In Wonderland: A Combination Of Fact & Fiction

When I was a child, I watched the sky change and lost myself to daydreams. I put my clothes on inside out and backward, too lost in the worlds I was busy creating to focus on the task at hand. My shoes were never on the correct feet. I was quiet and kind and lovely. My mother, a teacher at one of the local schools, worried that someone would call her when I showed up with the shirt’s tag sticking out in front of my neck, wondering what was happening at home. But she loved my imagination and allowed it to breathe. I learned how to read and write early on to write my own stories. My own heroine or comedienne, I wrote poems, stories, plays, musicals, and orchestrated ballets as I walked to and from school with friends, often pulling them into my worlds. We danced in neighbors’ yards.

In fifth grade, there was a boy with flecks of silver in his eyes and a shy smile. We were finally the big kids in the last year of elementary school. Our elbows bumped, sitting next to each other in class. The stories took on a different angle. My friends and I were confused. The boy who used to cry on the bus or the one who taught our class how to fart with our armpits when the teacher stepped out of the room. Suddenly, we were watching them. At least I didn’t fall for the boy who used to eat worms. Most of the time, I had better taste than that.

One day, the boys were sent to another room and talked to a man we had never seen before. A woman came into our classroom and taught us about our bodies. We were confused. What were the boys being taught? We listened to her and stared at the white cement walls that separated us from the boys in the other room. Our eyes widened as we learned that we would bleed. We held our stomachs. The boys came back into class and looked too relaxed. We spent the rest of the day whispering to each other. We built a fortress with our bodies at recess, locking our elbows together and staring at the boys, our faces brave, until they ran away.

The boy with the silver eyes moved to Atlanta. We wrote letters for the first six months. Still very much children. We talked about books and games and made each other laugh at our jokes. We drew hearts and funny faces until we faded from each other’s lives. Sixth grade came, and we were the little kids in school again. Then there was the need to visit the school’s nurse with several other girls, all annoyed by the sudden need to do so. Inevitably and collectively embarrassed. Boys had started to turn into packs of wolves. We pushed them into lockers and shoved them away. By eighth grade, there were whispers about two abortions. We were supposed to be kids; we were supposed to practice kissing our pillows and hands. We were supposed to wear Laura Ashley to the dance, puffed sleeves and blue forget-me-nots on our dresses. White tights and black patent leather shoes. Tube tops became a thing, and we were even more confused, trapped in between. We walked in groups because we were friends and carefree, but we also walked the halls carrying swords, slaying the wolves who looked too hungry.

Somehow we escaped eighth grade and made it to high school. Our bodies grew up and out. Some of us started to feed those wolves when they cornered us. Other girls sought them out. I kept them as pets at a distance. Until I decided to kiss one of them. His mouth was a wet cavern, and his tongue was a warm eel, flopping around in it, slowly dying. I regretted it instantly. A hand where it shouldn’t be, a shock and an unwanted experience, the newness of it repulsive instead of enjoyable. Underneath, fingers shoving and jabbing like he owned me, was pulled away by mine, while I listened for the sounds of his parents fighting upstairs.

This is mine. Not yours. He understood the no that echoed in his parents’ basement and still pouted. I chewed his hand off and set him aside, watching him bleed out. He behaved like I was the villain. There, there, I thought, patting him on the head. You’ll live to drown others. He did. There’s a photo of him with a woman who looks trapped by the weight of his arm around her shoulder, her eyes caught in a frozen plea for help. She’ll have to save herself. His friends have walked away.

The other men in our group shrugged it off when I told them what he did decades later, inviting him to parties and weddings to minimize without another thought of what they learned about their friend, the good guy who he was. How many of them had claws, too, I wondered. I pitied their wives and daughters. They were already letting their sons sharpen their teeth. Dismissing their guilt as just what they thought we girls on the floor owed them.

“It was horrible,” I told my friends as we lay on the grass, waiting for our next class to start. “Jabba the Tongue Monster. Are they supposed to drown you with their mouth?” I asked my more experienced girlfriends. They shook their heads, and we rolled around on the grass, laughing hysterically and making gagging sounds, scaring the boys away. We didn’t care. We hoped that by the time we got to college, the boys would be men, and the men would know what to do. Some of them showed promise.

I wanted to tell them about what else he had done to me but hesitated, too embarrassed and disgusted by him, so I tucked the story away and let him whine to his friends about how awful I was for breaking up with him. He has two daughters now, I’m told.

We spent the rest of school sorting through our options, primarily unimpressed by them. We avoided the ones others warned us not to walk home with and shoved our knees into those who surprised us when they pushed us up against walls or stood too close for comfort as we waited for the bell to ring. We honed our instincts and learned how to fight. Sometimes, we froze. They were still wolves. It was left to us to sort through them and figure out who was kind and who was not. We sharpened our swords and cut them down as they continued to crawl out of the woods.

Then, I met Henry the summer before we started college. We watched the lightning bugs and kissed. Finally, someone who made me sigh.