Your Little Secret

My world is a middle school. My life begins each day when I board the bus that will take two goddamn hours to deliver me to its steps. And each day my life ends when I step through the door of the garage where we live. Except this year it doesn't — because she calls me and talks to me for hours until my mom comes home. I walk all around the garage pulling the longest phone cord all over the place while I take care of my infant and toddler siblings. Furngully the Last Rainforest is probably on repeat on the chunky television. I’m not a parent. I’m a 13-year-old girl and I have a bad haircut in the shape of a mushroom, because it is as short as my mom will allow. I wear a red turtleneck and a LA Raiders parka every day to conceal my body. We live in San Diego and at times the heat is unbearable.

I cook for the babies and she talks sweetly to me. The phone cord catches afire from actual fire. Opps. Phone cords, meh. Meh doesn't exist yet because we still have phone cords — stretchy, tangled, spirally phone cords. Lifelines.

One day she shares her secret journal with me. She details my body and what it would feel like. I give her the lines my scared and ignorant relatives have been shoving down my throat for years. My otherness has had them completely on edge for so long, I know all their fears by heart and they all pour out. Nothing is ever the same.

28 years later — just last month at a comedy festival with a high school friend I ask, “do you remember Jenalyn.” Anne tilted her head forward just a bit and raised her eyebrows. She glared at me like I was fucking crazy. “Dude, you were so in love with her.” Yeah. And I’ll always be.

In 1995 I would stand in the downstairs half bath of the suburban house my mom managed to upgrade us to just an hour north of San Diego. I would sit on the closed toilet for hours and belt out Melissa Etheridge I want to come over. I had a CD player now so no more rewinding. Instant satisfying agst.