I have been incredibly, joyously busy. I can't even begin to tell you what the last week has been like for me, and it's been all good... and I can't wait to share. But you'll have to wait.
Contrary to popular belief, I'm not spending all my time on Facebook... but I did have the shock of my life when I actually tracked down my best friend from elementary school. Of course, I had to tell her that she was in the book. And when I told her in what context, she - thankfully - laughed.
So in celebration of us connecting again for the first time in 20 years, I'm going to print an excerpt from the book that I don't think either of us will live down. Lucky for her she's pseudonymmed. (And once again, please remember to donate to RAINN!)
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In the meantime, I was turning six and adjusting to life with my mom and no dad in a condo complex right down the street from what was about to be my elementary school. I called them the blue condos, even though they were kind of grey. They were next to the yellow condos, which were next to the brown condos, which were directly across the street from where my new best friend Diana lived with her mom. Conveniently, her dad lived in a house on the other side of school. We rode our bikes - pink banana seats, flowered baskets, streamers and all - around the neighborhood and played in the park, and when winter hit we would go sledding. Of course, we played Barbies too. And naturally, we undressed them and contemplated their hard, plastic bodies in comparison to our own. Not that we'd get naked in front of each other - rather, we'd lament the fact that we didn't have chest bumps like Barbie did and wondered if there was something wrong with her, or us.
Diana had an older brother, Taylor. He was surly in the way only a teenage boy could be. He tin foiled his bedroom windows so no sun would come in. On the weekends he slept until noon, and if Diana and I made any noise in the house before then, he'd scream bloody murder and threaten to kill us. He acted like he hated Diana and I - he probably did. Despite that, I often found myself wondering if Taylor had a cluster of stuff down there like Chris did, or if he was smooth like a Ken doll. I never had a crush on Taylor - he was too mean, and not in that way that boys who liked girls were mean. So I was never inclined to ask him what he was hiding behind his jeans. It didn't matter, because Diana solved the mystery for both of us.
Like most children of divorced parents, Diana split her time between her mom's condo and her dad's house. She was lucky enough to have the two within spitting distance of one another, so she wasn't horribly displaced from week to week. It was also convenient for the two of us when we'd play together, as the blue condos were right in between both of her homes. We'd take turns hanging out at her place and my place, but one afternoon when she was supposed to come to my place, she called me to switch up our plans.
"You have to come over here," she said.
"Why?" I demanded, feeling put out. I didn't think it was fair. Diana and I were always at loggerheads over what was fair, and in my desire to keep her as a friend, I usually gave in to her.
"Just come over and I'll show you," she said.
There was an urgency in her voice that I never heard before, so I told my mom I was going to Diana's dad's place and took off through the field behind the condos.
When I got to the front door, she was waiting for me.
"C'mon," she said, and took my hand as she led me downstairs.
Though I had a basement phobia that had lasted as long as I could remember thanks to an incident where my mom's cat had jumped on my head (followed by an impromptu viewing of the Amityville Horror when I was being babysat one night), I didn't find Diana's basement discomforting. For one, it was easier to deal with demons and things that were going to jump out at me with my best friend at my side. And for two, Diana had kind of made it a play area, with board games like Risk and a blackboard where we'd play school games, despite the fact that the area was unfinished and packed full with boxes. And it was in one of those boxes that Diana had struck gold.
"Look," she said. And she opened the box to reveal a pile of Playboys.
We immediately poured over them and mused about all the naked women on nearly every page. We were mostly silent as we took in the soft lighting, the feathered hair, the juicy, glossy pink and red lips parted just so, the shapes and the colors and the expressions on their faces. We scrutinized the poses they were in, deduced that it looked like we would one day have chest bumps like they - and Barbie - did, but our most important discovery came when we flipped through a Penthouse.
Namely, that boys had a bumstick.
I don't remember how the term was coined, but I didn't have a hoo ha or a noo noo, or whatever else parents liked to term a vagina - I had a front bum. And it made sense to me that I had a front bum and a back bum, so I never thought anything of it. Though I'd never discussed with Diana how confused I was about what I'd seen playing doctor with Chris versus what we saw when we played with Ken and Barbie, we were both curious about what boys had down below. So when Diana opened up the Penthouse to a picture of a naked man, it was like a timeless mystery had been solved. It was Ken that was abnormal! Somehow, I felt like I'd been given superior knowledge. And so I shared my knowledge that boys had a bumstick - but not how we'd discovered it - with my mother. And she laughed.
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