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Show suit. When wet, it clung to my body like a bandage and made it hard to move around. I swam less and begged to be left home on beach days. Meanwhile, hair kept growing. A dark, twisted patch of hair under each arm, a wiry mass between my legs. Months passed and I outgrew the new muu muu that I loved and never wore. I placed it in the Goodwill pile with the tags still on, a necessary sacrifice to keep things orderly. One day my mom came to me and said that she realized why I was no longer wearing sleeveless shirts. She said it had just occurred to her, but I would always think that somehow I slipped up and was found out. Sitting on my bedroom floor with me, she showed me how to use an electric razor, one that looked old to me, like one she used in college, to shave under my arms. I did not feel closer to my mom at this point. Joining the world of women who shaved their armpits did not make me feel proud or special as those books on adolescence by men like Dr. Dobson had said I would. Instead I felt soiled, old like the avocado-colored razor. I remember the moment I felt my body for the first time, as an object, as something for others, men, to gaze upon, to judge. It was Bryan's sixth birthday, the one in which he asked for an AT AT Walker, a pool party, and an ice cream cake. Given the price of Star Wars toys, he received only two of the three. How my mother ever kept his cake from melting under the Hawaiian sun, I'll never know, but on his birthday we ate giant slabs of frosting-covered ice cream while sitting on the grass at the Camp Smith pool. Being twelve and too old for such parties, Stacy and I had taken our pieces to a set 155 |