When I was eight, my family moved from Albuquerque to El Paso.

An adventure! my mother said. Why, if you want to go to Mexico, you just walk across a bridge, and there you are!

We learned how to count in Spanish, celebrated Christmas, packed the U-Haul, and moved south during the worst snow-storm the area had seen in decades. My parents rented a house with aqua blue and pink shag rugs in a Mexican-American neighborhood and, just after the New Year, I entered third grade at my new school.

As the classroom door clanged on my mother’s departing back, I glanced shyly at my classmates, an ache in my chest, the kind of ache you have when you haven’t slept long enough. I shrugged my red coat closer and tried to sort through the excited chatter, Spanish and English mixing into one glorious smattering of unintelligible sound as the classroom absorbed the presence of this white girl, the only one in the class.

Boys sauntered by my desk. Most pretended to ignore me but one, a handsome boy with a cocky grin, offered me a pencil. He told me I was pretty and called me Laura, which I didn’t mind because the person I most wanted to be in the world was Laura Ingalls Wilder. Marylou, the girl sitting across from me, filled me in on the classroom gossip, informing me that I shouldn’t, on any account, talk to Maria, a large lumbering girl wearing a slightly soiled pink satin dress, even as Maria lurched over to my desk and whispered that we could be friends.

“Don’t you want to take your coat off?” kids whispered as they passed by.

I shook my head and kept it zipped all the way up, even though the classroom was stuffy.

Soon the bell rang and we piled books back into desks and lined up at the door to go to lunch. I grabbed my Snow White lunchbox and followed Marylou gratefully as she issued orders to the other girls in the class. “Tisha can sit with us, and Elena can sit with us,” she said. “But Elsa, you have to eat lunch alone.”

Marylou had big curly pigtails and yellow ribbons that matched her yellow blouse and yellow socks. She looked like she was going to church while the rest of us looked frumpy, put together with odds and ends that didn’t match, jeans too short or too small, and dirty t-shirts.  

We marched through the halls behind Mr. Busby, the teacher, who led us through a maze of hallways, through a dark corridor, and into the cafeteria. There, I waited at the table while everybody else went through the line to buy their lunch. I opened my lunchbox and carefully removed my peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, orange, and homemade oatmeal cookies.

Elsa flitted by the table. “Do you want a milk?” she asked.

“I don’t have any money,” I mumbled.

“It’s free,” she said in a sing-song voice.

I didn’t believe her but watched as she walked to the counter, spoke to the lady, and came back with a small red-and-white carton of milk. “See?” she said.

Marylou flounced over, placing her tray beside mine. “What are you doing here, Elsa?”

Elsa slunk away.

I popped orange slices in my mouth while Marylou, Tisha, and Elena told me all about the boys in the class-Giovanni, the boy who had called me “Laura”, was their favorite-and then about the other girls, who were mostly persona non grata in Marylou’s opinion. The girls preened in front of the boys but whenever Maria or Elsa wandered by, they would jeer or stick their noses in the air, pretending that the other girls didn’t exist.

On the playground, we played hopscotch while the girls asked me about my tennis shoes. None of them had heard about the friendship pin craze-a few beads slipped onto a safety pin in a variety of patterns and then fastened to your shoelaces. I showed them the friendship pin that my best friend Cory had given me back in Albuquerque, and slipped three off my shoe, offering one to each girl in turn. Marylou, who wore Sunday-style black shoes, didn’t have anywhere to put hers, but she pocketed it, saying she had tennis shoes at home. Maybe she did but I never saw that friendship pin again.

The first bell rang and we ran towards a side door where our class was supposed to line up to wait for Mr. Busby. I jogged towards the wall, trying not to stumble in front of my new friends, and ran towards a clump of boys from our class. They were whispering and watching me as I approached.

As I passed, several of them pushed Giovanni towards me, into my backside. His arms closed around me, his groin pumped up against me, he whispered, you’re so pretty, so pretty, and the boys yelled, Yeah! Hump her! Hump her!

Face hot, I unraveled out of Giovanni’s arms and hurried to catch up with the girls, sinking into place towards the back, refusing to turn around so I wouldn’t have to face the boys.

Elsa stood behind me, and I broke Marylou’s prohibition on speaking to her. “What were the boys doing?” I whispered.

“It’s just what they do when they like someone,” she whispered back.

No boy had ever done anything like that to me before, and I hadn’t seen a boy do it to any girls at my old school in Albuquerque either.

The whole day had been weird. Weird weird weird.

“Marylou is not a nice person,” Elsa continued, still whispering. “You wait. She’ll stop talking to you someday, too.”

Elsa’s words turned out to be prophetic, of course.

I knew what sex was, though my knowledge of it was recent. Just before we moved from Albuquerque, a classmate asked me if I knew what “humping” was. I didn’t, and, with glee, she proceeded to tell me a litany of dirty jokes. In one joke, the word “cookie” secretly meant “sex.” Somebody kept asking, innocently, for a “cookie” and getting quite a surprise when they got a cookie indeed. Another joke had a mother eating a wiener in a bun that she enjoyed so much, she demanded another from her husband, who chopped off his penis and then their son’s penis to satisfy her insatiable appetite. As she chewed, she kept saying they were the best wieners she’d ever eaten.

I listened to the dirty jokes, my private parts raging, a desire I’d never felt before creeping all over my body. In first grade, a girl named Debbie had spent the night. She’d whispered that we should pretend she was the husband, I was the wife, and she fell asleep on top of me. Confused, I asked my mom about it the next day, and she drew me diagrams of a female uterus and a baby growing inside. I promptly forgot the talk, only to remember it when the dirty jokes reminded me. At night, I started whispering the dirty jokes to myself, letting my body flame up hot and red, and touching myself in a way that felt astronomically delightful but which I somehow knew was too private to mention to anybody.

When we moved to El Paso, we were caught in that unexpected snow storm and had to stay the night in a motel in Las Cruces. Alone on my cot, I waited until my family was asleep. Breathing low, trying not to make any noise, I rubbed my private parts with a pillow until it felt like something inside me rose up, clawing, and then melted, suddenly, unexpectedly, sweetly. The feeling was both completely new and, somehow, oddly familiar, comforting and warm and strange all at once.

But it also made me feel…sullied…in a way I couldn’t explain. At eight, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what I was doing. Masturbation, an ugly word. Orgasm, a creepy word. Had I known these words, neither would have made me feel better about myself, about what I was doing.

Now, with the advent of a real-life sexual situation that I encountered every day, I developed an insatiable desire for that sweet melty feeling, almost a need for it, followed by intense self-hatred. Like eating half a dozen warm cookies fresh from the oven and then feeling sick immediately afterwards.

School became a nightmare.

Students sidled past my desk, suggesting that the only reason the teacher gave me an “S” (”Satisfactory) or an “S+” on all my papers was because I was the new girl.

Mr. Busby, a tall man with a bush of blonde curly hair, would often call students to his desk and look at them, unsmiling, across that vast space before issuing various threats. One time, he called me over. Even though he was sitting and I was standing, he was taller than me, and I gazed into his cold blue eyes, afraid.

“Jessica,” he said, “if you don’t learn your capital letters by Monday morning, I’m going to bring a pair of pliers to school and rip your fingernails out.”

I slunk back to my seat, whispering questions to the girls who’d been his students all year. “Has he ever done that before?”

“No,” Marylou said. “But there’s a first time for everything.”

And so I was relieved when, on Monday morning, I’d apparently learned my capitals well enough to satisfy him because there was no mention of the pliers.

No matter how hot it got in that classroom, I kept myself wrapped up in that red coat. It grew ragged and dirty, ripped on one side, but I didn’t care. I needed to wear it.

At recess, I dealt with the boys and their hormones. Sometimes I’d complain to one of the playground monitors that the boys were chasing me. Their response-”well, if you don’t run, they can’t chase you”-failed to comfort me. But how could I explain to the playground monitors, or my teachers, or my parents that the boys were dry-humping me in a group every day?

And throughout the day, whether in class or at recess, life was all about discerning Marylou’s shifting alliances.

Who are we speaking to today? I’d jut my chin out at a particular girl and look for Marylou’s sorrowful shake of her head, meaning no, or her small smile and the benevolent nod, signifying yes. On rare occasions, Tisha and Marylou went to war; Tisha would gather some girls around her, and Marylou would gather the rest, and we all would march in tune to their commands. This usually meant sailing by, head held high, ignoring members of the opposing faction. Sometimes it meant verbal sparring and an exchange of biting insults. Very rarely, it led to an actual physical brawl.

One time only, the entire class of girls, even Elsa, stopped speaking to me altogether. For a reason I can’t remember, I had summoned all my courage and decided not to join Marylou and the gang up on the track field, where they were playing and gossiping. I told Maria and Elena that I wanted to play soccer instead. Some boys in another class had said I could play halfback, my favorite position, and so I ran the length of the soccer field, passing the ball, defending the goal, relieved to be free…

…until I saw Tisha beckoning me to the side. Behind her, Marylou, Maria, Elena, Elsa, faces fierce and ugly.

I ran over. This is going to be bad.

“Maria and Elena said that you said we were all stupid,” Tisha screamed at me.

“No,” I protested. “I didn’t say that.” Instead of anger at their lie, I felt only the quick sinking into social muck.  

“You’re dead,” Marylou said, between clenched teeth. “You’re dead to us.”

I hunched deep in my red coat and returned to my position on the soccer field, watching the girls go back to the track field, casting angry glances back my way as they walked. I’d be ignored, at least for the rest of the day, possibly for a week, maybe longer. Who knew how long they’d stay mad about something I hadn’t said?

It was that day that I lost my Snow White lunch box. I put it against the fence to play soccer and when I went back to retrieve it, it was gone. Whenever I lost belongings at school, even something small and simple like a bobby pin, it brought a wave of sudden, sharp homesickness. Things just didn’t feel right until I found the item or enough time passed that I forgot about it.

My parents didn’t have enough money for a new lunchbox immediately, so I started bringing my lunch to school in a plastic bag. I was the only girl in my class who brought a lunch to school, anyway, which made me feel poor since we didn’t have enough money for me to buy a hot lunch every day. I didn’t understand then that most of my classmates received a free lunch, paid for by the federal government. This was also the source of the free milk.

Weeks later, I saw my Snow White lunchbox lined up with other lost items on the wall outside the principal’s office. I wanted to retrieve it so badly, I felt a big lump in my throat. But I didn’t dare leave the line and go get it. Marylou was there. Tisha was there. I couldn’t let them know that there was something I wanted, wanted badly enough to leave their side and rescue it.

I didn’t talk about school at home. Instead, I started lying all the time, even when I didn’t have to. Once, I stole my brother’s Halloween candy and then told my mother I’d seen the daughter of the woman who came to clean our house once a week taking it. Even when Margarita said her daughter hadn’t done it, I insisted that I’d seen her, I’d seen her do it.

My mother was a ghost, limp and tired all the time, her body worn out with a prolapsed uterus and undiagnosed thyroid problems. My father, working hard at his new job as a university professor, was rarely home.

So we amused ourselves a lot.

The house my parents had rented jutted up against an arroyo and an expanse of flat land, acres and acres of creosote bush and small, scrubby prickly pear cacti. After school, my brothers and I would explore the desert, jittery about rattlesnakes but on the hunt for jackrabbits, which bounded up from bushes when we approached, skittering dirt and rocks with their powerful hind legs. We’d laugh at the way they ran away. Then we’d collect dirt clods and battle with each other, usually my older brother pitted against me and my little brother, to make things fair.

My parents bought chickens, which we cooped up in a small fenced area in the back of the house. I hated it when it was my turn to feed them or to search for eggs. The roosters seemed enormous and threatening as they’d strut towards me and attack my legs. I marveled at my grandfather’s calm expression, and the way he’d stride inside, ignoring the vicious advances of the little red-eyed demons.

When we wanted to scare ourselves, my brothers and I would take a small whip-like rope and thrash the ground near the roosters’ feet. Then we’d scream and run away as they charged, clambering up the wire fence and scraping our arms and legs on the thin wires that protruded at the top.

There was a pool, too, and as soon as the water grew warm, which was early in El Paso, we filled it with water and spent our afternoons swimming and tanning dark brown, so we didn’t feel as out of place in our classrooms full of Latinos who talked about us in Spanish, behind our backs.

Marylou lived only a few blocks away, as did Giovanni. To get to Marylou’s house, I had to pass his, unless I went the long way around.

I’d ride my bike, circling close, peering at his house with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard, her blue robe chipped and fading. If I caught a glimpse of movement, I’d turn around. I’d go the long way or return home and say I didn’t feel like playing, after all.

For a long time, I didn’t realize that Maria lived on Marylou’s street, until the day she and her sister threw rocks at me as I pedaled past.

In my memory, Marylou’s house was pink. She lived there with her parents, her older sisters, her baby brother, and her grandmother. We played on the swing set in the back, where I’d search my freckled arms, pestering Marylou with questions-”Does this look like a flea to you?”-possessed by an irrational fear of tiny bugs. “I don’t know, maybe,” she’d say. I’d try to pinch or scrape freckles off, wondering if they could be ticks.

Or, we sat outside under the Mulberry tree, watching her dad work on his old blue Chevy truck. We’d suck on packets of chile-sugar that Marylou’s mother had bought in Mexico until her father would pass his Coors to Marylou and watch her throw her head back, guzzling the warm beer.

“Do you like beer?” he asked me one time.

I shook my head. My dad would let me taste his, the cold sour bubbles filling my mouth. Every time, I’d spit it out, saying, Ewww.

“That’s good,” he said. “Marylou loves it.”

I spent the night once or twice. I remember nuzzling into a warm blanket on the floor of her mother’s bedroom, watching The Last American Virgin, and feeling that hot flood of desire in my vagina when the movie portrayed the boys watching each other have sex with an older woman through a keyhole.

Those were the times when Marylou was talking to me, of course.

Though I didn’t tell my parents about any of it, my grandmother remembers picking up the phone once when Marylou called, and seeing the desperate shake of my head. No, I don’t want to talk to her.

My grandparents were staying with us for a month or two while they searched for an apartment or trailer to rent. Each morning, I’d get up early, while the house was still dark and everybody was still asleep. I’d creep out into the kitchen and sit alone at the table until my grandmother got up. She’d braid my hair, which I was growing long, trying to be like the pioneer girls, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sister Mary. Their lives on the prairie a century earlier were lovely, and innocent, and sweet, and kind.

I tried to imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder with an obsessive need to masturbate every day, and I couldn’t.

I tried to imagine Laura watching dirty movies with her best friend, and I couldn’t.

I tried to imagine the boys in Laura’s stories surrounding her and dry humping her through her long, calico dresses and hoop skirts, and I just couldn’t.

I started wearing dresses every day, as soon as the weather was warm enough, long dresses that I called “calico” dresses, even if they weren’t. Marylou wore pink jeans, pink socks, and pink blouses. “Are dresses all you ever wear?” she asked me.

My hair grew longer and longer. It reached my waist and then my covered my butt and still I refused to cut it, even to chop off the dry scraggly ends. I basked in the swift movements of my grandmother’s fingers weaving through my hair each morning as she braided ribbons into it.

I still wore the red coat to school, over my long dresses. I wore the coat inside and outside the classroom, until it grew too unbearably hot, and then finally I started leaving it at home, missing it terribly.

But by mid-March, it was too hot to wear much clothing at all, much less a coat. El Paso’s springtime is a whirlwind of heat and sand. The winds whistle up and blow dust across the street like swirls of snow. Dirt grits against your skin. If you don’t close your eyes, sand cuts into them, like glass. By May, the wind has stopped gusting and the days are just hot, hot, stifling hot. The classroom was unbearable. We all wore shorts every day, which made me wonder if Mr. Busby was looking down our pants at our underwear when we did calisthenics after lunch. He’d wander in and out among the rows of children, pausing to glance down at us as we lay on our backs, legs in the air, pumping an imaginary bike.

Sometime in May, the school arranged for all the third and fourth graders to go to the community pool for the day. This was a big outing in a school too poor for field trips. Like all of us, Maria was excited. She came to school dressed up in a lime green satin dress, which had an unfortunate stain on the back. Nobody wanted to sit next to her on the bus.

Marylou and Tisha were friends that day, and had decided, inexplicably, to ignore the rest of us. We were free to hang out with whomever we wanted, and I chose to hang out alone.

But Marylou’s ghost was right there with me.

Waiting in line at the diving board, one of the boys in another class-a very dark-skinned Mexican American-shoved me, claiming I had cut into line. I had been waiting patiently, like everybody, for a long time, and here he was, taking my place in line when he hadn’t been waiting at all.

I tried to reason with him and a teacher, his teacher, came over, grabbed my arm, and hustled me away. “It’s not nice to cut into line,” she hissed at me.

I waited by the side of the pool, watching as that dark boy jumped off the diving board. Something inside me, broken and wet.

When he came up for air and climbed out of the pool, I was waiting. “You’re a liar and a cheat,” I said between clenched teeth.

Who was he? What was his name? It didn’t matter. I hated him. I hated him. I hated everything about him. I hated his dark skin. I hated his Mexican accent. I hated his skinny body. I hated, hated, hated him, I reeked of hatred, I let it seethe out of me, like the scent of garlic from the body’s pores.

He glared back at me. “You’re a liar and a cheat,” he said, and matched me stare for stare.

A teacher hustled us apart. I went to a far corner and sulked. My archenemy jostled his way towards the front of the line. Within minutes, he was jumping off the diving board again, clutching his knees together to make a cannonball and splashing some girls standing on the side. They squealed and ran away, their bodies freshly wet and glistening in the sun.

I shifted my whole body so I couldn’t see him and scanned the pool for classmates-filled with a lost, lonely feeling, familiar and comforting and dirty all at once, like the first time I had masturbated. Giovanni swaggered past a blonde girl in another class, and she cut her eyes at him, giggling. Marylou and Tisha were in the shallow end of the pool, whispering together like they were the only two people in the world. Who were they talking about? Were they talking about me?

I shuffled out of my chair and walked slowly towards them, the pavement burning the soles of my feet. As I approached, Marylou looked up, her arm across her forehead, squinting in the bright desert sun. For just a second, her face looked old, old, old- shriveled in the sun-and suddenly it felt like I could walk and walk and walk, forever, but I was never going to reach her.

Third grade ended soon after. Marylou flunked, so I moved on into fourth grade without her. Yet-almost three decades later-memories of Marylou and Giovanni still haunt me.

A few years ago, just as I was beginning to withdraw from my marriage for reasons I still don’t completely understand, my first husband and I bought a house just off of Borderland, that old neighborhood where I’d spent so many miserable days-just a year, really, a year that felt like ten.

I imagined writing a story about a woman who moves into her childhood home, the home where she’d been sexually molested while her parents remodeled it. During the course of re-remodeling the house as an adult, my imagined character discovered notes she’d written when she was a child. In those notes, she garbled about her experiences and wondered why somebody-God, her parents, a teacher-didn’t help her. She threw the notes inside the unfinished walls and there they piled up, waiting for years, only to be rediscovered at a time when the now-grown-up child was ready to face her past. Though I never wrote the story, I imagined a happy ending for her, where she found healing and hope by reading those old notes she’d written as a child. The act of moving into her childhood home and remodeling became symbolic, a metaphor, for the state of her soul.

The fantasy of that imagined character stayed with me, even as my marriage started to unravel.

One day shortly after we moved into our new home, I walked the length of Borderland. First I went to our old house, the one we’d rented. It was white, stucco crumbling. It looked sad and lonely, set so far off the road like that, nothing but desert on two sides. I turned around and walked the other direction, trying to find Giovanni’s house and failing. Then I turned onto Marylou’s road, wondering if I’d even recognize her place. Though it was painted a different color, and looked smaller, shabbier, and closer to the road than my memory indicated, it was her house, all-right. The front yard was cluttered with weeds and things-a broken cement fountain, a small shrine to a saint I didn’t recognize, and an old car that hadn’t moved in twenty years.

I kept walking. I didn’t want to look at her house too closely. But I stopped long enough to notice the wooden plaque over the door, containing the names of Marylou’s parents, Marylou, and her brother. Though Marylou’s sisters had clearly moved on, and weren’t living at home anymore, Marylou was still there, living with her parents.

I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I moved on down the road.