How to be a Girl

Based on The Friendzone

By Maria Kozakova
When I was five, and romance existed, I was happy.
I was a girl, and I was friends with a boy, and it was the first time I fell
in love. I had more freckles than all the cheerios in my bowl of cereal,
butterscotch blonde hair, and a nose that was more often than not smeared
with paint. He was tall, with soft brown hair and a knack for all things
dinosaur. I pushed him into the creek behind our house as we were catching
frogs, and he made fun of the way I ate my moms pancakes. He held my
hand when I fell off his bike while trying to prove that yeah, of course I could
ride it, and blushed when the other kids from our street asked him if I was his
girlfriend. I dont care what he said, I was, and until this day, he is still the
best boyfriend I ever had.
We grew a little more,
went on to different schools,
and didnt see each other anymore.

Before I knew it, I was eight. I was still a girl, but I was in love with
another boy now. He was the fastest runner in second grade, with long black
hair that flew around in a tangly mane as he raced around the soccer field.
He was shy, but so was I, and we never exchanged a single word. One time
in P.E., during our baseball unit, it was my turn to bat. I took a breath, slowly
shuffled up to the base, and strengthened my grip on the small plastic bat.

The ball flew at me what I couldve sworn was light speed. I missed. Then I
missed again. Then a third time. HAHAHA! You hit like a girl! The jeers
came from my classmates, pointing and laughing and blowing raspberries at
me. Wait, I thought. Hit like a girl? Why was that an insult? Were girls not
supposed to hit well? If we werent supposed to hit well in the first place,
why was I in this stupid class anyway? I glanced at my boy through the layer
of tears automatically rushing to my eyes. He was standing completely still,
his head hanging, staring at the ground. That was my first heartbreak.

When youre young, you understand love so much more clearly,

because it is the most innocent type of love- not yet tainted by lust and
jealousy and lies. For me, love then consisted of staring at Tyler Walker every
Wednesday at art class, the way the dust swirled around his face inspiring
my award winning flamingo finger painting. It consisted of holding Jimmy
Moores hand once during the annual fifth grade dance, too scared to make
eye contact, but not scared enough to simply stand in a gaggle of my friends
on the opposite side of the gym to the boys.
I never asked to go to their- the boys- birthday parties, even if they
were my friends. Ewww! they would have squealed, giggling. We dont
wanted to get infected with your cooties!
My mother wouldnt let me go to the birthday parties anyway,
because Id be the only girl; and that would be inappropriate.
Before long, I was twelve. I was friends with other girls because I was a
girl, and I didnt want to sit alone at lunch. They ate pizza with the little
plastic forks and knives, and gasped and cooed whenever a scandalous
encounter with a boy transpired. While the boys had small scuffles and
fistfights outside by the lunch tables, we, the girls, engaged in flat out
complemental warfare (also known as compliment-offs). You see, girls dont

like silence, and will chase it away by complimenting everything and

anything they possibly can about the other girls within a strict one mile
radius.
Oh my god, I like your scarf!
Really? No way. I just borrowed it from my sister! Thanks though, your
shoes look amazing! They new?
AAHHH! Thanks for noticing! They were half off but your top looks
cute as hell! Wheres it from?
This dance of exclamation marks and question marks went on for quite
a while. I became a master at it. We all did.
Crushes came and went.
Boys started to stare when we wore shorts, or even just a simple tank
top. Of course, there is nothing scandalous or arousing about a girls
shoulders. Im pretty sure every single boy out there knew that, but after the
school started enforcing its dress code, they started thinking, Well, there
has to be a reason that girl shoulders are illegal. They must be akin to a
boob, or a buttcheek. Lets stare every time we see one from now on!
Can you blame them?
Probably.
None of us ever did, though. We acted flattered and complimented. To
be seen as desirable to a boy- that was the dream.
I was now fifteen, and my friendship group was entirely female. It was
never a choice, was it? I had seen what happened to the girls who hung out
with guys- getting called sluts, whores, or lady-lovers. I didnt need that
added stress in my already overwhelmingly busy life. I had no time for

relationships, and besides, I had carefully observed what happened to

everyone around me in one of those. My best friend was a prime example.
One day, her sort-of boyfriend invited her over to the fair in town. She
went, and they catapulted their bumper cars at each other at the thrilling
speed of 3 miles per hour, and rode the ferris wheel into the night, yelling
the lyrics to the cheesy pop music playing faintly from the fair speakers. It
was a perfect day, she texted me later. I will always remember it. She
didnt know just how much she would be soon trying to forget.
Did you hear they did it behind the public toilets? The whispers
followed her down the hall. They went on a date together. 20 bucks says
shes pregnant already, the voices giggled. Her no-longer-sort-of-boyfriend
grabbed the nearest whisperer and pushed him against a locker, a fist
around his shirt collar.
Thats not true! He yelled angrily. I dont think of her that waycome on, look at her! Where do you get off, coming up with idiotic rumors
like this?
But you obviously like her, the whisperer smirked, a glint of menace
in his eyes. He pushed the other boy off of him, and straightened his collar.
No, came the firm reply. He turned to look at the hallway, in which
everyone was now staring at him. I dont! He screamed. That girl with
whom he had eaten cold pizza on a bench that night at the fair never talked
to him again. That girl was my best friend. She cried herself to sleep that
night, and didnt let a boy touch her for the next 2 years.
Stories like this were a regular thing. The broken hearts that ex
boyfriends left scattered in their wake, the midnight text rants from a
sobbing friend who had just discovered that a certain he had been cheating
on her for a few months. They stretched out of classroom, through the halls,
winding around the school bathrooms smelling of abuse and tears, and flew

straight out the front doors and onto the nighttime streets. The wolfwhistlers, the supermarket creeps, the stepdads and lonely neighbors. The
best part of it all was that we had been throughout our entire lives
conditioned to yell thank you! back at the drunks stumbling in a general
homewards direction, stopping to holler sweetie and honey at us. There
was a reason why I always had to get home two or three hours earlier than
my male friends. At first, the unfairness of it all caused fights between me
and my parents about it, but after my friend Sarah ended up at the police
station at 3 am on a Saturday soaked in tears, I stopped questioning it.
It is so upsetting listening to so many males talk about all of the times
they have gone on road trips alone and slept in their cars alone or on the
side of the road, or travelled overseas alone and slept on the floor of
strangers homes or in parks or at hotel, and they appear to have such
freedom in that they are able to be alone in ways that girls cannot. And there
is an ignorance surrounding this, in that these boys never seem to
comprehend just how lucky they are that strange people and unfamiliar
places and the dark of night are not their enemies, but instead exciting,
promising things.
Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and
soldiers, bar room regularsto be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening,
recording. Of course, all of this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, always
supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men
and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an
invitation. God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be
able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
But I will never be able to.
So dont
tell

me
that my gender doesnt isolate me.
Because it does.