Emelia Gauch | Prose

I developed breasts sometime between seventh and eighth grade. They snuck up on me, evil omens in the night. One day, I wore white camisole tank tops with built-in bras that gaped in the front, and then overnight I was pressing my boobs together so they could fit.

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I wanted breasts so badly before I got them. In elementary school, I prayed to G-d that they would come in, that they would be round and large and curvy. I would look down the guidance counselor’s shirt at her cleavage when she called me into her office, feeling a mix of shame and jealousy, shame and desire. Still, the girls in my grade and I hated the first girl who developed boobs. We mocked her for her push-up bras from Pink and the way her boobs tried to escape her sports bra when she ran. The other girls seemed to hate that adulthood kissed her first. I hated that I kind of wanted to kiss her too.

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On the playground, the girls would sit on the orange monkey bars. I was always scared to climb to the top of them, so I’d be left at the bottom staring up at dangling legs swinging back and forth. I wished I was on top of the monkey bars. We would talk about who was stuffing, who wasn’t, who had gone bra shopping as we measured the smallness of our wrists by encircling them with our fingers. 

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I never stuffed tissues into my bra, but I thought about it often. It would be pretty easy, I reasoned, to just curl up a handful of toilet paper and shove it into my shirt. I was scared my mom would notice, though and I didn’t want my mom to realize I was a girl yet. 

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The girls in my grade rushed to get bigger with dates and makeup. They started wearing mascara on their eyelashes in the fourth grade and ripping holes in their leggings to expose their knees. I thought about how good they looked, the ripped leggings. I knew I could never ask my parents to let me do that, so I started pretending to fall down on the concrete. 

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(I trip myself in the schoolyard where the boys play dodgeball. One throws foam red at another’s crotch and he folds in upon impact. In the corner, a group plays four squares and I think I hate recess. I think I might like it better if I was on the monkey bars, the view from up there Schoolyard Heaven. Down here, brand new blue Converse kick in front of my face. Clean hairless legs - we aren’t old enough to cut ourselves shaving yet - tangle. Still young enough to go to the nurse's office for a bruise. The monkey bar girls don’t go to the nurse though, hands gripping tight, they don’t slip Recess Gods.)

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The summer between seventh and eighth grade, I went to sleepaway camp in the woods of Ontario. We lived in cabins and I slept in the top bunk. My bed was closest to the speaker. Each day, I woke up first, jolted by music broadcasting and beckoning us to flagpole.

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The fuzzy voices demanded, “forty-five minutes until breakfast.” Then, “thirty minutes until breakfast.” Then, fifteen and ten and five. Each morning, with the exception of Saturdays, when we slept in, I rolled out of bed at the last possible second in TJ Maxx shorts and a faded shirt I’d stolen from my dad. I quickly brushed my teeth. I hurried out of the bathroom, tugging on cheap flip-flops and making my way to where my bunkmates were waiting outside. We trudged through dewy grass and wet dirt, the earth catching in our toes.

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Each cabin lined up single file and my younger cousin who went to camp with me would come by, even though she was supposed to be in line. 

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She’d say my name and tell me I had toothpaste stains around my mouth. I licked my palm and rubbed the side of my cheek until she said, it’s gone. Then, her counselors yelled at her to come back to the line and she’d leave me with a quick embrace. 

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One morning after the toothpaste cleaning, as we stood in line, getting ready to go inside for breakfast, one of the girls in my cabin told me she could see my nipples through my shirt. She said it with disdain, staring below my chin, below my collarbones. I looked down and noticed the peaks in the old threadbare t-shirt, a mountain range spanning my torso, complete with rolling hills and valleys. 

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My face flushed. I didn’t realize you could see them through, I said. (I didn’t realize you weren’t allowed to.) 

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Gathering around the flagpole would be different now.

A boy in our age group started talking to us at the fork of camp where the boy cabins and girl cabins met. 

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I wore a black tank top and sweatpants. 

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               I wore a bra. I only had one. Beige, even though I really wanted a bright red

               push-up. I bought the beige bra from the Victoria Secret in the Natick Mall when I

               went with my friends. There had been a buy one get one half-off sale. I got one,

               and my friend got another. 

               They measured us there. My size was 32D. Her size was 34A. 

               The numbers meant a lot to us then.

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I remember his gaze slowly dropping. I watched him watch me, him following the bulge of my chest and laser beaming along the sides of my body, down the edges of my hips. Out, in, out. My skin buzzed.

I suddenly was wise beyond my years, wiser than I ever had wanted to be.

When people say “Suddenly” in books and essays, they rarely mean it literally. 

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To be clear, this moment was not an instantaneous realization. 

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It was a solidification, however, that no matter what I looked like, I would be first and foremost a body. 

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Sleepaway camp taught me this. Sleepaway camp taught me that stomachs were meant to be flat, my boobs were nice for men to look at (and I hated them for it, both men and boobs), but that was about all of me that appealed to men, that feminism was bad, that girls shouldn’t like other girls and girls that like girls definitely shouldn’t be changed in front of. Sleepaway camp taught me that I needed to shave around my vagina at least once a week and that I should always have hairless legs. Sleepaway camp taught me that I don’t really know how to shave, that razors accidentally leave little slits on my fingertips. I remember the first time I noticed this; I stared at my plush beige and pink fingers with swirling patterns laid into them, slashes slicing through the circles and diagonals. Fingers like a topographical map, now cut open like a cavern. 

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(During a weekly shaving session, the top of my razor had fallen out of the handle. Water streaming down around me, I grasped the razor head and tried to put it back in, but it just slipped again, falling onto the dirty communal bathroom floor, cutting against my skin.)

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When my breasts grew in, everyone I wanted to see me as older saw me as a problem and everyone I never had thought about before suddenly wanted to look at me. 

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(I wasn’t ready to grow up yet, but it was made out of me with your eyes, palm pressed against the small of my back, hands brushing my chest. 

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I did not go from child to adult, but from child to woman.)

Another summer passed and going into eighth grade was now going into ninth grade. My grandparents took me on a trip to Ireland with a tour group as a present for my Bat Mitzvah. The tour was mostly made up of old people and families with children ages 2-7. One family contained a group of older boys. They were siblings or cousins I think. 

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I fantasized about one of them making conversation with me, becoming my friend.

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On the seventh and second to last day of the tour, we visited a castle where we would be served a traditional medieval dinner of rastin and ribs, baby roast potato & bordelaise sauce. I selected my outfit carefully, settling on a pair of dark wash skinny jeans and a v-neck olive green long-sleeved shirt. When I exited the bathroom after changing, my grandma told me I had a nice figure. I put my hands on my hips, trying to memorize what my body, a nice figure, felt like outside of my own skin. 

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I ran my tongue over my braces, feeling the ridges and bumps. 

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I felt pretty.

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We got on the bus with its fuzzy gray and purple seats and drove to the castle. Upon entering, a waiter in a period costume handed my grandparents mead as she led us to the dining room. She asked if I wanted anything to drink. I said no, I’m fourteen. 

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The dining room looked like a movie set, all stone and wood, candles instead of electricity. Angled wood beams held the ceiling up. I imagined what it would be like to be a princess.

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We sat at the same table, for the first time ever, with the older boys. My grandparents faced each other at the end, leaving me the awkward third facing one of the brother-cousins. The one sitting to the left of the boy across from me started to make conversation, asking where I was from. I liked that he looked me in the eye and I ignored how his gaze dropped momentarily every few seconds. His brother-cousins watched our conversation, exchanging glances. My ears burned. I leaned back into the stone seats and I answered, turning slightly pink. Finally, I thought, another teenager to talk to. 

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“What grade are you in?” he asked/asks/is asking me after ten? twenty? minutes. 

               “I’m going to be a freshman,” I replied/reply/am replying.

“Where do you go to school?”

               “Boston.” 

“What do you study?”

               “Oh, I’m in high school.”

His face turned bright red. 

He glanced at my chest. 

He stopped talking to me after that.

Innocent girlhood exists for a short period of time and the path finds itself littered with your dead bodies. It is a horror movie actually. Blood and guts, 

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                                                                                               zombies and broken toes. 

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Vampires, sucking the life out of you. If growing up doesn’t feel like murder, it’s suffocation. You choke on unflavored chapstick and bubblegum mouthwash. You grow first in your head, then you have to wait for your body to catch up. Your arms stretch outside of the door and your fingers dance in the air through the windows of your best friend's car. Your legs can’t fit in your twin-size bed anymore, so you end up sleeping in a fetal position. 

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                                                            You are big until you realize you aren’t.                You are so small and your

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                                                            body gets older before you’re ready. 

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                              You are a child with the bones of a woman, trying to keep from falling over. 

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                              You aren’t used to the weight of yourself. 

Adulthood lies at the end of the horizon and I rapidly approached it, not with open-heartedness and grace, but trembling fear and shame. My arms were too weak to keep myself afloat.

But during the summer, my friend and I drove to the shoreline.

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We, she said, are here to play. I remember that I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that. No one else was on the beach, so we ate shredded cheese and danced in the freezing waves. I wondered what color my mermaid tail would be. I forgot warmth and my toes turned blue. I forgot arms                were arms and legs                were legs and they tingled with salt. I forgot they served a purpose.                I forgot I had a body at all.