Thirteen

Not just a number, but a state of mind

Photo by David Heslop on Unsplash

It’s August 21, 1979. Tomorrow I turn thirteen. We are at the family beach house in Ventnor, N.J. In the morning, my friend Julie will decorate the room with toilet paper. Julie has been my friend since the fourth grade. While we giggle ourselves to sleep, she gives me the scoop on what it’s like to have your period. She wears a bra to hold up her boobs, while I wait impatiently like Margaret for mine to appear.

In two weeks, the summer will be over, and we will be in eighth grade.

I am on the precipice of something, everything. The hormones have a mind of their own. Mood, meet swing.

I’m thinking of this girl this week. What she might say to our thirteen-year-old friend visiting from far away.

We were in the car the other day. He was head first into a whoopie pie, the filling oozing out of the plastic and smeared onto his cheeks like shaving cream. I inform him of this development. He flips the visor mirror to get a look and wipes the filling away with his shirt. At this point in the week, the Mary Poppins in me picks her battles. I no longer flinch.

He studies himself in the mirror.

“Oh no,” he said. “I think I have a mustache.”

His skin, like mine was forty-five years ago, is baby-bottom soft and has yet to meet a pimple.

“Do I have to shave?”

I tell him to talk to Russ when we get home about that department. But likely what’s happening, I explain, is a little bit of peach fuzz.

And by the way, I say, this is part of life. Nothing you can do to stop it.

“Ugh, I know,” he says, resigned to a hairy future.

Have you looked under your arms lately? I ask.

Another Ugh, this time a little louder.

A pause. Then this:

“I just want to keep being a kid.”

And this line — this is what they call the money shot in the movies. This is the essence of being a human tadpole, a body and a brain and a heart on the brink of metamorphosis, a funky chicken dance, one foot racing to the finish, the other longing to stay put, deep in thought with a cream-filled cake-like cookie.

It is a dance, he will come to understand, that is for all ages.