One of the Boys

adolescence

CHAPTER 1

Growing up, I was never the type of girl that wanted to wear pink and prance around in dresses, and my mother hated me for it. Every morning she'd dress me in my older sister Sasha's hand-me-downs and yell at me when I tried to change clothes. I wanted to play kickball and the guitar, anything other than all the things my mom made me do. From the ages of three to four she forced me to take gymnastics. When I asked to quit, she put in ballet. Sometimes I felt bad for disappointing her, for not being like my older sister, but most days I didn't care. I just wanted to be myself.

Because of my mother's distaste for my boyish ways, I spent a lot of time during elementary school pretending to be someone I wasn't. I played jump rope with the girls instead of kickball with the boys. It wasn't that I thought I wouldn't be able to keep up with them, I just knew that they'd never let me play kickball with them. Boys are dumb, but elementary school boys are a whole other breed of terrible.

The day I finally got the confidence to ask the boys to play kickball with them set a president for the rest of my life.

It was a day in early April during the fifth grade, and the sun was blazing. The boys were playing kickball like usual, while the girls stuck to jumping rope and four square. Playing with the girls was suffocating. I didn't enjoy their silly playground songs, and I was tired of pretending like I did.

Cinderella dressed in yell-a went upstairs to kiss a fella. Made a mistake. Kissed a snake. How many doctors did it take? One, two, three...

I think maybe I would have enjoyed jumping rope more if some of them were actually good at it, but none of them were. The majority of them failed to make it to double digits, while I constantly jumped past the twenties and thirties. How could these girls enjoy something they were so terrible at? I was good at it and still found it insufferable.

It was at this moment, watching each girl jump over the rope, that I knew I couldn't suffer through another second of this. I could not bear to spend another day in 90° weather doing something I hated. So instead of getting in line to jump rope like normal, I walked towards the kickball field.

The playground at our elementary school had two levels; the kickball field was on the bottom while jumping rope was at the top. This made walking down to the boys feel like a long, drawn-out process. I could feel all of their eyes on me.

A light breeze blew my hair into my face. When I reached them, I remained silent for a moment before speaking.

I cleared my throat. "Hey... I was wondering if I could play kickball with you guys?"

The boys stared at me before laughing. My cheeks turned red.

"You want to what?" laughed Jake. For elementary school standards, Jake was attractive, and he knew it. He was the type of boy that thought that the whole world revolved around him. By this point in time, he already had an ego the size of a football field. "You want to play? With us?"

"Yes?" I titled my head. "Is there a problem with that?"

"Like that'll ever happen," this time he laughed so hard he started to double over. All of his friends joined in, except for one. Ben.

"Ah, come on guys," said Ben. "Why can't she play with us? It won't kill us or anything."

"Yes, it would," said Kevin, Jake's best friend. "She's a girl. You think she knows how to play kickball? Who's ever team she ends up on is gonna have to carry her on their backs."

"Exactly," Jake said. "There's no point in letting her play if we already know she's gonna suck."

Though I only stood a few feet away from the herd of prepubescent boys talking about me, they pretended like I couldn't hear them.