Giving Up

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Photo by Ole Schwander

Rainy days, we practice giving up.
        We fill the middle school locker room with cheap vanilla body spray that vanishes like the candy necklaces we loop like nooses around our necks. We open lockers too small to store the backpacks that shrink us closer to the ground. Even our wet footprints are eager to disappear.
        The rain makes our clothes stick our bodies—we are slick with the reminder that we exist to be hidden. Teachers throw sweatshirts at girls in white t-shirts the same way they send us home when our fingers don’t reach past our shorts or a bra shows when we bend to tie our shoes. We’ve given up on wearing sandals and tank tops like the boys, the Lost & Found mostly our confiscated clothes hanging from the rack like ghosts.
        Girl bodies are to be covered, which is why we have to wear PE clothes approved by the PTA, dispensed a size or two too big, shrouding our bodies like a secret, like shame.
        It’s no secret Brittany has the biggest boobs, enough to fill bra cups while the rest of us struggle to fill the training bras that make our fathers flinch. She shows us her bra the way she shows the boys her breasts for money like when she leaves school and sells that body to make a living. The cups and hooks and straps are pieces of a puzzle we are trying to put together like how to shave our legs without stripping slivers of skin or how to suck in our stomachs so our ribs show like frightened wings to help us escape.
        When it rains, we give up the chance to go outside at all. We watch the boys from behind the opaque windows of our locker room. They race to see who can slide the farthest on the wet blacktop. They jump in every puddle to see how much water they can displace. They look up to the sky, open their mouths to savor the taste.
        Inside we look up at the skylight, rain pounding hard on the glass overhead. It is crowded, bodies crammed into the tiny rows of lockers. They are small enough our backpacks don’t fit but our bodies do on a dare. Dawn fits, and Tori, who is so small she still wears children’s clothes and eventually gets a bone disease for old people. We crowd around while they beg us to close the door like a coffin.
        All spring we exercise inside, testing our bodies like how the teacher pinches the fat on our arms and legs and calls out the measurements for the class to hear. She counts how far we can bend in half to reach forward for an invisible prize, and counts our vertebrae to see if we are growing straight, sighing at the girls whose spines aren’t clear lines for her to see.
        When we run out of tests to fail, we line up single file down the rows of lockers, trying to call to each other over the top, though our voices vanish overhead like specters. We know what to expect from the tiny TV in front of us just like we know that girls can only hit softballs and aren’t allowed to play hockey, just like soon we will have to learn to square dance with the boys who stomp on our feet and complain like we’re the ones who picked the stupid activity when we’d rather play field hockey or grind with each other like MTV.
        The man on TV has a curl halo and a red tank top and his fingers go way past his tiny shorts. He waves his arms, stepping to the beat of a song only the teacher knows. He is the only boy allowed in the locker room because the male PE teacher says cramps are nothing compared to a football injury and eventually the principal runs off with a student the way Julie is dating the band teacher and everyone pretends they don’t know because he wins orchestra awards and she is the best softball pitcher.
        The man on the TV sidesteps, shouting, “Faster, ladies” and when we can’t keep up because there is no room, our gym teacher says, “Get smaller,” meaning shrink yourself to fit. We take tiny steps, try to move in rhythm without moving at all. We break a sweat, tired from the effort of erasure.
        We get small like how Tasha hasn’t eaten in a month because she didn’t fit in a locker, throws up now before class, or how Becky can’t sit cross-legged for attendance without bruising her tailbone. We get small like how we disappear in math class, all the problems about billiards and trains, imaginary men named Dave, and in history too, the textbooks absent of women, though our teacher, a real man named Dave, reminds us we’re special by picking us up at recess, spinning us around like we’re dancing.
        We wave our hands over our heads like frantic birds, hollow bones flying nowhere. We twist but don’t shout, silent as important for girls as small, the teacher says after a few days trapped with us giggling inside. We squat and lunge until it burns. “Push until your body gives up,” our teacher reminds us.
        Soon we’re giving up crusts of sandwiches, pizza grease we blot with a napkin, our lunch altogether. We give up on saying the boys spit down our backs and grab our butts like we give up on saying the bus driver talks about stomachs or that when we have a bad day the principal makes us hug him too close and too long and whispers in our ears that he’ll never give up on us because he thinks we’re more like a friend than a student.
        The rain hits the glass ceiling hard and the windows fog up with our collective vanishing. In front of us the man on TV commands the women behind him. He reminds us that disappearance is reward, erasure a pleasure.
         Outside, the boys run laps in the rain, competing to see whose stride is biggest before heading into the gym to spread out and lift weights, binge on carbs and protein shakes to get bigger.
         We hear them laughing when the tape is over, before we rewind it to begin giving up all over again.