Essays, Etc.

Little Girls in Pink, Etc.

I recently went to the mall with a good friend of mine, and as we were eating our food, I noticed three girls sit down to the left of us.

They were at least four years younger than my friend and I, probably around ten or eleven. They were without any adult supervision, which made me slightly worried, but that wasn't what really made me disturbed.

I saw that all the girls had pink bags, and that they were from Victoria's Secret. For those of you who do not know, or do not have a Victoria's Secret in your area/state/country/continent, they sell bras, panties, and all sorts of scandalous lingerie.

I suppose that it's none of my business, but when I saw the girls with those bags I became concerned for not only them, but the mental well-being of their parents and the future of our generation.

I quietly mentioned the bags to my friend and she shook her head.

"It's probably just lotion. They sell tons of lotion there."

"Why not go to Bath and Body Works?"

"I don't know! Why don't you go ask them, since you're so interested? It's probably just lotion. Calm down, Jesus."

I shrugged and admitted that I was totally, totally right and that my friend Ashley was an idiot.

I kept glancing at the bags as the girls laughed and moved them, looking at their cell phones that were better than mine and their jean shorts that I'd never be able to pull off in public, let alone wear, when I was ten. Hell, I couldn't do that now.

I couldn't help but feel like an old person, angry at the rebellious nature of the youth:

"When I was young, we didn't tramp around like little whores and wear short shorts that showed our skin, or spaghetti tops!"

One girl moved her bag enough so that I could see a thong, and I lost it. Just fucking lost it in my mind. I thought about taking the bag, returning it, calling the parents, yelling at the parents, yelling at everyone, this was just so fucked that I couldn't even handle it.

But I didn't do anything.

I just took another bite of my sandwich and leaned over to Ashley, whispering:

"There's a black thong in that girl's bag."

She choked a little, and coughed.

"Yeah, exactly."

I thought that maybe the problem was with me, that I was being prudish. This was because of something that had happened a few weeks earlier:

I invited a friend to sleep over, and, as was common when we were in a room with each other for many hours at a time, we began gossiping about kids we went to school with, either past or present.

Somehow we got on the topic of relationships that kids we knew had in middle school, and I learned that many of my friends had been getting frisky with one another, completely under my nose.

"They did what?"

"Oh, yeah, he totally did her. Like, multiple times."

"But I associate with these people, and they're fucking each other."

"Yes."

"In middle school."

"Yes."

"While I was studying, they were fucking each other."

"Yes. Multiple times over."

"What if they didn't wash? Oh God. Oh God. I shook hands with so many of those people. Oh God."

My friend began laughing, but my brain was in overdrive. People I knew. Fucking. All the time.

Then I began separating them into groups in my head, tallying whoever was a member of the groups:

The "Let's Have Sex" Group: Everyone but me.

The "Let's Study and Maybe Read a Book Later" Group: Me.

I also learned that my best friend had done something rather intimate with her boyfriend at the time, and I felt like crying. Not just for our mutually lost innocence, but because I now had a mental picture of that in my head.

When I saw those girls, I immediately thought of that moment, when I realized that my friends were losing their innocence one by one and no longer wanted to just eat cupcakes and watch bad movies together. They wanted to do that and other things, and those other things scared me.

I watched one of the girls pull out her smartphone, a phone ten times as expensive, and ten times as unnecessary, as mine. I watched her fingers as she nimbly typed out a message, with her short shorts, her spaghetti top, her group of friends who all wore makeup and had blond hair, natural or otherwise, and her black thong in her bag.

I cringed as I imagined what she was sending on that phone, to God knows who:

"Hey, want to meet up later? I bought something today that I want to show you."