moments of vindication: chapter two

Again, I was 8 years old. I'd turned 8 again. It was a complicated year.

I saw the movie LOOK WHO'S TALKING a lot when I was a kid. The scene that excited me most: Kirstie Alley is with her boss, they're at work, his hand travels under the desk, he feels her up under her skirt. That was the hottest thing I'd ever witnessed in all my 8 (+/-1) years and for the first time I understood why grown-ups had jobs.

Meanwhile, I had been secretly harboring a crush on this boy in my class, Matt, and every week our desk partners would alternate. I couldn't WAIT to be his desk partner. I thought: OK, I like this kid. I know how this goes. Girl and boy? Check. Desk? Check. But what to do about the skirt...?

I didn't have a skirt! It just wasn't my style. Yet somehow I convinced my mom to buy me a red, plaid, pleated skirt--PERFECT to act out my fantasy. I visualized it in my mind a hundred times: we'd be sitting there, learning how to spell our names, and he'd reach under the desk--slowly, casually--and run his scabby, first grade hands over my thigh. And then? Then we'd be boyfriend/girlfriend. It was so simple, it just had to work.

I wore the skirt on the second day into our desk partnership because the first day my mom was suspicious of my enthusiasm. Or something, I don't really remember. Anyway, he never did touch my leg--no matter how much I fidgeted--and my ass was sore as hell when I went on the big slide that day. I never wore it again.

A few weeks later one of the other girls pushed him against the wall and kissed him, right there in front of everyone, claiming Matt as her boyfriend. I wasn't jealous. Frankly, I thought he was kind of a pussy. And now he had cooties.