13-Year Old Slut
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When was the first time you were ashamed of yourself?
When I get out of the car, after my mom picks me up from ballet class, I immediately see the word in giant red letters across the side of my house:
S L U T
I am an awkward 13 year old 8th grader, standing on the street, looking at my house, paralyzed. I feel the heat in my cheeks and then seething through my entire head, pulsating in my neck, pushing tiny beads of sweat out of my scalp. My heart is hammering. I am shaky and lightheaded. I’m about to be sick. I don’t want anyone to see this, but my mom is right there, staring open mouthed at the red letters.
I don’t know how many people in my German hometown actually know what the word means translated into German. Except for elderly people, most everyone in Germany knows at least some English. I need to get rid of this before anyone can ask me what it means. I wonder how long “slut” was displayed across the side of my house for everyone to see before I got there.
I know immediately who did this.
I scrape the sticky, red tape off the bumpy textured walls, with my face so close to the pale yellow paint that the bumps blur in front of my eyes. Close up at least I can’t make out the letters, the insult. My face hot, I hold back the tears that keep welling up, burning in my throat. I was supposed to be the good one. I feel dirty and disgusting.
I have never even kissed anyone, but I’m immediately thinking of how to defend myself and my purity in this tiny town where everyone knows everyone and you don’t want to be the village whore. It didn’t occur to me then that even if I had kissed someone, it still would not have deserved this.
After helping me scrape the letters off the house, my mother pried the names of the boys I suspected out of me. She told me to call and confront them. I didn’t want to. My mother was angry and I felt I had to match her anger, when all I wanted was to cry and hide in my bedroom and never go back to school. My mother didn’t let up. She threatened that she would call the boys’ parents if I didn’t call them and deal with it myself. Two bad options, but having my mother call this boy’s mother was just slightly more mortifying than having to face them myself.
