She never wanted to be a mother. Never wanted to be a wife. She had been an unusual girl, disinterested in dolls, barbies, or games of “house”. The closest she had ever gotten was the castle she got as a Christmas gift one year. It became a beloved object to her. True, there was a princess, but there were also two knights (both good and bad) and a dragon and a fabulous trapdoor which she busied herself using hour after hour, deciding if it would be the black knight or the white knight this time that would fall through the trap door into the dungeon. The princess stood oft forgotten to the side. What bloody use was a princess in a dress and pink cap?

It wasn’t that she thought girls useless. She was one herself after all, and knew her own body’s finesse in climbing trees and discovering dead animals and finding the best spots to bury treasure. She didn’t think in terms of gender. Except that the boys at her bus stop were smelly and mean, and their flesh was repulsive to her, and from this she determined that some boys were not to be liked, not at all. And she recognized that some girls could be terribly boring and fickle, always creating problems in friendship when there didn’t need to be. But in the end, it really wasn’t about boys or girls, it was about children. For the most part she found them to be silly, vulgar, mean-spirited things with dull brains.

Unfortunately, these thoughts did not quite make it to her consciousness until many years later. Back then, she found herself stuck in a child’s world that made her feel an unwelcome alien. She did try sometimes, to fit in, but she despised them, and they despised her. She had “friends”, if one could call them that. Children she didn’t much like, but tolerated if they had something of use to her.

Like Heather. There were acres and acres of land on Heather’s farm and land was something Adrienne coveted. In the summers they explored every inch of that farm and imagined themselves as wild horses while running alongside the real ones through the pastures and over the soft ground of the woods with their long white and gold manes flying out behind them.

They ran with the lust of children while the sun pressed down on their heads. They ran for the pure joy of feeling their bodies working…bodies that were still new to them. To Adrienne there was nothing in the world but that moment, the two of them running, their awkward long limbs moving them with grace over the land.

There was Laurie, a friend because she was an outsider too, only for different reasons. She was freakishly tall and large, with a veritable afro of red hair punctuated by a full-body covering of densely packed freckles. She towered over the other children, foreign and wild and large. Despite all this, she was kind and ridiculously happy. Adrienne secretly thought her a fool, but never said so. She needed someone to share a swing with on the playground.

With Dawn, Adrienne discovered the body, the way children do. They were friends out of an unspoken pact of secrecy and nothing more.

Robbie, her first crush, and one hell of a kid, was the only one she considered a real friend. Only Robbie wouldn’t talk to her in school. Pretended not to know her. He could forgive that Adrienne climbed trees better than any boy he knew or that she made him wind her up on that contraption she had hanging out of a tree made up of an old bouncy horse and some rope. She always wanted to spin faster, and he would wind her up on that thing so tight that Adrienne’s head almost touched the branch where the rope was tied. Then he’d let her loose, while she hung on with all her little fiery might, head pulled in and her voice screaming and squealing with equal parts terror and delight. He could forgive her fascination of spiders and insects. He could even forgive her weird habit of scouting for dead animals that needed a proper burial under the willow tree, but he couldn’t forgive that she was a girl, and boys and girls just simply couldn’t be friends. Not in school anyway.

This hurt her deeply. Robbie wasn’t a silly, vulgar, mean-spirited kid with a dull brain. He had thoughts, good ones, and he talked about them with her (on the weekends, of course).

“Do you suppose animals go to heaven too?”, he asked her once, looking at her back all hunched over the newest grave she was digging for a dead mother squirrel she had just found on the road.

“I don’t believe in Heaven,” she grunted.

“Well that’s dumb,” he shot back, and Adrienne threw a fistful of dirt straight at his head.

Boy and Girl Fishing, found at www.artmia.com

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