Chapter 54 Summer

I first learned about the dire consequences of my libido when I was twelve years old and I fell in love with my sister’s stuffed rabbit. His name was Claude, but let me get one thing out in the open about our situation. He was the one who began our romance when he kept staring at my bare legs from the shelf on the wall during the night. At first, our relationship was only a friendship. I told him all my secrets, even the deep dark ones that I never told anyone else, and he told me how lonely he was sitting up there on the shelf all the time. It was tragic really. We were two lost souls looking for something missing in our lives. A few months later, my parents kept wondering why Claude was going bald. My father thought it was moths. My mother thought my sister was giving him haircuts with cuticle scissors because she wanted to become a hair stylist one day. The mystery was solved one night when I was caught dry humping him in my bed when I thought everyone was asleep. Of course, there was a lot of crying and screaming, and of course, no one would listen to me about how much I loved him and how much he loved me in return. The following day, my parents took Claude into the backyard where they burned him in a pile of autumn leaves. As my sister shed tears for the loss of her toy, they comforted her and ignored my tragic wailing. They didn’t understand they were killing my best friend. That was when I learned I would never forget the sound of a stuffed rabbit screaming. When I turned fourteen, my parents enrolled me in the swim team after school so I couldn’t sit at home every evening, watching old horror movies and writing morbid poems about dead rabbits. Why they chose swimming, I had no idea. I hated swimming because my breasts were already developing beyond a C cup, and they were constantly getting in my way as I tried to perform the strokes. As the weeks of practice went by though, I slowly began to learn how to move my body gracefully in the water, and it seemed to embrace me in return. The pool became the one place where I could let my thoughts go. No one cared what I said to the water when my head was beneath it. I came to love the water much like Claude, and I thought it loved me back. For the first time in my life, I started to excel at something. I began winning races. My parents offered up their praise and talked about my success at the dining room table instead of my sister’s accomplishments. At the end of the summer, there was the championship race. I was the favorite to win the breaststroke, but they didn’t tell me I was going to be racing against a long-limbed girl named Betty Snow. Betty was beautiful in a way I had never seen before, and the sight of her bare legs gave me goose bumps. There was a curious dreamy feeling blooming inside me that I had only felt for boys before. Unfortunately, she was in the lane next to me for our race. As we dove into the water, I found I couldn’t tear my gaze away from her, so I was keeping pace with her. The water seemed to sense my distraction, and it made it that much harder to swim. I decided I was only going to have one more look at her when suddenly the wall of the pool was in front of me. The race was over. I had lost to Betty Snow. I’ll never forget that moment when I looked over to my team, realizing I had just lost the championship for them. You should have seen the look they gave me in return because they knew I hadn’t swum my best. After that day, my parents no longer mentioned my achievements at the dining room table. To my sister’s relief, she was once more the shining star.When I was sixteen, I tried to find a job to make some extra pocket money, but the only thing I could find was babysitting some kids who no one else wanted to babysit because they were little monsters. What made it worse was that their father brought them things like ancient jungle gyms from the junk yard where he worked.