Posts tagged girlhood
Cold Water

After running around in the heat of a South Carolina sun all day, I didn’t think there was anything that could scare you. We wandered from pier to pier, picking up nearly every shell on the shores of Myrtle Beach and kicking over abandoned sand castles. After a long day of pink streamer bike rides and arcade bubble gum, it was time to rinse off the day and rinse the sand out of our Kool-Aid dyed hair.

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My Honda Civic, July 1989

It was a night like any other that summer. Short skirt, fishnet stockings, thick lines of black eyeliner, ruby red lips, and dancing. I’d had a line of coke before the night began, and part of a bottle of cheap wine—seriously cheap, dollar-a-bottle Strawberry Hill. It was early in the night for us, a hallway mark of 1 a.m. David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” was at the part of the song where everyone screams along.

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Girl Growing

Elise is standing in front of her dresser mirror, a tangerine in one hand, a wad of Kleenex tissue in the other. Her dark-eyed reflection stares back at me beneath a fringe of stylish blond-brown bangs. In our fifth-grade class, Elise is a golden goose amid the rest of us awkward ducks, with her pert nose and movie star mole at the corner of her mouth.

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