A Place Little Girls Aren’t Supposed to Be
A Place Little Girls Aren’t Supposed to Be
Imade my way down the hallway toward the locker room. I dreaded going back in to face those girls, but I had to pick up my clothes.
I faced two doors. On one side was the door to the women’s locker room. Beside it was the door for the men. On each door, a little stick-figure image announcing the gender of those who belonged there.
Something came over me then. You could call it an irresistible impulse, my body taking over for my brain. I placed my hand on the door to the men’s locker room. I turned the handle. I stepped in.
I heard the sound of showers running and the slamming of locker doors. The air smelled partly of sweat, partly deodorant. Steam filled the room.
A lone figure stood at the row of sinks with his back to me. There was enough steam to obscure but not completely obliterate him.
He wasn’t wearing a towel. He wasn’t wearing anything. I saw only the back of him, but I knew who this was. Those well-muscled calves. His strong back, every muscle defined. Naked buttocks. When I’d seen him making love with Brenda on the island that day, I’d looked away. This time I didn’t.
Forrest didn’t see me right away. He was shaving. There was a tattoo on his left buttock—a name, with a heart surrounding it. Regina.
I have no idea how long I stood there. Maybe as long as a minute. Possibly less.
I guess he must have spotted me in the mirror then. He set down the razor and turned around.
He stood there facing me. Naked.
“Oh, Frances,” he said. “You aren’t supposed to be here. This is a mistake.”
Only it wasn’t a mistake. Seeing my face, Forrest must have understood that. I’d chosen the door to this locker room.
Always in the past, lying in my bed, when I got to that big moment in the stories I constructed, this had been the problem. No picture came to me, of the man, and what he would look like. Now here stood a man in real life, a few feet away from me, facing me head-on with a real-life body.
“I had to drop out of the triathlon,” he said. “I guess I didn’t train hard enough.”
“I won a trophy today,” I told him. He was still standing there. There was a towel on the sink, but he had not wrapped it around himself. I had never seen a man’s penis in real life before. Not like this. I did not look away.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said. Another man might have exhibited embarrassment at being discovered naked this way. Not Forrest. The look he gave me then was not unkind, but it crushed me. “Little girls don’t belong in here,” he said.
I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a little girl anymore. Look at my skirt, I could have told him. The blood was everywhere now.
I turned and ran.