The Nate Years
by Natalie Taylor
Photo by Natalie Taylor
I dressed carefully the day I decided to be a girl. My bare toes curled, tunneling divots into the gray-purple carpet of my walk-in closet. I stood tall, pushed my shoulders out of their perpetual slouch Mom was always yanking me out of with a sharp poke between the shoulder blades. The Backstreet Boys’ muffled crooning seeped through the closed door that led to my bedroom. A ball cap, once-black, now a rusty gray, hung by its leather band from the doorknob, and the mirror clung to the door with plastic brackets, exposing the beveled-glass edges. There would be no turning back.
Over the top of my sports bra—the one with the thinnest straps—I wore the yellow tank top I usually only paired with overalls. But the day I decided to be a girl, I wore the tank top with a pair of blue-jean shorts embroidered with tiny yellow daisies, a pair of hand-me-downs from my older sister. I had never worn them, but they conformed to the new curves of my hips and butt easily. My exposed thighs prickled with goose bumps, and my scarred knees and shins shone naked as they reached towards the floor.
“Too girly,” I’d said when I’d pulled the shorts from a box of Sarah’s old clothes, but they took their place on my shelf anyway. As if they knew I’d eventually turn to them as a symbol of something I could be.
tomboy n.
1. A rude, boisterous, or forward boy. Obs.
2. A bold or immodest woman. Obs.
3. A girl who behaves like a spirited or
boisterous boy; a wild romping girl;
a hoyden.
The dictionary is precise, portraying an interesting evolution (tomboy once described an actual boy?!), but in the end, the current definition is finite and harsh, filled with loaded words like boisterous, spirited, romping, and hoyden.
Yet, according to psychologist Sheana Ahlqvist and colleagues, “despite the importance of identity meaning, there is little consensus on the definition of tomboyism, even within psychological research.”
The world is telling tomboys two different things—you are rude and too bold and a romping hoyden, but we don’t actually know how to define what you are. We tell tomboys, “Your definition of self is wrong.” But we are really saying, “We have no idea what to do with you.”
My mother claims I became a tomboy because Hannah was a tomboy. When I was four, Hannah moved in down the street, and we were instantly best friends. She was a year older than me, was extremely shy, and was obsessed with the Olsen twins.
Mom also says I was never shy before I met Hannah, though I have distinct memories of a paralyzing fear of new people before Hannah was ever part of my life. Mom says I had no interest in the Olsen twins until Hannah and I became friends, that I had no desire to own Barbie dolls until I saw Hannah’s collection. While my pre-Hannah disinterest in Barbie dolls leads me to assume that I had tomboy tendencies before my new friend, Mom might have been right in some respects. It’s natural for a child to adapt to whatever her peers are interested in, particularly if that peer is older. But Mom wasn’t there when we decided were tomboys.
Hannah and I spent long afternoons locked in her bedroom, pretending to be the Olsen twins solving mysteries like they do in their Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley series. Hannah—being left-handed—always wanted to be Mary-Kate, who was also left-handed. But according to the newsletters Hannah received in the mail from the Mary-Kate & Ashley Fun Club, Mary-Kate’s favorite color was blue, and my favorite color was blue, while Ashley’s favorite color was pink.
“I hate pink,” I told Hannah.
“You can’t be Mary-Kate, though. You’re right-handed.”
“But you like pink.”
And she did like pink–her bedspread was pink, her laundry basket was pink, the tutu on her mostly naked, life-size Barbie doll was pink.
The Fun Club newsletters also told us that Mary-Kate was a tomboy, playing more of the tomboy roles in their videos and films. So, as the kindergarten logical resolution to our conflict, Hannah and I became tomboys. If we were both tomboys, then what Hannah and I had in common with Mary-Kate Olsen was the same. If we were both tomboys, then we could both be Mary-Kate whenever we wanted.
Spring forward to my tenth year, and I’m stumbling towards the front of the bus behind a group of guys I call my boys. I pull my baseball cap out of my backpack. We aren’t allowed to wear hats at school or on the bus, but I slide the cap on backwards as my tennis shoes clunk against the hollow steps, exiting the bus into the Texas hot summer day. Cole, Pat, and Praveen are already trotting across the grass towards the bike rack where our bikes are waiting for us, and I run to catch up.
We shove each other back and forth, trying to beat each other to the bikes under the sprawling oak tree that spits acorns into the dirt. Dawdling, we throw acorns, ducking and dodging nature’s bullets behind the wide tree trunk and low bike racks. Sweat collects itself under the leather band of my ball cap, and my short bangs poke through the hole in greasy tendrils.
We clamber on our bikes and are off, speeding down the road in a never-ending race with no winner. We never wear helmets. We own the streets of this neighborhood. We know every shortcut, cut-through, and pothole. We are kings, sultans, rulers. I never ask why we always have to race. I am one of them. When you are one of the guys, you don’t ask questions. You don’t say things like, “Can’t we just ride today?” No matter how tired you are, that is exactly what you want to do-—just ride.
“Praveen!” I yell, “I can’t believe you hit me in the fucking head with the fucking Frisbee at fucking recess. Can you even fucking aim, you fucking asshole?” I yell, adding, “Fuck!” for emphasis. I yank on my handlebars and stand up on the pedals, pumping once or twice to get ahead of Praveen before coasting. Then I hawk a loogie.
Praveen pushes his glasses up on his sweaty nose saying, “I’m sorry, geez. Don’t fucking yell at me.”
Cole and Pat giggle. “Don’t be a pussy, Praveen,” says Pat.
Cole pops wheelies on his trick bike as we weave past houses set back behind tall pine trees.
Determining my status on the tomboy spectrum started slowly. With Hannah, I had mostly emphasized my disassociation with pink and purple and my hatred of shopping, but I still played with her Barbies. I still wore girl clothes—though no skirts, and definitely no pink. But I kept my hair as short as Mom would allow and started wearing the backwards baseball cap. I picked up cuss words from my brother and the boys who’d learned them from their brothers. I surpassed Mary-Kate’s version of tomboy—the surface level tomboy roles seen in movies—and became something entirely different. I became Nate Taylor, penning the name on the top of all my papers (with Natalie in parentheses in case my teachers didn’t know who the new moniker described). While I was often naturally called Nat, I thought Nate would engrave my tomboyness into my exterior, would tattoo it on my forehead so nobody would ever doubt my identity. Now, I look back at those years and call them the “Nate Years,” though the name Nate never stuck. It, like all my other boyish characteristics, was viewed by adults as a phase.
While I became Nate, the girls around me became girlier. They painted their nails, began fantasizing about being a middle school cheerleader and slathered their lips in pink lip gloss. Hannah and I drifted apart, mostly because she moved away, but I think our falling out would have happened anyway. She grew into a girl who loved shopping and makeup more than being sweaty. When I look at her Facebook pictures now, I see no remnants of the girl I solved mysteries with. Tomboy, for her, was not an identity. It was a phase.
By the time I entered third grade, I preferred guy friends over girl ones. I was still close with a few girls with whom I gossiped and had tea parties, but I was partial to riding bikes with Pat, Praveen, and Cole. I collected these boys–Pat with his badassness, Cole with his red hair and freckles and dependably parentless house, and Praveen, forced into the category of nerd because he had private tutoring sessions twice a week. I became one of them. I called them “my boys,” and they drawled out my name in thick Texas accents, calling me a pussy and a fuck-head, same as they called each other.
On many nights after those days riding bikes with the boys, I took a shower and stood, wrapped in a towel in front of the bathroom mirror. My dark hair was still wet, hanging just below my earlobes. I took a comb to my head, slicking my bangs backwards so that no hair touched my face. My hair bubbled at the front, and I looked like a brunette version of a young Leonardo DiCaprio. For a brief moment I looked suave. But when I moved my head, wet clumps of hair fell forward, tickling my cheeks in a disappointingly girly way. I sighed, then leaned over the sink, stomach pressing against the edge of the counter as I inspected my upper lip. I wondered if I could ever grow hair there. I went to sleep that night in my dirty sports bra, believing if I wore a bra constantly, my boobs would stop growing in.
I was convinced my sex could be whatever I wanted it to be, that when puberty hit, I could grow a mustache if I wanted to. Despite the videos we watched at school, which told me that I could start my period any day, I was in denial that it could happen to me. I showed the boys the pad the teachers had given to all the girls and told us not to show any boys. My boys joked that girls had to wear diapers. “I never will if I can help it,” I told them.
A girl asked me on the playground once if I wanted to have a sex change. “Maybe when I’m older,” I told her, but only because I wanted to see her reaction. I still thought of myself as a girl but my own version of what people thought a girl should be.
A 2010 study conducted out of the University of London looked at how the identities of tomboy and girly-girl are co-constructed in opposition to one another in girls aged nine to eleven. Carrie Paechter found that girls create their identity in accordance with stereotypes of hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine characteristics, so that tomboys are usually defining their identities by or against those same stereotypes. Paechter says that children considered tomboys by either themselves or their peers usually presented themselves by “embracing the masculine,” by doing boy things, such as playing competitive sports, being physically adventurous, getting into trouble, and by dressing more like boys. Or they might simply reject femininity by avoiding things they associated with girly-girls, such as the color pink, wearing skirts, keeping clean, and grooming their hair. Some girls claimed both identities, saying they were “a bit of a tomboy” when playing sports, but they dressed and acted like girls in other situations, creating a plasticity in their selfhoods, moving easily between the two when it was socially acceptable.
Yet, as the girls neared puberty, most tomboys, even those who had rejected girly-girl behavior before, would come to identify themselves as girly-girls. They became less competitively active because their girl peers spent more time sitting around talking, and the girly-girls became more popular in school. Being a girly-girl seemed to have more advantages, so the girls jumped ship, leaving their tomboydom behind them.
Other girls turned an about face. Instead of rejecting femininity, they began to reject masculinity out of fear of becoming a “future butch or lesbian…if they continued to be tomboys.” One girl who was interviewed even described the laughable future career of being a butch PE teacher.
I can find myself in parts of Paechter’s study. I was the tomboy with honorary boy status, who rejected all things girly. I treated “pink” as if it were a curse word, didn’t understand the concept of makeup, and hated having my hair done—I didn’t know how to put my hair in a ponytail until I was fourteen. I also loved being dirty. I once bragged to a group of girls on the playground that I hadn’t showered in four days to the amusing effect of them running away yelling, “Ewwww.”
However, while I identified as a tomboy, I hated competitive sports. I didn’t like being depended on, and had an absurd need to know exactly what I was supposed to do if a ball was thrown or kicked to me. I wanted to be perfect. So while Cole, Pat, and Praveen played soccer or Frisbee on the playground, I sat with the girls who picked daisies in the field, where we talked about boys. And while my male counterparts were sneaking into the woods after school to smoke—or possibly just look at—the cigarettes Pat got from his brother, I stood on the street and yelled at them, “You idiots!”
I dressed like a boy, smelled like a boy, cussed like a boy, rode a boys’ bike, and played in the woods with boys, but I was also not exactly a boisterous hoyden. I was not rude or loud, unless I was alone with the boys. I didn’t get into trouble, didn’t do things I knew were wrong. I had fear, while the boys seemed not to possess it. They didn’t know that fear existed, and I was jealous of that.
Other girls in elementary school liked Little House on the Prairie, but I was drawn to the tomboy version of Laura Ingalls Wilder in Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink’s 1935 pioneer novel. I wanted to be Caddie, running wild in the prairie, riding horses, and getting into all kinds of trouble with her brothers.
A sickly child, Caddie’s parents allow her to play outdoors instead of keeping her inside to learn household chores in hopes she would regain her health. Throughout the novel, Caddie rues the day when she will have to grow up and become a lady. From her parents, she gets conflicting advice. Her father encourages her wild nature while her mother encourages her to calm down, singling her out for punishments because boys can be excused for rowdy behavior while girls must be lady-like.
I was amazed by Caddie’s fearlessness and bravery more than anything, and I attributed these characteristics to her ability to run and keep up with the boys. I thought that if I spent enough time pretending to be fearless, I too, could be like Caddie.
But in the novel, Caddie eventually becomes a girl, convinced by her father that growing up is not so scary, that becoming a woman isn’t just household chores but also a responsibility “to teach [men and boys] gentleness and courtesy and love and kindness.” When Papa asks if she is ready to stop running wild and grow up to be that woman, Caddie cries and doesn’t respond. But by the following morning, Caddie is “ready to go and meet” that womanly responsibility.
As a child, I read and reread the pages of that book, trying to puzzle out why on earth Caddie would want to become a woman when she had it so good being a boy. She could be free. She could be fearless. Why should it be her responsibility to teach boys gentleness and courtesy?
In Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, the title character experiences a fluid identification with gender. While born a man, she eventually becomes a woman, dealing with the consequences of that transformation—such as debates over her right to own property—as they arise. In the middle of the novel, Orlando also has the ability to move between sexes, dressing as a woman or a man depending on her activity or mood, the point being that clothes have a certain power in the world; clothes “change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s eight-year-old daughter Shiloh has started dressing as a boy and demanding (s)he be called John. Jolie and Pitt have been praised for allowing their child to express themselves, to experiment with their gender identity. Others criticize the celebrity parents for allowing John to decide their own gender so young. These critics claim John might have identity issues as they mature, or that allowing such gender fluidity now may lead to gender dysphoria later.
Woolf argues that while the sexes are different, “[i]n every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.” While Orlando becomes a woman, she remains the same person—the narrator enforces that Orlando’s identity has not changed—which suggests that gender isn’t necessarily a crucial part of our identity. Today we can be masculine, tomorrow feminine, mixing the two to create our own understanding of the self.
I live in Alaska now, where people approach the gender divide more casually. Two months after moving here, I stopped wearing makeup altogether. My mascara clumped in the bottle. The sponge I used for foundation rotted. It was liberating to throw everything away–I never liked makeup in the first place. I now live in a cabin with no running water and haven’t showered in four days. Last night, I had a beer with friends at the local brewery, and nobody knew or cared that I hadn’t showered recently. Nobody ran from me yelling, “Ewww!”
I think nothing of the new lifestyle I’ve adapted to. I’ve never felt so comfortable in my own skin. I only realize that it might seem strange when I leave the state. Recently, my boyfriend and I went to Pennsylvania to see his friends and family, and while nobody commented on my lack of makeup, I was more self-conscious of the zits that suddenly erupted on my chin. I thought about how I was dressing myself each day, conscious that I was often portraying myself differently from the expected norm. My lack of makeup felt more like a statement, just as my backwards baseball cap had been when I was ten. I felt like a tomboy again, even though I have not claimed that word in a long time.
If Pitt and Jolie’s child experiences confusion or distress later in life, it will not be because of their young gender fluidity but because of our culture telling them that their gender fluidity is wrong. We are forced to make choices about our definitions of self in attempts to better describe our personal understanding of the world. Often those choices of language are given to us: boy or girl, tomboy or girly-girl, butch or fem. Sometimes we are forced to pick the label that is closest to our understanding of ourselves. We are a culture of inescapable labels, but sometimes those labels don’t have quite the right fit. Sometimes their definitions contain loaded words that don’t describe who we are at all. Yet we put the label on anyway, because there is not another or better option, and if we don’t choose one, someone else will choose one for us.
Pat was the ladies’ man in the fifth grade—and had been since the third grade—with a new girlfriend every week. He had gel-slicked blonde hair and narrow, squinty eyes. He knew all the words to Eminem’s “Slim Shady,” rapping in the seat next to me during Language Arts class so that I eventually knew all the words too, which made me feel badass because everybody knew Pat was badass. He had an older brother, who—Pat claimed—sometimes gave him cigarettes, and the rumor was that he had already kissed a girl.
I laughed at the other girls who had crushes on Pat because they didn’t know him the way I knew him. I knew Pat when we raced down the hill in the back of the neighborhood, seeing who could get to the top of the next hill without touching the handlebars or pedals. I knew him when he cussed just to cuss, letting strings of “fuck-yous” and “dickheads” and “sons-of-bitches” out in long, continuous, incoherent sentences, often aimed at me. I knew him when we sometimes stopped to play in the creek, knee deep in mud and murky water, even though my mom warned us about water moccasins.
I don’t know why it happened, but it did. One day, in the spring after I turned twelve, mere months before I’d start my period, I decided I wanted Pat to be my boyfriend. I told no one, writing the secret in my little green journal instead.
One day soon after my journal confession, on the bus ride home, Pat told me he liked Blaire. My legs stuck to the leather seat as I stared into his light green eyes, stumped. I was sitting right there in front of him, but while he spoke to me, he didn’t seem to see me.
That night, I puzzled over what Blaire had that I didn’t. Blaire and I were friends, were both good students, had both short brown hair, had both braces, were both lean and muscular with rounding butts. The only difference I could see between me and Blaire was that she was a girl, and I, for all intents and purposes, was a boy.
I stood in front of the mirror the day I chose to be a girl, wearing my sister’s shorts and feeling like a foreigner in my own body. Without my ball cap, I didn’t know who I was. But I pushed past that uncertainty, opened the closet door, snuck out of the house so my parents wouldn’t see me, climbed on my boys’ bike, and rode to Kristen’s house.
Kristen was the only girl in the neighborhood I considered a friend and certainly the only girl in the neighborhood who was capable of doing what I planned to ask her to do. I pedaled hard, flying down the hill the boys and I competed on. The daisy-covered jean shorts rode up on my hips, so the plastic leather seat had chafed the inside of my thighs by the time I rolled up on Kristen’s front lawn.
Kristen had neatly combed brown hair and wispy, curled bangs. She wore pink, gauzy shirts with pale khaki capris pants, and her lips were always coated in a different color of lip gloss. She took dance lessons and prided herself on the latest gossip. Aside from Lacey, who was inaccessible to me due to her preppy popularity (and because I openly hated Lacey and her preppy popularity), Kristen was the girliest girl I knew.
I gritted my teeth, braced myself for what would happen next, and said, “I want you to teach me how to be a girl.”
She grinned, overjoyed at the prospect of giving a makeover, just like in Clueless. “It’s about time,” she said.
Kristen took me inside. We sat on the floor of her bedroom while she meticulously painted each of my fingernails before resting my hand delicately on the newspaper between us.
If I complained, Kristen said, “Do you want Pat to like you or not?”
After she finished my nails, she pulled out a makeup bag full of lip gloss in different shades. She held each color up to my face before picking a pale candy pink. The wand with its soft tip was cold and wet against my lips. She slid it back and forth, then instructed me to rub my lips together to smooth out the paste. I did as she said, instantly feeling sick to my stomach. She held up a mirror. I smiled weakly at the ghost of myself, then pushed the mirror away.
While my nails dried, we looked at People and Seventeen magazines, and talked about which boys at school were cute. We talked about how I could get Pat’s attention with my new makeover.
I had never been so aware of my lips, of my fingernails. I’d catch a glimpse of hot pink on the tips of my fingers and then became surprised to find the fingers belonged to me. My lips felt sticky, and my hands felt heavy, as if I’d attached weights to them. It became difficult to talk. And by the time I rode home, I knew I couldn’t remain this way. I’d remove the nail polish and lip gloss, but I’d leave the hat on the doorknob in my closet because I couldn’t go back either.
In 2007, sociologist C. L. Carr interviewed once-tomboys to find out if or when they ceased being tomboys and why. Most of the women she talked to stopped being tomboys around puberty for several reasons: because they grew out of it, because they were pressured by parents or peers, or because they found being a tomboy to be an obstacle for their growing sexual interest in boys. Meanwhile, those who continued to act as tomboys into adolescence did so because they were highly athletic or because they found they were sexually interested in girls.
It makes sense that sexual interest plays a role, but it’s almost too easy of an explanation. As we grow into adolescence, hormones pulse through our bodies and we lose control. I couldn’t help that I had a crush on Pat, but placing myself in that particular category of Carr’s study quickly becomes more complicated.
Before I liked Pat, I liked Cole, the boy with red hair and freckles, and Cole liked me back. While we were part of the group of guys, Cole and I were also boyfriend-girlfriend and had been off-and-on since the third grade, well before puberty began taking its toll on my body.
Cole and I walked our golden retrievers together and sometimes talked on the phone. We wrote each other notes at school and held hands during couple skates at the Skate Ranch. He bought me cheap jewelry from Claire’s once a year, riding his bike over on Christmas morning to put the package in my mailbox with a note saying “I love you” in scrawling, sloppy cursive.
Cole and my relationship wasn’t something we discussed with the other boys, but Pat and Praveen were aware of it. It existed in the background, a relationship that was secondary to my relationship with the group. I straddled an invisible, wobbly line–a tomboy with a boyfriend. To Pat, Praveen, and Cole, I was one of the guys, but to Cole I was also a girl he was capable of loving in his eight, nine, and ten-year-old understanding of the word. It seems impossible and complicated now, but it wasn’t then. We had little to no understanding of what gender and sexuality were, so the fact that I was both a boy and a girl didn’t matter. The fact that I was a girl who sometimes wanted to be a boy didn’t matter.
Many of the 2007 study’s participants struggled with the word “tomboy.” According to Carr and other scholars, there is no psychological definition for a tomboy. While the term is associated with a girl expressing a variety of male characteristics, it is unclear exactly what a tomboy is. Many of Carr’s subjects closely associated the word with childhood as a transitory phase that society expects you to grow out of. Even if these girls continued tomboy behavior into adolescence and adulthood, they grew into different monikers, such as jocks or lesbians. But what about those heterosexual females who aren’t jocks but aren’t girly-girls either?
Whatever happened to me that day at Kristen’s house worked. Pat and I were a couple within a week and broke up a week after that because I wouldn’t kiss him in the woods after school. I didn’t want to prove my feelings for him in that way, didn’t want to have to live up to the other girls he’d supposedly kissed before me.
A few months after Pat and I had broken up, my period knocked me flat, disproving my theory that I could choose the changes that happened to my body. I was distraught and in denial. I didn’t tell anybody for two days, letting the blood saturate wads of toilet paper stuffed in my panties. I willed my period to go away, but it didn’t.
We started middle school, and it was as if the boys knew about my blood-soaked summer. We no longer rode our bikes home together, and we no longer rode the bus together. They continued being the boys, remaining close friends and joining the popular crowd at school.
With my period came awareness but not a change in identity. I knew I couldn’t live up to the boys’ expectations anymore because they no longer expected me to be a boy. They believed I’d become more girly to fit in with their new popular friends who dreamed of being dancers and cheerleaders. I never became girly, never painted my nails, and never developed a liking for skirts. Yet I also could no longer pretend to race when I just wanted to ride.
I’d lost my boys, but I still imagined myself as one of them. Even though I stopped wearing sports bras at night. Even though I became more and more boy crazy, developing a new crush every week. Even though I pierced my ears and began to wear pink–but only sometimes. I did not outwardly claim tomboy as a moniker anymore, but I still thought of myself as one. It was the only way I knew how to make sense of my affinity towards blue, my dislike of shopping, and my love of being dirty. It was the only way I knew how to describe why I preferred the company of boys over that of most girls.
As for an affinity to girls, I had none and still don’t. I appreciate a woman’s beauty or smarts. I develop friend-crushes on many girls, luring them into being my friend because of something inexplicable that’s attractive to me. But I am sexually attracted to men.
I have grown into neither jock nor lesbian. I don’t wear makeup, and my favorite color is blue. I love to cook for people, but I also brew beer. I like to sit around and gossip, but I also love to run, though not competitively. I no longer want to embody fully male characteristics, but I still have a deep desire to be wild and dangerous. I still wish I were fearless; however, I’m uncertain I affiliate that characteristic with men now.
It is in the nature of language that we must be labeled, parceled out into categories of masculine and feminine based on arbitrary characteristics like fearlessness and gossip, but I don’t think anybody’s sense of self is that clear cut.
This past summer I rented a bike and rode it everywhere around my new town in Alaska. It was the first time I’d been on a bike in eight years, and at first, I wore my helmet diligently, afraid of losing my balance and crashing. But that first night when I brought the bike back home and climbed on the seat and began pedaling in circles around the neighborhood, something shifted.
I weaved wide loops, circling the neighborhood while the sun set in orange-purple streaks. The air was cool and smelled of a mixture of spring and summer. I tried to let go of the handlebars, wobbling dangerously before regaining my balance, but the motion felt familiar.
I pumped my legs, standing on the pedals, and racing an imaginary opponent. I raced with no purpose, with no intent to win or lose. The houses whizzed past, and I could have been in Texas again on a sweaty afternoon. The scent of neighbors’ barbeque permeated from backyards as I raced my invisible companion to the corner. I felt alive. I found something I didn’t know I’d been missing, something I hadn’t been aware I’d lost track of. Sweat slid down my spine, and I threw my head back, laughing at the sky.
