just_skin Jus I was nine with a sloppy bowl cut and a six-pack. Most people confused me for a boy, but I didn’t mind; in fact, I loved it. I was strong—I could jump to the third monkey bar and swing every other one to the end, then pull myself up and rest across the paint-chipped metal bars. I barely remember food. It was a fight to pull me away from games of tag or survivor or kiss-the-boys, although I would instead give them purple nurples or charley-horsed thighs. My mother would drag me across the pebbled playground and bolt the door behind us so I could have a few mouthfuls of macaroni. I didn’t consider that my body could be separate from my mind until we moved. It was a small town; my mother referred to it as “safe.” That was her way to justify squeezing us feral street kids into a cul-de-sac—replete with picket fences and houses that I thought only existed in American sitcoms. They were real, and I among them was a wasp in a beehive. Tufts of dirty blonde hair suddenly felt sharp against my forehead as fairies and princesses skipped along the sidewalk in front of our rented two-bedroom ranch. By the time I started school I had assessed every inch of my identity in contrast to the neighbourhood girls and my mother’s new-found interest in Catholicism. We had started going to church on Sundays, before which I was unceremoniously shoved into a pink dress with white embroidered flowers. I learned quickly that who I was no longer fit into this strange world and if I were to survive, I had to kill my former self to become something new—something out of sync, a body separate from the mind—and it required incredible effort to maintain. But I did it. September came. I turned ten. My hair grew enough for a professional hairdresser to even out my fringe and place two butterfly clips neatly above my ears. My knees, that once wore scabs like badges of honour, were ivory white and creamed with St. Ives. My mother no longer looked at me in disgust or made comments like, “there are no dykes in this house.” I never understood what she meant, but the whites of her eyes and turned down lips frightened me. I was glad to see her smile. She smiled a lot when our nail polish matched, or I opted for diet coke over regular, or asked to use a puff of her Elizabeth Taylor perfume. I made friends on the first day because we had the same butterfly clips in our hair. After school, I ended up in a girl’s room filled with dolphin statues and pink/purple everything and thought it was so pretty—well, she was pretty, her things were inconsequential. Then we laid on our backs, did a crunch with our bellies, and compared how many rolls of fat we had. Looking back, it was just skin, but in the moment, it felt like incriminating evidence of our moral failures as girls. We resigned ourselves to have a dinner of iceberg lettuce and mustard. That was the first time I thought about food. When the hunger hit, my mother frowned as I shoveled spoonfuls of macaroni messily into my mouth. Stray noodles slid from my chin to the floor, sauce smeared across my cheeks like clown makeup, and a single butterfly clip hung idly to an oily clump of hair. 260115 what's it to you? who go blather from