Eleven

I lost my innocence to a stick of incense. It was August right before sixth grade and eighty degrees outside but sixty-seven in the mall; I wore jeans and a striped shirt with a heart-shaped zipper pull. The incense, lurking in a corner of a headshop, introduced itself as Sex on the Beach and enticed me to rub some on my sleeve; the moment it touched the fabric there exploded a blinding flash of bodies basted in coconut oil, writhing on the sand in the glow of boardwalk lights. My mother had to scrape me off the floor and drag the pieces across to the Macy’s juniors’ department. I had just regained consciousness when a nearby mannequin with jutting plaster-of-Paris clavicles glared at me from the hollows of her eyes and seethed that my body was inadequate for boys; from that day on I vowed to metabolize oxygen and drink moonglow until fat displaced the tissue padding stuffed into my training bra. I tried it the whole month of September and ended up whoring with a chocolate cake brought to English class by a cross-eyed kid who swore to buy me lingerie on my birthday and wanted to slip his quarter in the slot machine keychain dangling from one of the zippers of my backpack. I longed to run from the room but the cake whispered that every devilish bite of sugar and ultra-hydrogenated fatty acids would send me faster through puberty to collect the swelling breasts and womanly hips that everyone with a cunt was entitled to around my age.

I believed it until I woke up to the radio alarm streaming RuPaul’s morning show, still flat-chested and girdled with a jelly ring.