One of the Boys

All she wanted was to be one of the boys. One of those towering columns of knees and elbows, enthusiasms, and loyalties. They moved as a pack, six, eight, boys at a time. All older, all full of the mystery and mastery of the masculine in a world that prized such. She was only six and she could already see how boy was better than girl, how masculine was rewarded, how feminine restricted. The ranch was man-kingdom, the ranch house was woman’s territory. Land management, animal husbandry, and mechanics filled his days. Bread making, laundry, milk cows, and chickens hers. Her Barbies came clothed in sky-high plastic shoes and impossible beauty standards His G.I. Joes wore muscles and stern expressions. Boys were better, and so she chased the impossible ideal.

The day is sunny in memory, though it might have been cloudy. The wind was blowing as it always did across the sere Wyoming plains. Her sweat was not so much from warm weather as personal effort. The boys chased from horse barn to cow barn across the gulch, moving so fast between them her stubby legs could not keep up. They convinced her there was a tunnel leading from one barn to the other, a secret pathway that only boys could access. Even at six, she knew this was more than metaphor. She was old enough to see how the world was ordered, young enough to believe she might change it.

At some point, she caught up. To the oldest cousin. His burgeoning manhood in evidence as fuzz across his upper lip, as the stink of rarely washed skin. The noise of the other boys faded as she at last succeeded in cornering her prey in the hayloft above the horse stalls. It was a victory soon to be subsumed in the bitter taste of defeat. Prey became predator.

This paragon of everything she desired craved something else. She was never to be one of the boys, only a thing to be used and discarded. This wolf in boys' clothing saw in her innocent enthusiasms the opportunity to explore flesh thus far denied by girls his own age. Wolves do not snarl as they stalk; they pad silently circling the prey, securing the advantage before they show their teeth.

Her cousin congratulated her on how fast she could run, on how clever she was to corner him in the hayloft. “You must be tired,” he said touching her leg, seeming to wisely acknowledge the comparative length of her thighs and his. Subtly inferring that he had let her catch him, that she could never outrun him.

Did this undercurrent of threat pierce her confidence? If so, it is lost to the haze of the after. Memory says she should have felt afraid from the moment she entered that dusty old barn cut through by sunbeams and the sweet smell of alfalfa. In truth, she probably felt puffed up with confidence. She knew the flexibility of her own mind, the responsiveness of her muscles, the ordering of interaction between elders and little ones. She knew the exits.

To take an exit though, one must first acknowledge the need to leave, and why would she leave? Now, when she had caught him. When that elusive carrot of being one of the boys dangled so close, why would she fear the shadow of the stick?

“Come over here,” he said, indicating a hay bale. “Sit down, let’s talk a while.”

Magic words! Eldest cousin cared what she thought?! this was heady stuff. After years of being ignored, belittled, and discounted, of boys’ eyes rolling when she spoke, of being constantly and specifically instructed in her role as ‘just a girl’—one of the boys was actually asking her to sit. And talk. There was no resisting the siren call of imagined respect.

Her palms scraped against the scratchiness of the hay bale as she hoisted herself up to sit, being careful to choose a higher bale, one that would put her at eye level, declare her as equal. He smiled a nervous little twitch and scraped his own palms down the front of his jeans before sitting himself.

“Hot day, isn’t it?” he coughed past the dust in his throat.

“Yes,” she replied, tentative. “Especially after running. I bet it is cooler in the tunnel.” She was fishing, hoping to be inducted into the club.

“The tunnel? Oh, yeah, that.”

He sat, shifting on his bale, knees, and elbows very much in evidence. This picture is etched in her memory. The last moment he was a figure to be looked up to, an ideal to be strived towards. A bookend of normality. Because the gap from that memory to the next is deeper than the gulch between barns. There was the sense of triumph, of finally being welcomed into the boy-tribe and then there was this…

Her jeans and panties are tangled around her boots - she can’t run, though she desperately wants to. The hay is rough on tender parts of her. He sits, disturbingly intense, mumbling the kind of inanities you whisper to spooked horses - “Settle now, settle.” His gaze is focused, but not on any part of her that contains self. He does not wish to know her thoughts, her hopes, her perspective on the relative value of Barbies to GI Joes. All he wants is this slit between her legs that contains nothing but pain as his fingers probe and prod and invade. His blankness is most disturbing of all. She has never before seen humanity surrendered to appetite. In her short six years, her interactions with others have been colored by humane impulses but this hunger is different; the memory of being devoured in this way stands alone, lost in hay-dust and mote-filled spears of sunlight.

Later, she once again chased after the boy on a retrieval mission, her fingers following the burning trail his had blazed. There is hay stuck inside of her. She knows this because on the long trek back from the man territory in the barn to woman country in the house, every movement stabs fury to her core, the insidious strands of alfalfa repeating the hurt, reminding her that as a girl she owns title to nothing. Not the Ranch, not the respect of her older male cousins, not the dark secret parts of her body. The burning shame of rooting inside to remove the detritus of his disregard is a hard thing - an obsidian stone she will carry for a lifetime. It is a graven image to be regularly examined, its very inscrutability the proof of its power.

She never told what happened—lesson learned. She could not accept that the ranch was man’s demesne, that she must retreat to the house, but she learned to not chase the boys. She learned to go her own way, blaze her own trail. And she learned the careful calculus of all females - constantly judging that moment when appetite supersedes humanity, the point where she ceases to be a self and becomes nothing but a target.

She had wanted to be one of the boys. It was not a worthy goal.