Kenosha Writers’ Group

“The Worst Possible Thing”

At a very young age Lucy knew that she was different from other girls and other people in general. She wasn’t interested in dolls and frilly things and the sight of the color pink made her swim with nausea. The things that made Lucy become alive with joy were ferociously riding her bike, running until her legs nearly buckled under her body, and exploring the woods near her house in the hopes of discovering something forbidden.
Lucy was aware that her interests were more like that of boys, yet she was still ultimately a girl. She was an energetic wiry-statured girl with countless freckles and wild brown hair. Lucy felt most comfortable in hooded sweatshirts and pants that somehow always had patches, as her mother tried to salvage the remnants of many torn open knees. There never seemed to be a time when Lucy did not have at least one scrape or cut or bruise from simply being a fearless little tomboy.
Life in Lucy’s eyes was an endless tunnel of opportunities in which she saw no limits. The years passed by and Lucy transformed from a young child into an eleven year old person. The comforting simplicity of life as she knew it began to slip away. The boys who she would joke around and play with at recess and after school began to tease her and act differently toward her. They no longer wanted to play with her and instead their faces acquired odd expressions when they looked at her. This made Lucy uneasy and as she searched her face in the bathroom mirror, she tried to figure out what had changed and saw only the same old face staring back at her.
Some of the boys in her class began saying silly things to her along the lines of “I like you” and “You look nice today” and writing her scribbled boy-handwriting notes saying similar things. Lucy had grown, but not to the degree that everyone else in her class had, and the changes were so slight that Lucy could not see them. The other girls displayed various sizes of bumps on their chests, some even nearing the size of her mother’s. Sitting in the bathroom stall peeing, Lucy began to notice the sounds of plastic and paper crumpling more frequently. Many of her classmates’ faces began to have painful looking red spots, and some had so many that you could no longer see what they looked like.
One day at school there was a stranger in the classroom who Lucy later found out was there to talk to the class about the word written on the blackboard, puberty. The boys were led out of the room by a male stranger and the door closed behind them. The female stranger made Lucy and the other girls watch a video with weird diagrams and too many words being spoken. Afterwards she explained about menstruation and hormones and described as best as she could about all the changes that were going to or had already started to take place in our bodies. Lucy absorbed as much as she could and after understanding a considerable amount, became very sad. She wondered why this had to happen to her when she didn’t want it to – she didn’t like the boys in the same way the other girls did as they giggled and tossed their hair from side to side. She wanted to keep running like a maniac and riding her bike no-handed down the big hill in her neighborhood.
In Lucy’s mind this sucked - plain and simple. Lucy did not want to become like the girls in their frilly pink stupidity and was worried sick that she no longer had any choice in the matter. What would become of her she feared? Living happily in the fearless simplicity of childhood had been amazing and was something that Lucy was not ready to give up. She hoped that maybe this puberty thing would pass her by and that she would not catch it. But deep down Lucy knew that she could not stop it and that puberty would soon rear its ugly head and transform her into a mother-looking person. As the tears flowed down her freckled cheeks, Lucy felt that the world was ending, and as she peddled her bike faster and faster she wished as hard as she could to simply ride away from everything.