LITMIR.BIZ

      Berkeley High is an open campus, lodged in the middle of the city, where it was easy for me to get lost in the crowd. I started skipping classes systematically, going out for lunch and not coming back in the afternoon. We had a cafeteria where only nerds went; it wasn’t cool to be seen there. My Nini was an enemy of the local hamburger and pizza joints and insisted I go to the cafeteria, where the food was organic, tasty, and cheap, but I never listened to her. We students would hang out in the Park, a nearby square, one block from police headquarters, where the law of the jungle prevailed. Parents protested about the drug culture of kids hanging out in the Park, the press published articles, the police walked through and looked the other way, and the teachers washed their hands of it, because it was outside their jurisdiction.

      In the Park we divided up into groups, separated by social class and color. The potheads and skateboarders had their sector, whites stayed in another, the Latino gang kept to the edges, defending their imaginary territory with ritual threats, and in the center the drug dealers set themselves up. In one corner were the exchange students from Yemen, who’d been in the news because they were attacked by a bunch of African American guys armed with baseball bats and penknives. In another corner was Stuart Peel, always alone, because he dared a twelve-year-old girl to run across the highway and she got run over by two or three cars; she didn’t die, but she was disabled and disfigured and the one who played the joke on her paid for it with ostracism: nobody ever spoke to him again. Mixed in with the students were the “sewer punks,” with their green hair and piercings and tattoos, the homeless with their full shopping carts and obese dogs, several alcoholics, a crazy lady who used to moon people, and other regulars.

      Some kids smoked, drank alcohol out of Coke bottles, made bets, and passed around joints and pills under the cops’ noses, but the vast majority just ate their lunch and then went back to school when the forty-five-minute break was over. I wasn’t one of those. I attended just enough so I’d know what they were talking about in class.

      In the afternoons we teenagers took over downtown Berkeley, spreading out in packs before the mistrustful looks of passersby and storekeepers. We walked along dragging our feet, with our cells, headphones, backpacks, chewing gum, ripped jeans, and coded language. Like all of us, I wanted more than anything to be part of a group and to be liked; there was nothing worse than being excluded, like Stuart Peel. The year I turned sixteen I felt different from the rest, tormented, rebellious, and furious at the world. It was no longer a matter of losing myself in the flock but of standing out; I didn’t want to be accepted, just feared. I distanced myself from my old friends, or they distanced themselves from me. I formed a triangular friendship with Sarah and Debbie, the girls with the worst reputations in school, which is saying a lot, because at Berkeley High there were some pathological cases. We formed an exclusive club; we were closer than sisters, telling each other everything, even our dreams. We were always together or connected by phone, talking, sharing clothes, makeup, money, food, drugs. We could not conceive of separate existences. Our friendship would last for the rest of our lives, and no one and nothing would ever come between us.

      I transformed myself inside and out. I felt like I was going to explode; I had too much flesh, not enough skin and bones, my blood boiled, I couldn’t stand myself. I feared I was going to wake up in a Kafkaesque nightmare, turned into a cockroach. I examined my defects, my big teeth, muscular legs, protruding ears, straight hair, short nose, five zits, chewed fingernails, bad posture, too white, too tall and clumsy. I felt ugly, but there were moments when I could sense the power of my new feminine body, a power I didn’t know how to wield. I got irritated if men looked at me or offered me a ride in the street, if any guy in my class touched me or if a teacher took too much interest in my behavior or my grades, except for the irreproachable Mr. Harper.

      The school didn’t have a girls’ soccer team. I played at a club, where the coach once had me doing extra stretches on the field until the other girls left and then followed me into the shower, where he felt me up and groped me all over and, since I didn’t react, thought I liked it. Embarrassed, I only told Sarah and Debbie, swearing them to secrecy first. I stopped playing and never set foot in the club again.