Their Gang
Fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
12/23/95
A regular suburban gang of five to seven ten-year-old girls, most of whom are holding onto their pre-pubescence with fear disguised as defensiveness disguised as pride, are in their semi-secret hideout, the garage of an unfinished and unsold tract house.One of them has “found” a hardcore porno magazine. They’re all gawking at it and discussing it, each searching her soul for the direct emotional response she thinks the others will find most acceptable.
They unspokenly agree to speak about the way the women in the pictures look. By the standards of the female nudes they’d seen repeatedly in fashion magazines, the girls immediately agreed these women were U-G-L-Y.
Fake tits that don’t even look like organic matter (one girl said they looked like her mom’s nicotine patches only on steroids). Big teased bleached hair.
Train-wreck-looking makeup jobs, and lipstick that looked like it belonged on Ronald McDonald.
The most ridiculous looking high heels, worn even when the women were wearing nothing else.
And weirdest of all, wide waists and hips like you only see on real women like their moms and sisters, not on anybody cool enough to be in a magazine. If they knew what bad lighting and photography meant they would probably have mentioned that too.
None of them dare speak out loud about the men and especially not about the erections; none will admit to being even the slightest bit interested in that particular horror/mystery. Each pretended she was worldly enough to already have known what was inside boys’ pants, but too worldly to care about it.
Each girl carefully measured her staring time, making sure not to be seen as unduly interested in those odd-looking things with their ridiculous bulbous dangling extensions. One girl made the silent conclusion that when a guy’s pants bulge looked big it was probably just the size of those extensions; in other non-words, nothing to get excited about.
Then Sharee turned the page to be confronted by the first “uncut” male human in her limited experience. She turned her eyes away one second too late; she immediately knew all the other girls knew where she’d been looking. Sharee knew she’d failed to play the game by the unspoken rules.
In an instant, she felt estranged from her friends, even ostracised. She wondered whether she was doomed to become boy crazy, and if boy-craziness meant she’d forever be driven away from real friendship with the girls.
Seven years later, she remembered this incident while she was directing her best girlfriend’s boyfriend towards her, Sharee’s, bra clasp. As the boy’s nervous hands found their way around her, Sharee also realized what the fashion magazines used to say about how Being A Woman meant Making Tough Choices, and how sometimes the choices weren’t so tough to make after all.
