A high school boy and girl making out in the school hallway, the curved sheetrock wall, how unbeknownst to my unwitting middle school spy partner – I wanted to want that normal feel, to be the girl wanting the boy, and not wanting the girl. The boy heard us, looked up, then gathered his troops of pimply teenagers and chased us. We ran through the cafeteria, the bathroom, the locker room, sort of laughing, sort of screaming but the boys were waiting, and they nabbed us, and somehow we went, obliged, terrified. They dragged us to the prop room on the fifth floor. We must have walked. We must not have screamed. Exposed by our giggling, our pubescent confused bodies, mine especially. In the prop room, cloth mannequins around us with no mouths, hanging clothes on wheeled racks, They tied us up with belts and scarves, locking the door. They could have raped us, they didn’t, even killed us I suppose; they didn’t, of course, or I wouldn’t be here recalling this. Standing there, tied up, I felt it in my bones, that those boys – they knew who I really was, pretending to be something I was not. And more than forty five years later, I am still that tied-up girl. They left us in the prop room to free ourselves and sneak out, never to speak of it again.
Lisa Badner’s debut poetry collection, Fruit Cake, was published in 2022 by Unsolicited Press. Lisa’s writing has appeared in Rattle, New Ohio Review, The Satirist, PANK, Fourteen Hills, Unbroken, and The Fruit Slice, among others. Lisa lives in Brooklyn.
Image: “Painting the Wig, Paris” by Daniel Nester
Pine Hills Review 