We Were Just Girls

We never meant any harm. We were just girls, picking at our nail polish—pink, and teal, and silver glitter. We watched the flakes float down to painted gymnasium floors and promised ourselves we’d stop that nasty habit.

We whispered secrets to each other: Leah loves Tommy! We giggled and nudged one another when the boys walked by, holding each other’s lies in our pockets for safekeeping (we all knew Leah loved Lily, even if she wouldn’t confess for six more years).

We traded sandwiches at lunch—peanut butter and grape jelly for turkey on wheat—Chloe’s mom never packed what she liked. We weren’t yet aware of our budding bodies, so we ate with gusto, mouths open in delight. We shot milk from our noses and threw our heads back like wolves, howling as one.

The school week felt like eternity but summers did, too. We stretched out long and lean in the grass, kicked our feet in the air, dyed our tongues with Faygo Redpop and Jolly Ranchers. 

After dark, we grew somber, watched for shooting stars, held hands while we cried. Palms pressed together, we wept for ourselves, for our small injustices, for our parents’ divorces.

We knew in that moment that we were stuck in time, frozen with slick cheeks and stained lips. 

By the following year, our lives would swing back into motion like Foucault pendulums. 

We’d shift, one of us moving across the country, another switching schools. Chloe would wither away before our very eyes, skipping lunch one day, then the next, then the next.   

By the time we graduated, we’d have carved new paths, made new friends, discovered new secrets. We’d scoff at the things we used to do, the sandwiches we ate and nail polish we wore. We’re adults, we’d think, anxious to scour ourselves clean from the marks of girlhood.

We didn’t know that some marks don’t wash away.

We’d cry when we heard what Chloe had done, even though we hadn’t seen her in two years. We remembered her skeletal form, had noticed the angry red lines she hid with oversized sweaters, but it didn’t seem like our place anymore. 

We’d call one another in the middle of the night. We rarely talked by then, but we’d sit on the line, listen to each other’s familiar breath, and say, Just wanted to check in.

But those futures were yet to come, and we were just girls passing notes in purple ink. 

We wrote our names in looping cursive, swapping last initials with our crushes of the week. At sleepovers, we snuggled close under an old knit blanket, knees touching as we screamed and buried our faces, hiding from the monsters flashing across the screen.

We bashfully asked each other’s moms for our first tampons and practiced kissing on the backs of our hands. We shared one soda, passing the straw around, and meant it when we told each other, I’ll love you forever. 

And we did.