Free The Cake is a Lie by mcdavis3

with
bobbed black hair, flat chested.
    I felt so bad for flat
chested girls. I’d always think about overhearing a super popular
8 th grader, Hilary Thompson, nastily say about another girl,
“She’s on the itty, bitty titty committee.” Oakley’s face was
pretty though, her tiny mouth, thin nose and small sharp dimples
all bunched together cutely underneath her big, sharp dark eyes and
broad forehead. She had olive skin just like me. But the deal
breaker was the dark werewolf hairs twirling around her arms and
upper lip. A black forest connected her eyebrows. She was the
hairiest girl I’d ever seen. It was all yuck with a side of
gross.
    We all talked by the trampoline. We
asked them where they lived, who they knew. (This was back before
plain getting to know you questions didn’t bore girls to death like
the plague).
    Oakley excitedly answered for all three
of them. She’s such a chatty Cathy, I observed, it’s borderline
obnoxious.
    I wasn’t even paying attention to what
she was babbling on about, I was focused on Nora, Nora who didn’t
utter a sound. It made me want her even more, she was so
mysterious. She must be thinking about how boring we are, I
wondered. I’d instantly fallen in love with her, I wanted to marry
her.
    Us guys decided to play a two hand
touch football game in the field coincidently right next to the
trampoline. All of us played our hardest, like knights jousting for
Nora’s colors. We all loved Nora.
    Nora never came back to Abbie’s house
after that. No matter how many times I prayed and prayed for months
afterwards. Every time we went to Brian’s house my hopes would
skyrocket, just to inevitably crash.
    Oakley was at Abbie’s a lot though.
When we spent the night at Brian’s we’d talk to Abbie and Oakley on
the phone for hours. Sweet nothings. Someone would pass the phone
to me while I was playing video games and I’d half attentively say
“Hey, so what are you doing?”
    “ Nothing, sitting on the
couch watching T.V., what are you doing?” Oakley’s voice would come
through the other line.
    Oakley talked as if her voice was girly
and high pitched, and half of it was, but the other half had
something scratchy to it, like a kinky princess.
    “ Eating an otter pop,” I’d
respond, “What are you doing now?”
    “ Well now I’m walking to
Abbie’s kitchen, what are you doing?” The conversations would go on
and on like this. I was never that into talking with Oakley and
Abbie, they were just a bad reminder of Nora.
     
14. Sarah Faith Hall (Spring, 2002)
    Tysen, Brandon, Devin, Brian
and I were standing in our circle in the rec hall, sheltered from
the hundreds of bustling preteens around us. Safe from the
judgments and critiques. I watched an Arab kid maneuver around a
circle of 7 th grade guys adjacent to us, fighting to squeeze in.
They blocked him out. He frantically stood in no man’s land for a
few painful moments before fleeing the area. I felt bad for him,
but if he came to my circle I would ignore him too, position my
body to keep him out, scowl.
    “ I can’t believe you’re
officially a man.”
    Tyson’s booming voice brought me back
to the moment. He had his hands on Brandon’s shoulders giving him a
neck massage. That was one of the things I loved about Tysen, he
was always touching you. He had a very masculine persona so he
could pull it off–no one thought he was gay, just goofy. I touched
and hugged my friends occasionally, draped my arm over their necks,
but one of Tysen’s things was touching guys affectionately, he
owned that. Sometimes I would reflexively squirm out of it at
first, but most of the time I loved it when he put his arm over my
shoulder.
    “ Tell me all about it.”
Tysen continued.
    He was now bouncing up and down, riled
up over the big news that Brandon fingered his girlfriend for the
first time over the weekend. That’s another thing I loved about
Tysen, his boyish giddiness for anything related to sex. He
masturbated like