Growing Pains
Growing Pains
When we first heard the word, we were eight years old. We were at someone’s pool, for someone’s birthday and we overheard someone’s father purr, “That bikini sure looks sexy” to someone’s mother in the kitchen between cake and presents. Sexy. We whispered the word to each other during Marco Polo, giggling at the way our lips popped open and closed to expose our blue-icing-stained teeth. Sexy. We made our Bratz dolls kiss inside the treehouse, the click of plastic on plastic setting a rhythm for our chant. Sexy. We trapped air bubbles in our tankini tops and one pieces to make it look like we had boobs. None of us understood what the word meant—those with older sisters would find out soon enough—but we knew that it was something good. Desirable. Something that made us feel as though our veins flowed with glitter and our freckles were multi-colored rhinestones.
The first time we felt sexy was at our eighth grade semi-formal. Our mothers allowed us to get our dresses from Delia’s rather than Marshall’s, bought many of us our first strapless bras, taught us to walk in three-inch heels without stumbling. We straightened our hair and painted our lips red and eyelids gold, unable to stop admiring our transformations in the toothpaste-splotched mirror. Some of us had dates—nervous, pimply boys whose voices had cracked on “dance” and who would proceed to fasten their ties around their foreheads and spend the night moshing in an Axe-scented circle—but all of us hoped tonight we’d get our first kiss. We could think of no better place than the Burton Regional Middle School gymnasium, with its gum-spackled bleachers, scuffed floors, and banners touting the 1998 girls’ basketball team’s tournament victory. Our mothers called us beautiful, snapping grainy photographs as we twirled in cotton-candy-pink tulle and clingy teal lace. But we had our own word, and we whispered it to each other in the bathroom, sopping sweat from our armpits with scratchy paper towels and blushing over who’d asked whom to slow dance. Sexy.
Sophomore year was the first time someone called us sexy. Football game. White-out night. A few of the seniors had stashed a cooler with filched Bud Lights in the woods behind the field, and we’d deluded ourselves into thinking we were drunk after choking down half a can. Days before, we’d gotten our braces off and we loved the way our teeth felt, all smooth and a just bit slimy. No more fumbling kisses resulting in tangled wires and bleeding lips, or the horrifying realization that a chunk of someone’s lunch had jail-broken into our mouths. We pranced laps around the field, swaying our bony hips in low-rise skinny jeans whenever we passed the student section. Did we notice the way Darren looked at us? Did we see how Kyle followed us with his eyes? During halftime, we allowed ourselves to be pulled under the bleachers, behind the gymnasium, into backseats that reeked of BO. Emboldened by alcohol, we took off the t-shirts we’d hacked into crop tops, showed off the outrageously padded Angel bras we’d begged our mothers to buy us. Sexy. The word dripped over us like butter on popcorn, sunk into our skin, and burrowed deep into our brains where we’d frequently seek it out at night when we spun fantasies into dreams. A confirmation. A promise. What we believed was the first word of our fairy tales. “Once upon a time” be damned.
By the time we were sixteen, we felt as though we’d discovered one of the basic laws of the universe. Having a boyfriend meant having someone who’d hold our hand in the hallways and kiss us when the more puritanical teachers weren’t around to reward our PDA with a detention. It meant not watching any of the movies we paid twelve dollars each to see at Regal Cinemas on Friday nights (though typically it also meant not having to pay twelve dollars from our own meager savings in the first place). It meant showing off our barely concealed plum-colored hickeys in the locker room when we changed for gym class and gossiping about how Aaron/Drew/Charlie/Noah told us they’d never felt this way about a girl before. Having a boyfriend meant we were (at this point, we’d always lower our voices, bookending the words with giggles that betrayed how young we really were) loved. In love. Drunk with love and all the other trite sayings we picked up from the Top 50 Hits. And to catch a boyfriend we had to be sexy. We had to let the edges of our “good bra”—the one with the pink/black/red/white lace that we spent an entire month’s worth of babysitting money on and that we never washed because we’d heard horror stories of other girls who put their bras through the spin cycle just to have them come out misshapen, lumpy, missing the teeny rhinestones that glittered on the straps—play peek-a-boo with our Abercrombie v-necks. We had to laugh too loudly at things that weren’t funny, we had to snap our gum when we talked. We had to forget our basic knowledge of algebra, how to spell any word longer than five letters, what a covalent bond was. We had to forget the word “no.” To be loved we had to catch a boyfriend. To catch a boyfriend, we had to be sexy. According to one of the math properties we’d purged from our brains, the logical conclusion was that to be sexy was to be loved. We believed it.
The older we got though, the more we realized that sexy wasn’t just a state of being. Wasn’t an attribute (albeit a modifiable one) like being “blonde,” or being “a good dancer.” Sexy was an industry. The magazines by the self-checkout area of the grocery store promised us ten surefire tips to get sexy abs by summer. Advertisements that interrupted our sitcoms packaged sexy into a bottle of $100 perfume and told us, in husky over-enunciated words, that once we smelled like crisp florals or sultry musk, men would find us irresistible. *CELBRITY* swears by these five exercises for sexy legs! This new sexy lipstick from *MAKEUP COMPANY* will make your lips so plump you’ll wish you could kiss yourself! Miracle shampoo for sexy, bouncy waves. Everywhere we looked, someone was peddling sexy. Promising sexy. Placing it in a black pot at the end of a rainbow and charging a small fortune for the opportunity to race after it.
We were seventeen when we discovered that sexy existed on a spectrum. That we could be sexy while other girls were sexier and others still were sexiest. It was Thanksgiving of our senior year, the first time many of us would be seeing our boyfriends since they flew across the country for college. The mid-August goodbyes had been tearful, tacky, heavy with promises of undying love. Babe, don’t cry you’re so sexy, how could I ever find a girl who’s better than you? Three months of long-distance had taught us new ways to be sexy—grainy photos taken in our bathroom mirrors at the dead of night when the rest of the family was asleep, weekly whispered video chats under our covers with the door shut, a towel shoved into the gap. And the constant texting. Our fathers threatened to kick us off the family plan if we kept running up the data every month. Now it was November and none of that mattered. Tuesday night we shaved our entire bodies, shivering yet persisting with our dulled drugstore razors when the hot water ran out after our left thigh. On Wednesday we woke up early—earlier than our mothers who’d planned to be in the kitchen by 9 a.m. boiling chunks of pumpkin and wrestling dough into submission. We spent over an hour doing our makeup, holding back tears when our wings were lopsided, when our curls fell after ten minutes, when our blush looked like a splotchy rash. Everything had to be perfect. Sexy. We were so excited it never crossed our minds to be nervous, to find it odd that they invited us out for a mid-afternoon drive rather than to their Thanksgiving dinners. We climbed into their cars expecting our Nicholas Sparks moment, only to ooze out twenty minutes later, feeling as though someone had punched a straw through our sternums and slurped out our insides. We might have been sexy—though none of us felt it then as our mascara mapped the hurt across our cheeks—but college girls, with their tube tops and “maturity” were sexier.
It wasn’t until our first year of college that we figured out how to be sexier too. Those of us who were lucky enough to join a sorority in the fall learned all the tricks during exclusive frat parties and mixers. The rest of us spent those initial few months sitting in lecture halls, half our attention on our droning professors, the other half on the groups of girls who always came in late, treating the auditorium aisles like catwalks. We were always taking notes. All the work-study money we earned as rec center attendants or library assistants went toward our new “college wardrobes.” Weekends started on Wednesdays, and we learned how to hold our liquor. Sexier girls got drunk, but still made it to their 10 a.m. Econ class so they could sip iced coffee and re-hash the night’s conquest with their friends. There was usually a night’s conquest, a public one, in the middle of the crowded dance floor under the disco lights where everyone could look on with the proper amount of jealousy. Often, these public make outs would be followed by an even more public strut of shame home, greasy hair tied back in a bun, makeup inexplicably perfect, oversized hoodie purposefully clashing with their miniskirts and heels. Brushing our teeth in the only quad-facing communal bathroom, we watched these morning migrations. If we cracked jokes with our friends—snickering when those girls would beeline to the showers, finger combing the tell-tale knots out of their hair—it was only because we wished we could wake up in a cramped navy-sheeted twin XL bed with mascara crusting our eyelids closed and a headache hammering out the same rhythm as our hearts.
One day we did. Naively, we slipped on our borrowed sweatshirts, echoed how much fun we’d had, asked when we could see them again. On our walk home, we didn’t strut so much as shuffle, scuffing the soles of our trashed, once-white converse on the stone pathways. The sunlight needled our eyes, and we chewed our chapped lips raw as we tried to dissect what they meant by “yeah, maybe we could link up again soon or something.” Less of a promise, more of a dismissal. What we didn’t understand that morning (or the next four to follow, all from different dorms and houses) was that being sexier meant being lusted after, not loved. Meant being largely unattainable—yours for the night and your friend’s for the next. Meant walking home feeling the same way we did after we vomited up jungle juice for twenty minutes in the bushes behind KA. Gutted. Shaky. Insides scrubbed raw and stinging by bile. We’d come home to our starstruck roommates who demanded to hear all about our night while they flicked through the guy’s Instagram, voicing their approval. Tossing back one, two, three Ibuprofen for our headaches, we’d tell them everything. Well, almost everything. We’d leave out the parts where they couldn’t keep it up, where they’d roughly flip us this way and that, always pursuing their own pleasure, where they’d fall asleep with their backs to us while we stared at the water-stained ceilings, somehow both too hot and too cold. It didn’t take long for us to buy into those other versions that we made out to be equal parts steamy and romantic. To convince ourselves of our own happiness. This is what it means to be sexier.
Toward the end of our first semester, we began to realize that we’d come to occupy a certain role in our friend group: the sexy one. The girl everyone expects a dance-floor make out from. The girl whose friends take joking photos of her—thumbs-up selfies captioned “caught ;)” that are sent in the group chat. The girl nobody wants to go out with alone because they know they’ll get ditched for the first boy who comes over offering shots and a good time. We realized this the night one of our friends—pretty, timid, thoroughly a “girls girl” who was always polite in her refusals to trade an evening with her friends for a night in a frat house bedroom—finally kissed a boy on the dance floor. We watched the group shoot her questioning “okay” signals and silently mouth “are you all right?” Protective, they hovered close by, always ready to perform a Secret Service rescue on her signal. Draining the last of our too-strong vodka cran, we couldn’t help but wonder, first bitterly but later numbly, if they even noticed when we slipped away anymore.
The first time we made a mistake, we were nineteen, liminal not-quite-adults who were no longer who we used to be, but not yet who we would become. He was twenty, a sophomore, a smooth-talker, someone who paid us the right amount of attention at the exact wrong moment. We were at his fraternity’s football tailgate, one of the last of the season, freezing our asses off in the generic white school t-shirts (cut up and reincarnated as a halter top), which had accompanied our acceptance letters. Under different circumstances, resulting in a different outcome, it was the type of day that would blur into generalities and fuse right into the hazy amalgamation of our college football experience. That same hour-long schizophrenic mash-up of dubstep beats overlaid by 2000’s hits we knew every word to, the rhythmic plunk of ping pong balls rimming out of solo cups and onto trampled grass. Too strong mixed drinks that tasted like gagging in the stadium bathroom and not remembering anything before the halftime show.
But then, him.
Peter “call me Pete” with the brown waves and sharp jawline that was something out of those Wattpad stories some of us used to secretly devour as teens. He insisted that he knew us from somewhere, had seen us around—weren’t we in a class together? We were positive that we would’ve remembered him, even from our largest lecture class, but we were happy to accept the insinuation that he’d had his eye on us, so we giggled into our tepid drinks and told him, yes, that must be it.
“Are you excited for the big game?” he asked, words bookended by swigs of Bud Lite.
Some of us feigned interest, rattling off a few platitudes about how we thought the only two players whose names we’d memorized would do today. Others fiddled with the strings of our halter tops, remarking with sarcasm that we had no idea there was a game today, and earning ourselves a laugh and another hit of that smile. A few confessed in a low voice usually reserved for the most scandalous secrets that we truly had no interest in football or rivalry matches—never had, even in high school when our team managed to claw their way into the state championship and we’d found ourselves celebrating that the game was over and the afterparty starting, more so than that the Burton Huskies had secured their unlikely victory. The outcome was the same regardless, contributing to the sense of sour inevitability (which those of us who still nurtured a secret belief in fairy tale romance would think of as fate), we’d have for many nights to come as we lay in bed, sat in lecture, sipped bitter coffee in the library, rewinding and replaying this day in hopes of pinpointing The Moment where it all went wrong.
“You’ve gotta be freezing,” Pete said, taking note of our bare shoulders exactly as we’d hoped he would.
“Alcohol blanket.” We clinked our solo cup against his can. “Though it’s wearing a bit thin. Another drink?”
Or.
“You’ve gotta be freezing.”
“Oh, this is nothing. It’s much worse back home. As kids, we used to wear sweatshirts to school when it was in the thirties—no hats, no mittens, just us and our Gap hoodies against the elements.”
Or.
“Freezing is an understatement. Not sure who decided that tailgating is an outdoor activity, but I have some words.”
Or.
It would take us a surprisingly long time to realize that The Moment, so to speak, existed much further back on our timeline, predating Pete by at least a few years.
“What even are you drinking?” He peered into our cups, raising an eyebrow at what looked like Sprite, but smelled like a medical examination room.
We offered him a taste, pretending to be insulted when he coughed and remarked that there was no way that wasn’t toxic. We knew you weren’t supposed to drink rubbing alcohol right? At this we shrugged, gesturing toward the plywood bar that was beginning to sag under the weight of off-brand soda liters, towers of questionably clean solo cups, and a wide selection of the liquor store’s cheapest vodka. We’d done our best with the materials at hand.
“That shit is for pledges and GDIs. Let me show you where we keep the good stuff.”
We allowed ourselves to be ushered into the house, pleasure radiating out from the slice of bare skin on our backs where Pete placed a guiding hand. Crossing the crowded yard, we noted (and all too quickly forgot) the expressions on the faces of the sophomore girls we passed—eyebrows arched, lips curled down, noses wrinkled as though they were stuck in traffic behind a garbage truck. Jealous, we assumed. And why wouldn’t they be?
Inside the house, we loitered briefly, knowing two things: first, that “the good stuff” was most likely squirreled away in the bedroom, and second, that anticipation could be a powerful aphrodisiac. We picked our way through the carpet of crumpled beer cans, pausing in front of the composite photo to search for Pete’s face among the sea of essentially identical boys. There he was, next to the last boy from this frat who’d brought us upstairs, also under the guise of sampling “the best tequila we’d ever tasted.” How perfectly ironic.
We asked him questions: how did he like being in the frat? Did he have any wild hazing stories—sorry, pledgingstories *wink wink*—he could share with us? There had to be something, come on. If he didn’t tell us, we’d just have to imagine for ourselves what sort of stuff went on in the dusty, beer-scented basement late at night.
The entire time, he kept glancing over his shoulder to scan the room. In the moment, we figured this to be his horniness making him antsy, or perhaps concern that one of his brothers was going to walk in and start ragging on him the way twenty-year-old boys do when they sense that one of their buddies is a drink or two from getting laid. Silently applauding ourselves for being so attentive, so empathetic, we gulped our last few sips with our heads thrown back. Our mouths slipped into the particular smile we’d spent all semester perfecting—a grin that straddled the line between saint and sinner—and waved our empty cup at Pete. So, how about the good stuff then?
Something of a gentleman by college standards, he gave us water afterward and offered a t-shirt before we had to whine for it. Held against his chest, a kiss pressed between our shoulder blades, we allowed ourselves to think of love for the first time in months. The problem: he was not ours to keep. Two days after we walked home, feeling butterflies and feeling stupid for feeling butterflies and wishing there was a better way to describe the giddiness that fizzled in our veins, we were cornered in the dining hall by someone we may or may not have known. The girl (not girlfriend—that mattered) was sexier, despite her bleeding mascara and rage-red cheeks. Perhaps because of it. She told us she loves, correction loved, him. They were supposed to go to formal together next week. Nothing was official but it felt that way to her. Repetitions of “we’re sorry, we didn’t know” did nothing against her volley of “how could you” questions. Eventually, her friends pulled her away, staring murder into our eyes. The last thing she said to us: “You dumb fucking whore.” On the outside, we were unmoved, blinking back tears and our own caustic words that we knew not to say. But inside something fractured, spiderwebbed, and shattered apart like a mirror struck with a crowbar. Looking around the dining hall, we suddenly became telepathic, hearing a chorus of “whore, slut, bitch, cunt,” rippling down the long tables where everyone had stopped shoveling down salads to stare. Pete alone wouldn’t meet our eyes, reading the label on his Gatorade as though it were the answer key to his next midterm. We could read his mind too. Love had nothing to do with it.
A few years later we are still sexier, equal parts chased and chastised, though sometimes the scales come unbalanced. Times like when our friends with serious boyfriends stop inviting us out. Times like when our mothers lay down their dishwashing gloves after Christmas dinner and tell us they don’t like the person we’ve become. Times like when the only thing capable of pulling us out of an insecure, self-deprecating spiral is a “u up?” text from an unsaved number. Ice-rolling the previous night’s margaritas from our puffy cheeks, we stare at our reflections and wonder when we started to look so tired. The voice that answers back isn’t our own—hasn’t been for a while, generally fluctuating between that of our friends, our family members, past men, and the girl from the dining hall. Sexy. A resignation. Sighed like a hard-swallowed pill. Not so much a promise as a damnation. By now, the glitter and rhinestones have dulled and flaked away, layers of excitement and happiness peeling off like weathered house paint.
In a year or so, most of us we will move out, move on, and move forward. Sexy will find a new home within the unfurling list of our best qualities. I will be okay. But now, in this moment, confronted by eyebags the color of bruises and a seeping emptiness in my heart, I have never felt so alone.
Kristen Siegel (she/her) was born and raised on Cape Cod. She graduated with a BA in English from Duke University and is currently pursuing her MFA at Emerson College. Her work appears in After the Pause, Five on the Fifth, and Tiny Molecules.
