In our group a girl who made out with too many boys was a slut. How many is too many? What was ‘making out’? Well, in seventh grade it was just being Suzy Helm. She got her voluptuous breasts in really early and she teased her hair and wore big earrings and she made out with a lot of guys who may have felt her bra, and that was bad.
I always wanted to catch up with her later in life, when I entered the slut phase myself, (lamentably late), to see how she fared in adulthood. I hope she did really well. I hope she married a wonderful man and had kids if she wanted them and somehow put all the childhood judgment behind her. I’m sorry I ever called her a slut behind her back. She and I weren’t close, but we sat near each other in Algebra, which we both repeated in summer school. Our names weren’t next to each other in the alphabet but out abilities were very similar.
Wait, even that’s not true. Nobody expected me to be able to do algebra and I certainly didn’t expect it of myself. Even learning the times tables in third grade and later fractions in fourth grade was painful plus I think we all (parents, friends, teachers) agreed that being good at math was beyond my reach.
However, having taken to slutdom very late and very happily, now I wonder if I couldn’t have somehow crossed that great equal sign barrier into X. Maybe Suzy could’ve as well. Maybe she grew up and invented Adobe or something equally math based and mysterious.
I knew something about Suzy that I never told my friends in junior high. I had gone over to her house once to study for a test, the blind leading the blind and so forth and she had an ordinary room, nice mom, regular apartment. There was no S&M rig in the bedroom, not that I would have known what that was. We had something anodyne like coke and chips for snacks.
In other words, Suzy’s house was identical to those of the general non-slut population in our crowd.
That’s the thing, those early labels, they really hurt. I guess the boys bullied each other more physically, with us girls it was more covert and it somehow managed to mangle curiosity, envy, even admiration with something a whole lot nastier.