God Save the Boyband

We gather here today to lay to rest our beloved girlhood. We have watched her days shorten. The dolls and stuffed animals have been buried beneath old clothes and scraps of denim. The blood has come and we are starting to ask questions we are told we shouldn’t. The whimsy has drained from the house, remaining only in the basement where we sleep on the pullout couch and eat cheesy pretzels and gain a new vocabulary for the things acted upon us when we were younger. We boot up the family computer, extension cord zagging through the blankets, listen to the opening notes of the soft green grass, see the glowing light, the rock rolled from the tomb, and utter that first gasp, girlhood resurrected, reentering our bodies as we sit, eyes fixed to the screen, veins pulsing, voices echoing off the basement walls; behold the boyband.

 In the first mornings of teenagedom I held a secret, she was still alive inside of me. Each morning, her alarm blared the ringtone of the band’s first single, and her lockscreen smiled back adorned with curls and a nirvana t-shirt. The eldest daughter was a short straw to pull, and beneath the schoolwork, the dance classes, the grief, the fixation on being wanted, on being special, she granted herself one small indulgence to carry lovingly beneath her tongue, in the crook of her elbow, in the pit of her stomach where the swarms and the laughter resided, the boyband.

 And these boys were nothing like the boys she knew- shallow and cruel, calling her a feminist bitch, or nothing at all if they deemed her unattractive. But the boyband—if you would dare call them that, were from working class families, were good brothers to their sisters, talked about mental health, and believed all women, and if they only knew her, they would never treat her like she was invisible. She had a dream, meeting the drummer at a train station that ended with him convincing her not to kill herself, so these boys were different, weren’t they?

 She and her best friends had the same favorite member, clocked in their hours reading the fanfiction, memorizing the covers, logging onto their fan accounts to skype their friends from texas, canada, california, only getting catfished a couple of times. Girlhood was thriving. In between wanting to die, she was getting her first dose of love, and she became dependent on it. This temporary fix was a placebo, and deep down I think she knew it. Over the years, the facade was fissuring with talks of solo contracts, scandalous interviews, toxic partners, and the critics were calling it as it was; boys will be boys. But these weren’t her boys, the ones she built up in her head.

 Whole years of memory were wiped clean, scrubbed of specificity and left smelling only of death, which was breathable if you didn’t get too close. She was left, again, and again, floundering in the mosh pit, trying to gain a glimpse of the security she had lost or the future she may make. Shining her flashlight at the ground and wedging her feet into the open gaps between bodies, using her torso like a blade to slice through the crowd until she was tasting metal at the barricade, and looked up to see an empty stage. Her pointe shoes were dangling from the mic stand, photos of her and her best friend on a roadtrip to a concert pasted to the face of an amp, the college acceptance letter she couldn’t accept because she had no money ripped up and tossed into the crowd like confetti, a letter from a younger dancer claiming they couldn’t wait to grow up so they could be just like her hidden in the base of a drum. The racks of costumes, the mounds of textbooks, her subpar ACT score, her journals in lieu of permission to see a therapist, but no band in sight, only the glow of a computer screen propped up on the pull-out couch prop set. The crowd was still jostling to some invisible music and I was just there, watching, clutching the rail.

My savior was not who it was supposed to be. A savior had not shown up at all. I have circled all the way back home. With girlhood comes outgrowth. I wanted her back. I wanted to be blind, to dedicate my waking and unconscious life to some ideal of a boy from Australia who doesn’t even live in Australia anymore, but probably some penthouse in Malibu with a model girlfriend and a rescue dog. I want to tell myself that I am wanted, that I am special. I don’t want to buy my own birthday cake. I want to make it to my next birthday. I know she does, but there’s no way for me to tell her that. I want to write a thank you card to the boy band for giving her something imperfect to love. But I don’t know who to address it from, or where to address it to. I want to hate the boyband for turning out to be people instead of answers. I want her to take the posters off the walls. I want her to take years to find something to replace them.

-Amanda Pendley

Amanda Pendley is a twenty-six-year-old poet from the suburbs of Kansas City. She earned her BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa and her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She has worked as an editorial intern at Black Lawrence Press and as a Co-Managing Editor of Lumina Journal. She currently works in higher education, bridging creative writing with cultural literacy. Her work has appeared in Vagabond City Lit, Homology Lit, and The Hellebore amongst other publications. She currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.