to “talks” in their bedrooms, despite my unsuccessful efforts to steer the activities outside and toward sports. They preferred lounging around, sampling the newest Lip Smacker flavors, dabbing Love’s Baby Soft behind their ears, while thumbing through the latest TigerBeat magazine with its full, glossy, poster-sized inserts of the Bay City Rollers and Donny Osmond. Gone were the days when my friends wanted to sing like Laurie Partridge or shake a tambourine like Tracy; now everyone wanted to be Keith’s girlfriend. This sea change left me strategizing to maintain my cover.
Writing those words now, I’m struck by how conscious, how calculating my actions sound in hindsight. The tug of war between being my true self and fitting in with the group of girls to which I belonged—unfathomably, it seemed to me—raged constantly in my head. The effort to suppress my male self burbled like molten lava under the surface of my consciousness, consuming an enormous amount of my energy, but I had never known anything else.
“Have you got yours, yet?” Lynn asked me one day as we luxuriated in her room.
“My what?” I asked, lazily tossing one playing card after another at her garbage can.
“Your period—or, as Jolene likes to call it, ‘the curse.’” She nodded in the direction of her sister’s bedroom.
“Uh-uh, you?”
“Not yet.” Lynn sat up on the bed, pulling her legs in close to her chest. “I don’t really get the girls who act all excited about it, you know?” She frowned, shaking her head. “Like, you bleed all over the place once a month for the funnest years of your life. How is that exciting?”
“I dunno,” I mumbled. “It doesn’t seem too great to me, either.” I thought of my mother’s promise to get me “a little belt” when the time came, referring to the uncomfortable belts that had been used to hold the sanitary pads of her era. Mom was suspicious of tampons, which were new to the market. She expressed vague concerns about infections and protecting a girl’s virginity, both of which I discouraged her from elaborating on. How would I run or play in a belt? I had never summoned the courage to ask her, instead hoping I would magically be spared my period when the great cosmic error of my gender was discovered. I envisioned medieval buckles and locks, metal clanging against me as I skateboarded.
“Do you think other girls don’t want it?” Lynn asked earnestly.
“For sure,” I said, but the only person I was sure of was me. “I’d rather not get it at all.” But Lynn had made me aware of something I’d never considered: If regular girls like her didn’t want their periods, could there be more people like me than I realized? “Do you ever wish you didn’t get boobs?” I ventured.
“No way!” Lynn shouted, bounding off the bed to stand in front of her large mirror. She eyed her chest—already a 36C—appreciatively. “I’ll be able to nurse a whole family with these suckers!” Lynn often spoke of her wide hips and large breasts as perfect for childbearing—an unfathomable act I couldn’t imagine myself ever doing. I slumped deeper into the beanbag chair I sat in. She glanced at me, an afterthought. “Do you not want to get boobs?”
“I don’t really care either way,” I lied, trying to sound casual. “At this rate, it’s looking like I won’t, anyway.”
“Oh, you’ll get them,” she said reassuringly. “Every girl does, eventually.”
I sought solace with my boy friends, feeling secure in the way I belonged with them. Where other girls didn’t seem interested in playing with them, the boys continued to include me and never spoke badly of girls in front of me or made me feel like they didn’t want me there. I felt very protective of girls, knowing how it felt to go through life treated as one, even if I secretly wasn’t one. Some of the other boys in our neighborhood didn’t treat girls as kindly.
One year, Melanie and I shared a paper route. Every weekday after school and on Saturdays, we’d gather around our route manager’s garage awaiting the delivery of the Calgary Herald before loading our bags with papers and walking our routes under their heavy weight. All of the other paper carriers were boys, while Melanie and I were a team of two. I noticed how different these boys were from my friends when several of them dominated the conversation, spoke poorly of girls, and stuck to other off-color topics.
When I hung out with my friends who were boys, we’d ride Sidney’s backyard half-pipe for hours, hanging around talking skateboarding and trying new tricks. But as my middle school years drew to a close, so, too, did my place with the boys. One Sunday afternoon, I walked out of Sidney’s house after using the washroom and right into the middle of a conversation.
“Then she just …” Donald stopped mid-sentence when he saw me. Donald and I were neighbors, school peers, and church-mates and had played together since we were babies. Our siblings were friends and our parents close. He shuffled awkwardly, glancing at Rob, another lifelong friend and schoolmate. Sidney skateboarded rhythmically up and down the sides of the half-pipe, staring fixedly at his feet.
“What?” I asked, grabbing my board and standing on it. I knew he hadn’t been talking about me because there’d been something a little lurid in his tone, a gleam in his eye I knew I could not be responsible for.
“So, anyways,” Donald stammered, “there was a—well, so that’s what I’m gonna do my project on.” Rob nodded enthusiastically, playing along.
“Cool. That sounds rad!” he said.
“You think his school project is rad?” I asked. They nodded, too vigorously. I knew they hadn’t been talking about school. This was a weekend, and these were thirteen-year-old boys. My throat clenched a little and I felt like I might cry if I thought any more about what they could possibly be excluding me from. And so I got on the half-pipe. Sidney stepped off to watch me as I rode as if possessed, climbing higher and higher up the plywood, moving from fakies to rock-to-fakies to rail grabs and stalls. I pulled off moves I’d never nailed before.
“Whoo! Give ’er, Lor!” Rob yelled. I heard the others hooting their approval. They’re such good guys. They didn’t mean to exclude me; they have no idea I’m really one of them. My board thundered up and down the ramp, and I grabbed the top rail so often my hands became sore, my thighs burning. Still, I rode higher and harder. This is it, I thought. Nothing’s the same, everything’s changing. Finally, I began to slow, no longer fighting for height, resigned to gravity and my own physical limitations. Accepting what was.
“Holy, that was wicked,” Donald marveled as I stepped off the ramp. “You’re sweating like crazy!”
“You shredded,” declared the usually laconic Sidney.
“Yeah,” I shrugged sheepishly, grateful I was no longer on the verge of tears. “I should probably get going.”
“Me, too,” Donald said, kicking up his board. We said our goodbyes to the others and walked the several blocks back to our street, our conversation easy and uneventful. Almost like normal—but I knew it would never be this easy again.
That summer, the hormonal magma of my loosely associated group of boy and girl friends collided, creating new bonds and solidifying others. The games we played morphed from Easy-Bake Oven and football to truth or dare and a kissing game we dubbed “Races” where a pair of one boy and one girl would run around the yard we were gathered at and kiss when out of sight of the group. The pair would run off for a minute or two—from the backyard to the front and then back again—while the remainder of us sat around and talked, arousing no suspicion if a parent were
