idea to enter me into the confidence-boosting world of child beauty pageants.
Her reasoning was that if I could finally see how pretty I was—and have a bunch of other people also tell me how pretty I was—I’d start to feel better about myself. I sometimes wonder, though, if she was also subconsciously trying to fix my rejection of femininity. It’s the only other reason I can think of as to why she’d enroll me into such a hyper-girly environment, the antithesis of everything I liked. I went along with it because I didn’t want to disappoint her.
Mom started staying up late, searching eBay for pageant dresses in my size, and in colors that made me want to vomit. Everything had some element of sparkly sequins built into it, designed to glimmer onstage. Aunt Susan got in on the action too, and decided to enroll her youngest daughter, Diamond, in the pageants as well.
(I know, I know. Emerald and Diamond. It was a coincidence, though—Diamond had already been given her name when Susan adopted her.)
At first the pageants were a disaster. Mom would put old-fashioned sponge curlers in my hair the night before so I’d have these perfect, cascading ringlets, but the cylinders hurt me so much, and I complained so loudly, that she eventually started waiting until I had fallen asleep before coming into my room
and rolling my hair while I was unconscious.
We had to travel out of town for a lot of events, so we’d pack all the equipment into the car at dawn, and I’d be exhausted and out of it by the time we arrived at whatever hotel ballroom we were competing in. I’d change into my dress in a bathroom stall, away from the other girls, and Mom would wait until the very last minute to put my makeup on. Lipstick was the worst—that greasy, caked-on layer of lurid red over my mouth felt so heavy. Smiling was an exercise in torture, and if you’ve ever seen a pageant, you know that the smile is everything.
Well, that and your walk. And I could not walk. I’d stomp out onstage and lumber from one end to the other, then head back toward center stage, where I’d plant my feet shoulder-width apart. I was so bad at it that Mom paid for lessons, like those runway classes that they do on America’s Next Top Model.
After I’d complete the walk, the judges would ask questions about what I liked to do in my free time.
“Motocross and play army,” I’d always say, trying to force the corners of my lips up in a gross facsimile of a smile.
Some judges would like the response, since it set me apart from the other girls, but others would mark points off for it. But the one part of the ceremony that I always excelled at was the talent segment. Even though I wasn’t as good a dancer as the girls in my regular classes back home, I’d still been doing it for almost my whole life. I would get into the competitive spirit and blow the other contestants at the pageants out of the water. Some girl would sing a horrible, off-key rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then I’d walk out onstage and clog so fast that my feet were a blur. And thanks to that skill, I started earning trophies—ridiculously tall columns topped with gold statues of girls in dresses holding scepters. Mom still has them all, hidden away in a spare room in our house, along with a closet stuffed with all my dresses.
Everyone told me how beautiful I looked in the clown makeup, and while I didn’t believe it for a second, getting any sort of positive reinforcement felt good, since I was starting to be bullied even harder at school for being too masculine. Girls would yell out at me to stay away from their stall when I entered the bathroom, as if I were some perv trying to spy on them, and Heather’s taunts about the way I walked down the hallway continued.
My single attempt to appease the girls at school backfired, hard. One weekend after getting my hair trimmed for a pageant, I decided to actually try to make it look nice for school, too. I parted it in a different way that definitely made me look more feminine. It was a style that I knew a pageant judge would appreciate, and I hoped that maybe it would make a difference outside of that small world.
Monday morning as I got to my locker, I heard a girl call out my name. I turned around and saw one of Heather’s friends, a girl named Erica. She was staring at my hair, and I felt my hopes rise.
“Nice haircut,” she sneered, and then laughed in my face. I blushed and turned back to my locker to open it and put my books away, and she suddenly kneed me in the tailbone. My chin smashed against the metal locker, and my books spilled all over the floor. It hurt. I heard everyone around us laugh and then scatter as the bell rang. I gathered my stuff off the ground, refusing to cry.
I couldn’t win on Lincoln’s turf, so in a way, Mom was right about the pageant circuit boosting my ego a little—I’d drink up kind words however I could get them. But whenever I looked in the mirror before going onstage, I still had no idea who the painted harlequin was looking back at me.
In addition to talent, I started winning trophies for things like Most Photogenic. In real life my actions and movements were totally butch. I’d storm out onto a stage in a yellow bathing suit with clear heels, and stand with my legs spread like a bull rider, while every other little girl kept their legs demurely crossed. But frozen in a picture, with glossy hair, a body-hugging dress, limbs posed by Mom, and a fake smile that hid everything I felt inside, the illusion worked. It was the ultimate in false reality.
As the pageants dragged on, I also got better and better at motocross. Not only were the races exhilarating, but I’d get to suit up in full-body protective gear that hid my breasts, and a helmet that hid my hair. You know those moments in an action movie when a stranger screeches to a halt on a motorcycle, and you think it’s a dude, but then the person takes off the helmet, and as long hair comes pouring out while the head shakes back and forth in slow motion, you realize it’s a lady? Well, I never wanted to take the helmet off.
I ended up winning the talent portion of the Oklahoma state championship pageant for my expert clogging to “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” But when the judges found out that I wouldn’t be able to make it to nationals because that pageant overlapped with a gig my dance studio had booked for us on a cruise line, they decided to strip me of my title.
“We need to give it to the first runner-up so that we have someone to represent Oklahoma,” they told Mom. She wasn’t having it, and only returned the sash, keeping the trophy and crown for our collection.
“We already paid for them,” she said, fuming. She was right—the entry fees were expensive, and the cost of those prizes came right out of her pocket.
She was so annoyed about the situation that we ended up quitting pageants for good after that. The whole experience was pretty absurd, but there is one title that I am still proud to have won, one with a name that pretty much sums up how I felt about myself at the time: At a competition in my hometown, I had been crowned Miss Broken Arrow.
5
I woke up one morning in seventh grade to the sound of rain hitting the roof. I rolled over and stared out the window for a while before getting out of bed. There wasn’t any sort of wind whipping the trees around to make the weather look cool or dramatic—just a steady, determined downfall, the kind of rain that makes you want to crawl as deep under your covers as possible and disappear.
I managed to drag myself from bed, avoiding all mirrors, even though my body was safely shrouded in plaid pajama pants and a faded Def Leppard T-shirt. I felt off. Not exactly sick, but a strange depression seemed to be pulling at my feet, and my brain was a fog. Not even my new bedroom on our house’s second floor, with its walls stripped bare of anything pink, could cheer me up.
I showered, numb as usual to my breasts, aware of them only as objects, something external to run soap over. I closed my eyes, let the water pour over me, but all I could see in my head was the water coming from the sky outside, gray droplets soaking me and making my long hair stick to my back, weighing me down.
I gathered my hair all into a ponytail at the back of my head and pulled tight. The skin of my skull stretched until it stung, and for the millionth time I imagined rushing out, grabbing the scissors from my desk, and slicing through the thick rope I’d formed. I could hear the sound it would make, the thrilling, satisfying crunch of a thousand tiny strands splintering until I was free. I pulled the hair up and over my head and twisted it harder into a knot, pretending for a minute that it was all gone. The shower water now ran freely down my naked back, and for a moment I felt truly clean.
I dried off and pulled on my uniform before heading downstairs. My plaid skirt was rumpled and smelled off, like musty day-old socks. I noticed a small stain near the hem but shrugged it off.
My brother, Wesley, was at the kitchen table still half-asleep, listlessly shoveling Reese’s Puffs cereal into his mouth. You’d think the sugar would jolt him out of his stupor, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. The smell of bacon, fried eggs, and toast, normally so comforting, just made me feel slightly nauseous and did nothing to cut through the gloom outside.
By the time I got to school, the rain was coming down harder. I drifted from class to class in a haze. After fourth period I stopped in the bathroom before heading to lunch. I refused to make eye contact with anyone as I slunk down to the stall at the far end, away from the row of sinks and chicks fixing their hair in the mirrors. I shut the door, locked it, and collapsed down onto the toilet, grateful to be out
of sight. I let the weight of my head pull my gaze down toward my ankles as I peed.
There was blood in my underwear.
Not a lot, just a few spots, but enough for me to know that it was finally happening. This final injustice, a giant middle finger to my mind from inside my body. The red stains seemed like they were mocking me.
You can’t do anything to stop us, they sneered. And there’s a whole lot more where we came from.
The walls of the stall started to close in around me, and an asthma attack began to creep in. I felt betrayed. I wanted to rip the pair of underwear off and throw away this proof of the inevitable, but that was impossible—I was trapped in every way imaginable. Four walls around me, and a body that was determined to morph into something I had no mental connection to.
I started to panic. What if more blood suddenly started pouring out of me any minute now? I’d have rather died than call out and ask a stranger for a pad. I wadded up a bunch of toilet paper and stuffed it into my underwear in case anything else came out. I stood up and bunched it all into place so nothing seemed bulky or weird underneath my skirt. I flushed, took a huge breath, and walked out of the stall. Thankfully, most of the girls were gone by then. I washed my hands and fled to my locker to get my phone. On the bus ride up to the cafeteria, I shot my Mom an urgent text.
Come get me now.
She wrote back a few minutes later. What’s wrong?
Just come. Please.
• • •
When the bus dropped us back at the school after lunch, I saw her car parked in front. I broke from the rest of the kids heading inside and ran through the rain and climbed in. Mom stared at me with a funny look on her face.
“Did you start?” she asked.
I nodded and stared down at my lap. I was happy for the small favor that she had somehow sensed the problem, because I couldn’t even say the words “I got my period.” It was like the trap of my body had sealed my mouth shut too.