The Accidental Siren

1.5 Once Upon a Time

I was sent to bed without ice cream. Thanks to my little white lie, Dad woke me up at sunrise to search for the missing camera.

While everyone else spent Family Day baking snicker-doodles and playing spoons, I meandered through the woods in search of something I would never find. To lighten the blow and strengthen the lie, I made a production out of the punishment by drawing a map of the woods and enlisting the twins for help.

When the DEET wore off and the 'squitos made their move, I conveniently recalled using the camera at the beach. Jake and Bobby helped me putter around the shore, dune grass, and steps, kicking driftwood from the sand and plucking interesting shells from the water's edge.

When we returned empty-handed, Dad lowered his binoculars, looked at the ground, and shook his head.

It took years before I understood the reason I lied: I never looked at the photo of Roslyn... but I accidentally glimpsed the corner of her thigh before I creased the plastic. That's why I couldn't tell the truth; that dang glimpse of thigh.

I was certain that I did the right thing by trading the camera, but with the overwhelming guilt of maybe--possibly--noticing a sliver of a girl's upper leg, how could I explain the truth to my father and expect to look him in the eyes? In our house, the word “naked” meant twin boys streaking through the kitchen after shower time; the word “girl” meant long hair, dangly earrings, and curlycue penmanship. But combining the words created a phrase that could turn a simple conversation about bullies, cameras, and “doing the right thing” into something awkward and naughty; a conversation, perhaps, I wasn't ready for.

I wasn't ready because girls still left cooties on my juice-box straw. Girls were know-it-alls and brown-nosers and tattle-tales. Girls were scared of bugs--especially bugs with wings--and they screamed like sissies whenever a beetle clung to their skirts.

But I was beginning to realize that girls play beneath a mysterious shroud of whispered secrets, of notebooks brimming with rainbow hieroglyphics, of exchanged glances between mothers and friends who knew something that I didn't. Words like “love,” “menstrual,” “change,” “going out,” “Ryan Ryan Ryan,” or “bra;” hushed ramblings of exclusive “learning experiences” between Livy and our mother or Livy and her friends; words from conversations so exclusive that I was asked to leave the room; words I deciphered in bits and pieces with an ear glued to my sister's bedroom door.

Apparently, girls were different... special... delicate... but nobody would tell me why. To a flubbery sixth-grade boy who didn't know his penis from a pogo-stick, girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those “in the know” assured me that they were beautiful.

“What's so beautiful about girls?” I would implore.

And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn't possibly have the mental maturity to comprehend such grown-up concepts as love and bleeding vaginas; “You'll understand someday, James.”

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