What Kind of Girl Are You?

Zoey has two boyfriends. She plays with them every day, even on the days they call her Toot Girl. She says she is going to marry them, both of them, mainly because they don’t have booger noses. I do not know their intentions. (Zoey has girlfriends, too, but somehow they don’t merit as much conversation at the dinner table. For instance, I have no idea of the state of their snot. And she is not planning on marrying any of them. Which makes me wonder if she is going to grow up more of a guys’ girl, you know the kind? Because me? I’ve always been more of a girls’ girl. That kind.)

Men may be from Mars and women may be from Venus, but both are still planets about which I know little. (I’m thinking in this silly interplanetary metaphor we are each of us our own sun). Much has been made of figuring out the opposite sex, but what of figuring out your own? Sometimes I think that is more important, Venus a “sister planet” due to similar size, gravity and bulk composition yet completely unlivable due to hostile conditions.

I have been the girl who hates the other girl for sleeping with her boyfriend. Fucking bitch whore slut with scant mention made to the boy who made it all possible. And I have been the other girl, too. I have had girl crushes and been crushed on, felt as if I were the prettiest girl in the room only to feel the very next day as if I am the toadiest, awfulest, most boringest girl ever. I have forged friendships and fed them grapes, let some hang like yellow leaves, lazily let others fall when I never meant it. I have broken up with friends, and looking back those were more painful than breakups with boys, a misunderstanding between girls such a deep betrayal of similar size, gravity and dense composition of carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

Honestly, somewhere along the way I bet some boy has called me Toot Girl, though of course I don’t remember it. But I can still recite the letter that a girl handed me when I was 15 and had made out with her boyfriend the weekend before, how she and her friends came into the TCBY where I worked and ordered an extra large swirl only to smear it across the table and onto the walls as I watched from behind the counter. I guess I want Zoey to know as much about girls as she does about boys, though what I can teach her is not much. We have sent rovers to Mars and found water, gotten so excited about the possibility of life not to mention the countless nights spent analyzing boys, whatwherewhy, the apparent magnitude of the red planet measuring -3.0, a brightness surpassed only by Venus, your girlfriends, and then the sun.