Sleepovers always seemed, to me at least, to be overrated; they never were what the movies or television shows depicted them to be, and there was just something about a group of girls that always seemed more tiresome and anxiety-inducing than fun. What I disliked the most about sleepovers, however, was the next morning; whatever fun we were supposed to be having was non-existent now: Parents wanted us out. The girl wanted us out. I wanted to be out. Scarfed-down breakfasts didn’t hide what the bright morning sun exposed—a thick layer of embarrassment, like a film, coating the skin, a reminder of whatever had transpired in the darkened hours.

Amy seemed so much older than the rest of us. She was, at this point in time, eleven to the rest of our ten. She was already voluptuous and overtly sexual. Amy fancied herself an artist; she and I both had applied and been rejected to the School of the Arts for visual art that month. The walls of her small room, one of two bedrooms in her mother’s apartment, were covered in her drawings and paintings. My assumption was that as Amy wasn’t allowed to paint her room, she would simply cover the walls with what she was allowed to draw and paint on. In one corner of her room, there was a pastel drawing of a particularly dirty set of knees. One girl, Blair, commented on this. Blair, a thin, nasally girl with blonde hair, was put off by the apartment—you could just tell. A few months later, I would attend Blair’s sleepover, and I would see why her nose seemed up-turned by the darkened walls in Amy’s mom’s apartment.

Amy corrected Blair, “They’re not knees; they’re breasts. I turned it upside down because my mom was bothered by it.”

Standing against the wall of her room, I tilted my head to try and see these knee-breasts. Yep. They were breasts. The dirty knees were very dark nipples.

Amy walked over to the drawing and flipped it right-side up. It was her art and, at this moment, she was fine to disobey her mother. I thought this was great, and Amy, to me, was great. She was funny and extremely nice. I knew that she came from, as my mother would say, “unfortunate circumstances,” which meant that her father was a drug addict and wasn’t around, and her mother gambled a lot. My mother knew this because even in a big city like Charleston, there were certain pockets and areas within the city that, while still large, felt like a small town.

My parents, when they went out, went to a sport’s bar called Terri’s. Terri’s, before they were outlawed, had a lot of video poker machines -- something my mother loved. Something that Amy’s mother also loved. There was something about the fact that my mother was married and wasn’t up at Terri's every weekend that made her gambling substantially better than Amy’s mother, but it was fine because she was a nice woman and Amy was nice.

Out of all of us, Blair was the only one with a boyfriend. I mean, you know, as much as any ten-year-old can have a boyfriend. His name was Jacob, and I thought he looked like an alien, a big dumb alien. I had no proof that he was dumb. I don’t think I’d ever even spoken to him. He just had one of those faces that told you long before he opened his mouth that he was dumb.

Someone in the group decided that Blair should call her boyfriend. She should say sexy things to him. Amy immediately began to type up a script for her on a very old computer. These were things Blair should say, the way the conversation should go.

I sat on Amy’s bed, near the corner of the wall. The knee-breasts right above my head. If I looked hard enough out of the corner of my eye, I could see them in my periphery.  All night, I couldn’t stop looking at them: the breasts themselves were so long and the nipples were just so dark.

Blair called me out for this. She asked me in her nasally voice why I kept “staring at the boobs.”

Flustered and embarrassed at being caught, I lied. “I’m not. I’m looking at the star painting. It’s really pretty.”

The conversation about what exactly should be said to Jacob continued, but it really just turned into a group of girls trying to write a scene from an erotic romance novel; one where the man and woman are apart and lonely and need to let loose some steam over the phone. I learned the word brassiere that night, and for years after I carried the notion that a brassiere was significantly sexier than a plain ole’ bra.

I didn’t contribute to this conversation, and it wasn’t that I was uncomfortable with sex or sexuality or anything sex-related, I was uncomfortable with talking about it in front of them, and I was uncomfortable with talking about it like that. Perhaps had it just been me and Amy, I could have partaken in the conversation, but it wasn’t just Amy.

There were other girls there. It wasn’t just me and Amy and Blair, but I don’t remember who they were. I can’t even begin to picture them. I do know there were more than just the three of us because Amy’s bathroom wasn’t that small, but when we all crammed into it, not long after they had written all they could think of about brassieres, it felt claustrophobic and suffocating to me.

Amy’s mom, in the hidden depths of her room, had magazines—ones with pictures of naked men, naked women, people, not having intercourse, but touching one another. Amy coaxed us into her mom's room, and she began to search for something we had to see.  Rifling through these things, she found what she’d been looking for. She didn’t show us what it was until after we’d crammed into her bathroom.

Holding out her hand, we saw, lying in her palm, a cut out from a magazine. On it was a man, richly tanned and on a pool float; he wore sunglasses and appeared hairless, slick, and oiled. Lying against his hip and onto his abdomen was a large pink: Wait, is that his penis?

It was. It was his very large, very erect, uncircumcised penis. It was engorged.

To this day, I can’t believe it was even real. Or maybe my memory has enlarged it over time, and by the time I’m seventy his penis will have taken up the entire mass of his abdomen. Regardless, to me, it was huge. It was a huge penis, and I was looking at it. Panic ensued. I had to get out of the bathroom. Her mom would find it missing. Perhaps she was looking through her magazines and pictures at that very second. She’d barge into the bathroom at any second and find us gawking at this picture. Her mom would then tell my dad when he picked me up the next day. My dad. She would tell him. He would then tell my mom, and the thought of the lecture to come made my stomach twist into knots with shame.

Nothing good was coming from standing in that bathroom, hunched over a 2” x 3” picture of this man: This naked man innocently floating in his pool with his abnormally large penis exposed. That is abnormal, right? I thought. Somehow I managed to excuse myself from the bathroom. I went and sat in the living room with her mom who was watching something on TV.

“What were y’all doing in there?” “Nothing.” “Being silly?” I nodded silently when Blair, it was always Blair, poked her head out and stared me down before shutting the door back.

If I could have gotten away with calling my dad to come to get me right then and there I would have, but I couldn’t. Blair poked her head out again, “Katie, come here!” I made my way back to the bathroom and to the monstrosity of a penis in the palm of Amy’s hand.

Blair was a confusing friend; some days, she acted as if we were best friends—I liked these days; they made my day easier. We shared a table in Mrs. Tolliver’s fifth-grade class, so even on the days where she didn’t seem to like me at all, I still had to work with her every single day. Amy sat four tables back, and I would have given anything to be Amy’s tablemate.

Amy and Blair were both very popular, while both very different. This perplexed me. How is it that two very different girls could both be equally popular? The only thing they had in common was their intelligence, and I fell right in there with them. Okay, maybe a little below them, but I was close enough. At any rate, I was not popular. I don’t have a clue what I was doing differently, but I suspect it’s because I fell right in between the two of them. Blair’s parents had money. Amy’s mom had very little; Blair was athletic and slim. Amy was artistic and had, as mentioned earlier, developed very early and already had a body that was sensual and supple; My parents were middle-class. I wasn’t athletic at all, and while I enjoyed art, I wasn’t a natural talent. My body was beginning to develop, but in an awkward way that made me clunky. Neither of them seemed to care what anyone else thought, whereas I couldn't help it.

Whatever it was that separated me from them, it made the friendship between me and Blair strained. Every day I sat down with a small bit of anxiety. Does she like me today?  I was excited when she, two months after Amy’s sleepover, invited me to hers for her eleventh birthday. Amy wasn’t invited, but two other girls from a different class were. I knew them both, as we’d all gone to the same school since we were in kindergarten. I didn’t know them well, but I knew they were in the same league as Blair—wealthy, athletic and thin, and popular. Being invited to this party made me feel like perhaps I was becoming popular, or I was at least a blip on the popular radar.

Blair’s house was beautiful; her parents robotically nice; her handsome older brother charming. She had a trampoline in her backyard, and her father even had his own boat. I was in awe, and, most of all, I was thrilled that there was probably no picture of a gigantic penis for us to gather around later that night.

My wanting to leave Blair’s party around the same time I had wanted to leave Amy’s was for an entirely different reason, however.

Nicki, Christina, Blair, and I spent a solid amount of time on her trampoline. Not jumping or anything, just sitting. We talked, I suppose. About what, though, I honestly couldn’t even begin to tell you. But, at some point in the course of these hours, I did something to take myself off of the popular radar, if I was ever even on it, to begin with.

The other girls wanted to sit on Blair’s dad’s boat. I didn’t see the appeal, but sure I would go, too. But I wasn’t allowed. I was told, in not so many words, that the boat had a weight limit, and seeing as how I was so heavy already, there was simply no way I could sit on the boat with them. I was too fat. I was shunned to the trampoline which could hold my weight. Sitting there, I undid my ponytail and cried into my hands. When I tried to put my hair back into a ponytail, I couldn’t. I couldn’t get my hair up the way my mom had earlier fixed it.

I felt suffocated by my own body, a fat ten-year-old who couldn’t even get her hair into a freakin’ ponytail right.

I spent the rest of the night keeping to myself, and the next morning I didn’t even eat the chocolate chip pancakes her dad had made. My dad never made chocolate chip pancakes because to him chocolate for breakfast was absurd. God. I desperately had wanted those chocolate chip pancakes.

When my dad picked me up mid-morning, he never asked me what was wrong or what had happened to upset me, even though I knew he knew something was up.  I didn’t even tell him that next day, when Mrs. Tolliver, my fifth-grade teacher, had to call my parents and Blair’s to tell them about how we had fought in class.

That Monday, following her party, Blair drew a line down the middle of our shared table with her pencil and informed me that since I had ruined her party, I could under no circumstances touch her side. At some point during the day, either by habit or by my own subconscious decision, my disgustingly fat arm, in a brown and blue sweater, touched the line, and Blair, who was guarding it with everything she had, stabbed me with her pencil as hard as she could, using her pencil tip to push my arm away from her side, leaving a deep black indent for days and days after. I yelped, then yelled, and then I cried in front of my entire fifth-grade class.

When my grandmother died a month later of the lung cancer that’d be eating its way through her body for the past half-year, Amy would sit with me on the floor of the classroom, near the back where we kept our coats and bookbags—our knees touching, her arm thrown around me, her palm, the one that had held the picture of the man and his penis so sacredly, caressed my arm with an understanding of loss.

Blair would tell me under her breath, as I sat down at our table, minding her line, that she was sorry for the loss of my grandmother, and I would tell her to just shut the hell up.

Katie Ellen Bowers is a poet and educator living in the rural Southeast with her husband and daughter. Her work has been published in Kakalak, Broad River Review, and Levee Magazine.