Free The Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith Page B

friends and saw that if we were a continent
    unto ourselves, Elaine would be the north pole and
    Denise would be the south and I would be somewhere
    in the middle, trying to navigate all that space in
    between.
     
Slumber Party
    We are at Skyler Reeves’s house
    watching Maggie Cartwright’s dad’s copyof
Showgirls
    which could be fun if it weren’t so embarrassing.
    Denise has spent half the night
    hiding in the bathroom,
    because sometimes she gets that way
    around more than three people.
    When I ask Elaine
    if she thinks Denise is alright,
    Elaine shrugs and says,
Sometimes Denise is sucha freak
    and Skyler Reeves laughs.
    Elaine acts cool and won’t look at me.
    But what she doesn’t say
    is that her half brother is in jail
    and Skyler Reeves’s mom is on her fifth marriage
    and Maggie Cartwright likes being spanked
    and I am what I am
    so basically
    that makes us all freaks,
    doesn’t it?
     
Everyone Else
    After the movie,
    we all lay out our sleeping bags
    and Skyler and Maggie start
    talking about what happened
    at the Senior Prom last night,
    telling stories about high school girls
    like Lisa Tavorino and Kelly Barnes
    and Jenny Arnold and Jenny Able
    as if they were movie stars.
    Even my sister’s name comes up once or twice
    and Dinah says,
She’s so pretty
, as if
    I were somehow not aware of this fact.
    Skyler and Elaine and Maggie are
    so ready to become those girls
    and then there’s Denise,
    who’s still hiding in the bathroom,
    and as for me, all I know
    is that even though high school is only
    three weeks and an entire summer away
    it still feels like it’s a faraway land of
them
    and I will forever be living
    in the same old hometown of
me
.
     
The Jennys
    The story goes that Jenny, homespun girl,
    hopped onstage during the Prom last night
    and started singing with the band.
    Jacked-up on the fervor of fifteen,
    drunk Jenny sang the girl-part of a duet,
    didn’t notice her boyfriend’s hand
    loitering on another Jenny’s thigh.
    High school seems filled with Jennys,
    most of them hiding out as Jennifers,
    others as easy-access Jens,
    but these two—Jennys to the core.
    They’ve spent the year ruling popularity contests
    and baffling teachers with their identical penmanship.
    They discovered beer and marijuana
    and that’s when the trouble started:
    one Jenny liked Budweiser,
    one liked smoking out on the cliff.
    One Jenny has her hair tipped black,
    the other wears Mike Shaw’s letterman’s jacket.
    Last night, so the story goes, they were at the samedumb dance,
    one Jenny onstage, the other by the lockers.
    They took turns kissing the same boy:
    a beer jock, more Jenny’s type
    than Jenny’s, but it’s not about the kissing anymore.
    It’s about the fierceness of the name,
    the matching J’s and A’s on
    every science quiz for the past eight years,
    the feathered hair, the push
    to get Paula off the cheerleading squad,
    and the countless after-school hours spent
    making high school what it is,
    making sure no other Jennifer
    dares to call herself Jenny again.
     
The Hole in the Door
    I come home from Skyler’s to learn
    that last night, after my sister’s curfew
    had not only been broken
    but smashed into a million little pieces,
    my dad went into her room
    and tore down all her posters
    and threw her sluttiest shoes in the trash
    and drilled a lock on her door,
    but he was so mad it fell off
    and now there’s just a hole there.
    Tonight, my dad came into the living room
    where I was doing everything I was supposed to do
    and he said,
Penny, don’t ever be like your sister
    because no good can come of it
.
    He told me I only had one life to live
    and I’d better not ruin it
    the way she was ruining hers.
    Then he headed out to the garage
    to hit things with other things
    and I went upstairs and knelt outside my sister’s door.
    I looked through the little “o” my father made
    and I could see Tara in there,
    lying with her legs up against the wall,
    scribbling in her