Something About Her

Something About Her (600 words)

Note to reader: if you could provide feedback for revision in the comments below, I would be eternally grateful. I hope you enjoy!

You wanted her as much as you wanted to be her, although you wouldn’t have known it at the time. You were fourteen. Francesca’s Bear-Paw boots thumped against the staircase like a love-struck heart, and you stumbled behind her in a poor attempt to match her pace. Her legs, unlike yours, were long and slender. Her ass looked better than any thirteen-year-old’s ass had the right to look. It wasn’t a perverted thought. She was climbing the steps right in front of you. If she stopped suddenly, your face would’ve slammed straight into the plush, womanly seat of her Levi jeans.

Some stifled part of you—a caged bird ramming against your ribcage again and again—longed to reach out and touch her. In doing so, maybe you would finally understand the illusion. Maybe you’d discover that Francesca’s jeans were stuffed with cotton, or that Francesca was cotton herself, strutting around like a plush Pinocchio: light and airy and easy to pull apart. 

    The warning bell chimed. Behind you, a pack of prepubescent boys shouted obscenities and gestured between their legs as if tugging on tiny dicks. 

    Francesca reached the top of the stairwell. Her ass loomed overhead like a pair of ripe plums, and it was a miracle, the way she whirled on those gazelle-like legs to look at you. She smiled her glorious, gap-toothed smile, and you wondered, vaguely, what it would be like to lick her there, in the aperture of her sweet, candied mouth. The taste of maple syrup blossomed on your tongue. 

Then your biology textbook thudded to the terrazzo floor, knocked from your grasp by the most generic-looking boy you had ever seen. He didn’t apologize—likely, he hadn’t noticed you were there. He skirted around your shapeless body as if you were a desk or a bookshelf or any other cumbersome, inanimate thing. You couldn’t blame him, either. If the roles were reversed, you would have trampled him without pause. You would’ve shoved him over the railing to remain the center of Francesca’s attention, and therefore, the center of the world. 

You could feel the jealous eyes of boys on the steps beneath you. They weren’t making innuendos, now. Instead, they scrunched their hands into stone-shaped fists, furious that their friend had summoned more courage—or, in their terms, grown bigger balls. 

She couldn’t have been doing it on purpose, you thought. She was too good to torture you like that—too kind to realize that every person alive was a planet in her orbit, revolving ceaselessly around her C-cup breasted sun. 

Francesca grinned at her admirer. Nothing in her face revealed displeasure as the boy approached her, fingering the drawstring on his sweatshirt, and whispered something pathetic like, Hello. 

Years down the road, your therapist would tell you that you’d probably imagined it. “A coping mechanism,” she’d explain, in her sugar-coated way, “to minimize your negative feelings.” 

But you swore, in that moment, you had felt an invisible hand rummaging around your insides, cutting wires and rearranging gears. And for the rest of your life, you would hear it—that eternal click—as the hand exchanged your weak-willed heart for something much sturdier, much stronger. Once the work was finished, it didn’t even matter that you were alone on the staircase, dreading the detention slip you’d receive for missing class, just like it didn’t matter that the girl of your dreams was flaunting her perfect ass down the hallway and away from you, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with the most flat-bottomed boy in the world. None of it mattered, because you decided, right then, that you’d always been straight.