Buying Beer

I bought my own beer in high school. I didn’t have a fake ID; I would just go to a register with a guy behind it. I didn’t get a fake ID until my freshman year of college. Wow, lucky, huh? Looking like that at fifteen? Yeah, it was pretty awesome. What wasn’t so awesome was getting hit on by grown men before I was twelve years old.

Every coin has two sides. The girls who were jealous of the way my body pushed clothes around didn’t envy the advances from men old enough to be my father or grandfather. Guess what, there’s no escaping the latter. The girls stuffing their bras had no idea what it was like walking around in my body, said stupid shit like “You’re so lucky!” Like they knew my experience better than I did.

When I was fourteen, studying at the community college library for my high school exams, an older man with a thick accent approached me and asked me to help him with a word he didn’t understand. The word was suck. I explained it using the example of drinking through a straw. He thanked me, then told me he had heard that American girls like to suck and asked if I would like to suck him. I walked away, blood rushing in my ears. I wasn’t dressed provocatively, but somehow, this grown man found this to be an acceptable way to speak to a girl he’d never met because my body looked like a woman’s.

I read things like the story about the preacher here in Charlotte who says that if he’s on a jury for a rape case and the female (girl or woman irrelevant) was wearing shorts, he’ll vote to acquit, and I want to take my fat ass to his church in Daisy Dukes and dare that motherfucker to say anything to me.

I want to take all of these predators who blame their victims into a situation they can’t control, where they don’t feel safe. I don’t want to hurt them, but I want them to feel every atom of the fear they create in others. It’s theirs, and I want to give it back to them, with interest.