J-Bo.net

*the following is an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress

I had always feared becoming the family slut.

I knew that a slut was a bad thing to become, because that’s what Jenny called the girls who wore V-neck sweaters and brushed their hair in the school bathroom.

I’d been taking notes from Jenny, my older sister, for thirteen years. This is what I’d come up with so far:

Things That Make You Cool:

-Using computers/learning html

-Collecting pogs

-Six-inch dangly earrings from the dollar store

-Reptiles for pets

Things That Make You a Slut:

-Caring about clothes/trends

-Wearing Makeup

-Brushing your hair

-Crushes on boys

My childhood had been spent following her lead—staging attacks with our plastic dinosaurs, playing Ninja Turtles on Nintendo, and watching her feed live crickets to her pet chameleons.

But as the years passed, I had started to feel myself becoming feminine and relational in a way that Jenny wasn’t. Whenever she left the room, I would dress our tyrannosaurus rex in my Barbie’s wedding dress and walk it down an aisle through a stuffed animal audience while Because You Loved Me by Celine Dion played on my purple CD player.

Last year I had begun plucking my eyebrows into perfect arches with a pair of golden tweezers. I came home one day to find Jenny using those tweezers to feed live ants to her venus flytrap.

I feared what Jenny would think if she knew about the powder foundation I kept hidden at the bottom of my sock drawer. Or the fact that I had a crush on every boy I had ever seen. 

So the question had been swelling in my heart for years: at what age was it acceptable to start liking boys without being a slut?

My diary alone knew about my crushes, though I was sure to end all my boy-related entries with the same disclaimer: But I don’t even really like him that much and even if he asked me out I would say no because I’m too young to date and I’m not a slut like Megan Roberts. (That bitch had been dating all the hotties since fourth grade, dammit).

But the age at which it is acceptable to start liking boys without being a slut was such a hard thing to gauge. I had expected Jenny and my clan of older female cousins to eventually reveal the answer in time, but they all just kept not dating and not dating and not dating as the years went by.

So I looked to my parents, because they must have dated before they got married and people who marry the person they date are not sluts. Mom told me she never dated anyone before Dad, who she met several years after college. And Dad just told me I shouldn’t worry about dating until I turned thirty-five. I took that to heart and filed it away in my vague, mental database of things I thought I knew about the adult world. Thirty-five: the magical age at which it is acceptable to start liking boys without being a slut.

But then, when I was eleven, I found out about a little something called prom. I went with my parents to take pictures of a family friend who was wearing a beautiful dress and standing next to a handsome boy who everyone was calling her date. Her date! And her parents seemed okay with it. And she did not look like a slut. She looked like Cinderella.

That night I asked Mom how old people are when they go to prom, and she said seventeen or eighteen. Seventeen or eighteen! Not thirty-five! So seventeen or eighteen must be the real age at which it is acceptable to start liking boys without being a slut—otherwise the school wouldn’t endorse it!

But probably not a single day sooner, just to be safe.

I made a silent oath that day that I would not have a date until the day of my prom. Except, well, I figured I might actually have to find a date one day before prom. Just so we could plan things like what time he would come to my house for pictures. Not because I’d be a slut. I figured that would be justifiable.