The Auditorium
by Billie Bernard
There is a moment I always come back to, my mother in my ear and she is saying you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, and I am in an auditorium that smells like boy-sweat, which makes me ten years old and wishing I had a penis, where none of the boys will throw the ball to me, because I am the only girl in the room and the world and they all know it, they all ignore me, but they’re doing it on purpose, so really they’re giving me all the attention, and this is how it is for me always, outside the gym, or between the covers, or anywhere under the sky, the moment I am always living, the only-girl-in-the-world feeling, and maybe this is why, every day, for a whole week, I cried and said I’ll stay, simultaneously, the only girl at the same time one of the boys, at the same moment, I am ten, I am twenty-three, I am a silly girl and you are all judging me.