mal de coucou

Just like that, she was back in Junior High again.

Except the secret this time around is not howAshley got felt up by Brian at the Winter Ball and worst of all, liked it. It's the kind of secret that is shared in bathrooms, scratch that, bathroom stalls. The planning, the whispers, the illicit glances, the rush, the seemingly intractable bondage that forms under the guise of a secret. 

The first time she tried it, it made her feel the same way she did when she lost her virginity. It was like those cautionary tales had seeped into her bones, telling her what to feel (which was dirty), that nurture finally triumphed nature with a score of 5 to 4. 

Eventually that feeling, not unlike the pain of a recently broken hymen, dissipated and the pleasures of the act surpassed the initial guilt. How nice it was to finally know what to say at parties, to know what to say to fill those scrambled silences when everyone is racking their brain for the next topic. In fact there was so much to say and she just had to keep up with her captive audience who hanged on every syllable that spilled out or at least, so it seemed. 

How delicious it felt to finally have this world be her reality, a world that had seemingly only existed in Facebook albums of the beautiful and glamorous. Those quotes that ex-sorority girls might as well inscribe on their gravestones- "Well-behaved women rarely make history", "Dance like nobody's watching/Laugh like you've never been hurt"- suddenly had both relevance and reverence. 

Of course there would be those times, especially those late hours when the sun threatened to rise, when it almost seem like this new life was a hallucination of her own wanting. Her new friends seemed like ghosts that faded away with the dawn, leaving her with a lingering, gnawing ache that seemed to only be subsided with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter. She existed in their clouds of chatter, she subsisted on the inclusion of their company, bathroom or no, but couldn't put away the most earnest of her desires that creeped up upon her when she was alone in her bed; to hold her baby blanket and have someone who loved her sweetly stroking her hair.