The bus stop

 As long as I'm on the subject of Jr. high trauma, I may as well note another amazingly tragic, almost too horrifying to believe drama. This one also occurred in 7th grade, but this time it involved menstruation and the 100 or so kids that rode the bus home.

     In our bougie Jr high we had a pool. And those fucks they called coaches made us swim in P.E. class, because child torture was totally their kink. They didn't make us shower, thank the gods, but we did have to change together in the locker room, and the bathroom stalls did not have doors that locked. That means that privacy is not a thing, especially if you didn't have a friend in class to have your back and block you while you changed, or peed or whatever. My clothes and shoes got stolen a few times that year. They also didn't clean the stalls often enough, so that teeny little trash bin that's meant to hold 10 used menstrual pads/tampons per day, usually had 30 piled on top by 3rd period, and was not usually accessible. Allowing the world to know you were a human that menstruated was NOT AN OPTION. 

     That situation created an issue for me. I wore a pad unless it was a swim day, then I wore a tampon. So I had to switch it up when i changed for PE, and I couldn't bear to stack my bloody trash on top of the rest of it, so I brought a plastic bag with me to school to carry it in until I got to one of the other restrooms in the school later on. it worked like a charm, until it didn't. 

     One day I went to class after swimming and I was in a hurry. I threw my bookbag down by my desk as I narrowly arrived before the last bell, and a bunch of my stuff flew out. One of those things was my baggie of trash, and although I tried to hide it in toilet paper, enough was showing that you could guess what it was. A boy in my class spotted it and immediately started talking shit. Of course I denied it, made up excuses, called him out on his enormous ears and virginity, whatever I could, but it didn't help. I got roasted. And after that day, I never dressed out on swim day again, and I would wear 2 pads and a tampon together just so I would never have to create trash at an inopportune time.

     However, my humiliation was incomplete. The universe had to make sure that I was sufficiently traumatized, so the next day as I was leaving my last class about to walk home, one of the big-eared, virgin boy's friends ran up and stole my book bag, and headed toward the bus stop where 100ish kids waited for something interesting to happen before going home.

     I chased him the whole way, and when I got to him he was dramatically flinging the contents of my bookbag everywhere. His friends and much of the bus lines were pointing and laughing at something, and screaming at me that I was a nasty hoe and look at the nasty shit I had in my bag. I knew I didn't have anything in there, but as I got closer I saw that there was one of those giant pads the nurses office gave you in emergencies, covered in ketchup and right in the middle of my open bag. I think I yelled and carried on about how that was fake and not mine and blah blah blah....but none of it mattered. I was ruined. They won. Story of my life at that point. After a couple weeks people moved on and the school year ended. But the stage was set for the next series of events that shaped my life. The need for acceptance was deep in me, and that didn't turn out well.