42

Thirteen.
The unlucky number? Maybe so, but that’s where it all began for me.
When I was thirteen I was in grade eight at school. I was skinny with short black hair, and the tiniest girl in the school. I had a pretty good social group. It wasn’t until years later that we all dissipated away from each other.
When I was thirteen I was the queen of my brother. He was eleven and still in primary school. I was where he wanted to be and everyday after school I would be hounded with questions about high school life.
If only he knew what it was really like, maybe he would have stopped asking questions. But then again, if he was anything like me, he would have researched further.
High school was full of the typical groups you see on American high school movies. The tomboys, the girls and the boys who nobody could really decipher their true gender mainly because puberty hadn’t developed in their bodies yet and their voices hadn’t cracked, and they all had the same length and colour hair.
The populars, the people who could and did get along with anybody. They didn’t even need to necersarily get along with anybody, they just needed to be known by everybody and they were in. most of them even had the advantage of being well off in the social scheme with their parents being presidents or part of the rotary groups and other social clubs, or they were just plain wealthy.
Our best friends, the girls who sat up the front of class and may as well have used a Dictaphone to take down every word that the teacher said, did all their homework within the hour of receiving it and never missed a day of school. These girls became our best friends when we didn’t take notes, never did our homework and constantly wagged classes.
The others, the girls and boys who tampered with the “other” world. They wouldn’t necessarily wear black, or even show any signs of what they did. But everybody knew. These were the people who left school grounds at lunch time to go into the scrub, they would sit in the library and read books from the supernatural section, they would tune their minds out in class, and if you watched closely, you could see their mouths moving in some chant.
But then there were the people who were part of everything. Or at least more than one “class” of people. There were popular best friends, or there were other best friends. I guess I was a sort-of-popular other. I wasn’t exactly popular. My parents weren’t rich. They didn’t belong to any social clubs. But I did have my group of friends in the popular circle. And some of us were part of the others.

When you’re thirteen, your parents think you still have a few years to go before their child even begins to think about sex. They don’t think to question why their child wants to stay up late to watch the MA rated movies when at the beginning of the film there is a warning about the elaborate sex scenes.
Even though at thirteen, when your breasts are still budding, and you have no curves whatsoever, and your parents are considering sending you to the dentist for braces, its sex before school that’s on your minds. We didn’t go to school to learn. If we did, we wouldn’t spend 2 hours in the bathroom before school experimenting with our makeup that we “borrowed” from our mothers cabinet, or bought for ourselves on the sly. We wouldn’t burn our hair to a crisp with hair straighteners, and we wouldn’t still consider stuffing our bras that still don’t really fit anyway.
If our parents wouldn’t let us wear makeup until we were fifteen, there was also the option of keeping a makeup bag and mirror in our lockers at school, or getting to school early for the morning makeup-meet in the girls bathroom before home room. Because there was no way in hell that the thirteen year old boys who only thought about football and skateboarding could even glance at a girl if she didn’t have her badly inexperienced coat of makeup on her face.
But there weren’t just the thirteen year old boys that were on our dirty little minds. There was of course those men that are at the school everyday, the ones that do their best to teach you, the ones that sit at the front and give you penetrating stares with no idea of how our minds were interpreting those looks. As far as we were concerned, if we hitched our skirts up a bit, and tried to make our girly thirteen year old voices sound sexy, those penetrating stares meant a lot more than just “pay attention or you have detention”. We would dream about those teachers. Fantasize about them, and if we did have a crush on a teacher, his was the one class we never wagged, and did our best to either impress in, or act dumb so that we got that little bit of extra special attention that would make our hearts flutter and our in-betweens twitch when he stood behind us and spoke into our ears as his arm went around us to show us something on our papers. It was those moments that we longed for. We could breathe in his scent, and lightly touch his arm because he was practically hugging us from behind anyway. And then when he returned to the front of the class, we would remain in our daze and believe that we had a special connection with him, and that every look we received from him after that was a special signal that only the two of us could understand.

Then came the time where us girls had to decide amongst our selves what thirteen year old boy we were in love with and which one would become our first boyfriend. There were fights in which we had to justify ourselves in why we were a better choice for him than the other girl or girls that wanted him. Whether it is because he lived the closest to us, or we had more classes with him, or we were the same nationality, or even because our heights were perfect for each other. He was taller, and she just had to tippy-toe the tiniest little bit to be able to kiss him, even if she never did.

I still am not sure how I won the chance to pursue Ziggy. Perhaps it was the height debate, or the nationality issue. No body new where he got his dark skin from, but I rubbed in the issue that I was half Indian. So I tried to make the girls believe that maybe he was Indian too, although I knew for a fact that he was from a Mediterranean island.

Thirteen year old boys don’t pay much, let alone pay any attention to thirteen year old girls. The entry to high school life for the boys, was finding new mates to kick the footy around with, or finding new people who knew of better skate parks.