Free Hello Groin by Beth Goobie

me—the meaning of the apathy Legs had been fighting, the enormity of it, the absolute weight.
    Without warning a voice started coming out of my mouth— an unfamiliar, raw, gravelly sounding voice. And to my astonishment it said, “Justice is like sex, really. There are rules for when and how and what you can do, categories you fit into depending on how far you’ll go, and how often and with who. And it’s only when you buck the system and break the rules that you find out what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
    All across the room, dull slouched bodies were coming awake. Straightening in their seats, kids turned to give me dubious looks.
    “Find out about what?” asked a guy in the far right corner. “Justice or sex?”
    “Um,” said one of the front-row keeners, “I don’t really think this book is about that .”
    “About what?” asked Mr. Cronk quickly.
    “Well,” hesitated the girl in the front row, “ sex . I mean, you asked us about justice...”
    “Of course, it’s about sex,” said the gravelly voice coming out of my mouth. Once again it had managed to bypass the thinking, reasoning, sane part of my brain, and cut loose with my secret thoughts. “Everything we do in life is sex, isn’t it?” the voice continued, while I sat there hardly able to believe what it was saying. “I mean, it all comes from the same place inside you, doesn’t it? And that place is either a place of following rules and doing what you’re told, or figuring things out for yourself. Besides, Foxfire was an all-girl gang. Their justice was completely about sex. It was sex for them. Or maybe a replacement for it.”
    “You mean if they were getting laid properly, they wouldn’t have been doing the gang thing?” asked the guy in the far right corner.
    “Properly?” I shot back, too quickly to think about what I was saying first. “You mean with a guy, don’t you?”
    “Of course,” shrugged the guy.
    “Dyke city,” muttered the girl sitting in the desk ahead of me.
    Bye bye, sane reasoning brain . Suddenly I was leaning forward in my seat, my blood pounding furiously. Like I said, the body is devious.
    “That means you’re thinking universal, doesn’t it?” I blurted to the guy in the far right corner. “As in mainstream, whateveryone else around you is doing? But I don’t think that just because Foxfire was a girls’ gang, they had to be dykes. I mean, maybe they were and maybe they weren’t, but what matters is that they were a group of girls who decided to think for themselves. Because isn’t that the way you really learn—about sex, love, justice, reality, anything? I mean, how can you figure out the universal meaning of something if you don’t work out the personal meaning for yourself first?”
    “But you can’t have people running around kidnaping and shooting each other,” objected a girl near the front of the room. “You need universal things like rules and laws. And you should obey them. They’re there to protect you.”
    “Sure they are,” interrupted a guy halfway down the window aisle. “But Dylan’s right too. If you don’t work things out for yourself, you’re a robot.”
    “Yeah,” I said, nodding emphatically. I mean, I was so pumped, I was almost levitating. “I’m not saying you should break every rule,” I added, trying to backtrack a bit. I didn’t want Mr. Cronk thinking I was about to start a terrorist cell or something. “But if you live inside a rule, or a law, or whatever, all the time, without ever thinking about it, then you are that rule. Nothing but.”
    “Hey Dyl, what’re you doing Friday night?” asked the guy in the far right corner, and a wave of laughter engulfed the class. For a second I stiffened, feeling it all being swept away—the raw, half-baked things I’d been saying and the pure uncoiled sensation of strength that had come with them. But then I relaxed and laughed along with everyone else. So what if we were back to mainstream universal