Being 12, just starting to figure out who I was, and thinking she was the absolute shit (she kinda was, guys), I followed suit.
I started listening to Good Charlotte (admittedly NOT the shit), wearing black and grey with safety pins all over everything (remember when that was a thing??), reading Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, thinking about and beginning to understand sex, and writing poetry more often.I began exploring all my dark fantasies, dating boys in secret (when I was completely not allowed to), lying to my parents about where I was going and who I was spending time with, and stealing my mom’s clothes to wear to school.
In my head, I was this chick.
In reality, I was probably closer to these guys.
There’s a story with that.
You see, I’d leave in the morning after Mom did, so I could just walk out of the house wearing whatever I’d stolen from her.She wore lots and lots of black, and her things were sexy and fit well.All my clothes were still all young and old-fashioned and didn’t really look good on my developing body.Hers were SO much easier to work into the little goth/punk look I had going on.
The issue was that by the time I got home, it was always a toss-up.Sometimes she’d be there, sometimes my dad would be there, and sometimes the house would be empty.So I couldn’t just strut into the house wearing the clothes I’d swiped out of her closet that morning!!I needed a solution! We had an English-style garden in our backyard: sort of messy, lots of herbs and bushes and plants growing everywhere.There was a tall enough fence around it that especially being on the corner, there were very few windows from nearby houses that could see into it.So what I’d do was go in the back gate, pull my spare clothes out of my backpack, and change real quick in the backyard before going in the house.My mom was none the wiser.
Two funny stories came out of this.The first is this: the way this practice was finally nipped in the bud was that my dad caught me.He saw me out the back door and called me out on it after I got inside.*Gulp*So embarrassing.And he’s never let me live it down.I had to get very serious with him about how humiliating it was for me so he’d stop telling people the story.Even years later, as an adult.
The second, and probably more embarrassing, is the time that I got caught by the neighbor.He was the same age as me and when we were younger we used to play together a lot.He taught me chess, and his dad taught me how to throw a baseball when I used to play catch with them.As we got older and went to different schools, however, we drifted apart and got awkward around each other.His living room window was tipped at a funny angle to my backyard and really you’d have to be sitting in this weird little corner of it to see me, so I never worried too much about it.But one day, on my back porch, I had just dropped my skirt around my ankles when I looked up and happened to glance his shocked face in that perfect little corner of the window, staring right at me and my little girl panties, totally incongruous with my mom’s very adult long black skirt and lacy black top.For one horrified second our eyes locked, and time froze.Then, faster than I’d ever moved before and faster than I’ve ever moved since, I pulled that skirt right back up and bolted for the door.
We never spoke of it.
On a small scale, the same thing has happened to me since (guy friends seeing glimpses of my naked body through not-fully-closed changing room curtains, getting caught picking my nose, etc), but nothing has ever packed the same humiliating sucker punch as that day.
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