Stations of the Working-Class Pubescent Cross
We Are Condemned to Our Origins
We are nine when our mom enrolls us in the Fairlanes Young America youth duckpin bowling league. Duckpin bowling is Baltimore’s bastardized version of ten-pin bowling, played on a regular-length lane but with squat little pins and hard rubber balls swirled with marble or speckled with glitter. A rubber world that fits into child-sized hands.
Most kids who bowl aren’t going anywhere. They live one neighborhood over from us, and there’s a twitchy feralness to them, like squirrels or rabbits. We watch them—their skinny, long legs in Levi’s or Jordache jeans—as they saunter up to the lane. They coil their arms and roll the balls hard. Pins explode in the alley’s mouth before they’re engulfed by the darkness.
We bowl on Saturdays because it’s the day our father works on the car and drinks whiskey. In the place where we go to hide from him, everything screams to be seen and heard: flame red and ice blue bowling balls, AC/DC or Van Halen on the speaker system, Galaga and Frogger blinking and blipping, everywhere adolescence hard and pink like over-chewed gum.
After we’ve bowled our two games, we wait for our mom to pick us up. In the car on the way home, she’ll tell us whether our dad’s in a good or bad mood. While we wait in the vestibule out front, that glass purgatory, we shift our weight, gripping our secondhand bowling balls and bags, and wonder how we know we’re going somewhere. Not just away from one violence to another, but wherever it is we actually belong. Away from Baltimore, to college, even. How we know we’re waiting in a chrysalis, not a holding cell.
We Take Up Our Cross
Gambling is legal four times a year at Our Lady of Fatima Church: at the spring, summer, fall, and winter carnivals. Parish members line the perimeters of the church basement with cafeteria tables covered in numbered squares, prize wheels behind them. That summer, when we’re ten, my brother and I play all our money on the same prize wheel, the one with popular record albums, and finally win Hall and Oates’ H2O. Our money exhausted, we meet some friends, Steve and Dicky, and we join them in running the darkened hallways of the church basement.
Steve and Dicky know things, like the layout of the basement. They go to the Catholic school attached to the church—we go to the nearby public school—and when I say I have to pee, they lead me and my brother to bathroom.
What are those? I point to the long toilet bowls attached to the wall.
Urinals, Steve explains. You pee in them.
Not me, I snort and go into the stalls. As I go, I compile more questions for Steve: Are urinals a Catholic thing? Why do Catholic schools make boys and girls share the same bathrooms?
What are you doing in here? A boy none of us know is standing by the doorway when I exit the stall. This is the boys’ room.
I look at Steve. He shrugs. The other boy leads me further down the hall and shows me the girl’s room. Like the girls’ room at our school, there are no urinals, only stalls and sinks. As I wash my hands alone in the girls’ room, I hope they’ll wait for me, my brother and the other boys. But when I come out, the hallway is quiet. I am no longer of them. I am a girl, alone.
We Fall for the First Time
In the lunch line, a boy from another one of the seventh-grade sections asks me, Are you a boy or a girl? I don’t answer⎯not because I don’t know what I am, but because my face is hot, like lava, and I’m trying not to cry. A few years before, I’d written in my diary, I THINK I AM A LESLIE. But in seventh grade, I’m not sure. For one thing, I still buy teen magazines: 16, Tiger Beat, Bop, and clip pictures of Roger Taylor, the drummer from Duran Duran, because he is the least androgynous one, and am known for having the largest Duran Duran collection in my class. And, at lunch I sit with a boy, Carl. He wears braces and writes James Bond novels in spiral notebooks. Another girl and I make fun of him, call his stories stupid after he lets us read them. I never cry about being called names, being teased, but alone in my room, I cry about Carl. I cry about how we treat him. I wish I could tell him he’s brave for writing and sharing it, that I write too. That, even though I might be a leslie, I hope he’ll ask me out because he is a boy who I think I could like. Like Roger Taylor, or Roy and Ray from Menudo, the other neutered, smooth faces I’d tacked to my walls.
I’m glad he doesn’t, though, because I would’ve been just as cruel to him as the other kids were to me, and I don’t even know why. That’s the thing about bullying—you do it to kids and other kids do it to you, and you don’t even know why any of you do it at the time. Sometimes it’s like trying on clothes in the changing room, seeing what looks cool, posing. Other times it’s pre-emptive aggression, because you’re tired of being asked whether you’re a boy or a girl and you want someone else to have to answer to things for once.
We Fall for the Second Time
The “E” in the sign has been burned out as long as we can remember, leaving a dark space in the sign, which we read as Skat Land. You can see the gable-roofed building with orange and brown siding from the boulevard, tucked behind the lot that sells Christmas trees and the crab shack. Inside the rink, the boys skate fast but wind up where they’ve started. I hug the walls and never let go, even when the DJ plays Duran Duran or the Thompson Twins or Madonna. I’m too skilled in risk aversion, having endured a bad case of whiplash after my friend David tried to teach me to roller skate in the broken cement alley behind our house the year before. I’d broken an arm on the same cement alley riding my bike, and I’d accepted I was clumsy and brittle.
Eventually, I give up inching around the polished wood floors, moving instead around the edges of the rink, where there is danger but also, surprisingly, egalitarianism. In the dark spaces near the changing benches and lockers, an older boy presses against me and I feel it, his penis, against my behind.
I never tell anyone. I’m supposed to feel violated, to have nightmares, but I am strangely excited, proud. Chubby and androgynous, no one pays me much attention except to taunt. But in the dark spaces, I’m an ordinary girl, as powerful, desirable, as any popular girl who lorded over the skate floor.
I should feel bad. How can I raise daughters if I don’t feel the right way about things?
We Are Helped to Carry the Cross
Kacie and I work at the local fast-food restaurant. She’s a freshman at the local university and I’m a high school senior. Compared with us high school fuck-offs, Kacie could easily be manager, and we all try secretly to vie for her approval, me the hardest. One Saturday, a guy from my art class comes and orders a burger. He asks me if I’m going to the prom with anybody. Even though I already am (a friend), I’m proud to have been asked in front of Kacie, who’s working the register next to mine. I want her to know that guys (some of them) consider me attractive, that I’m desirable, in the same way I work hard to be promoted to the drive-thru, to make the ice cream swirl atop the biscuit on the strawberry shortcake perfect. The way I tell her, after the Sunday-morning rush after church, I’ve been accepted to Bryn Mawr College. That I’m a writer and want to be a novelist.
One night after work, sitting in her father’s car, I share chapters of a novel I’m writing by hand in a notebook. No one else has ever seen it. In it, two girls kiss, even though one of the girls has a boyfriend. I don’t know how I know she will approve, even want to read it. Maybe it’s the increasing time we spend together, watching French films (her major) at the university, or hanging out after work⎯sometimes with the manager, who’s a few years older and buys us wine coolers. But other times, we just sit in her father’s car, in parking lots or desolate roads, waiting for bigger things to happen to us.
I write Kacie a multiple-choice poll to see what she thinks should happen in my novel. One of the questions is whether the girls should do more than kiss. Kacie doesn’t fill out the poll, but she invites me to spend the night at her parents’ house, my first sleepover, albeit a decade too late. For years I have waited impatiently for high school to be over, to go to college, find my tribe. But now, with only a few months until graduation, I wish I had more time. As I pack my bag, I finally feel like a teenager: awkward, anxious, hopeful.
Jen Michalski (@MichalskiJen) is the author of three novels, three short story collections, and a couplet of novellas. Her latest novel, You'll Be Fine, was a 2021 Buzzfeed “Best Small Press Book” and was selected as one of the “Best Books We Read This Year” by the Independent Press Review. She's the editor of the online literary weekly jmww and currently lives in Southern California, although she will always be a Baltimore girl by heart.