She's Sixteen — A Short Story

Content warning: The following story contains references to sexual assault.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

She’s sixteen, and she’s on vacation with her family. She’s tired when the plane lands. She’s exhausted after the forty-minute bus ride to the hotel. On the plane and on the coach bus, she spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her. Her iPod earbuds effectively served as a blockage to civility. She meets them on the trolley employed to escort all the newly arrived families to their rooms. To them, she speaks, and they speak back.

Kate and Julianne, they introduce themselves. They’re best friends, and their families are vacationing together. They live in the city next to hers back home. It’s evening and she takes them in through the burning tangerine glow of the lampposts stationed strategically throughout the resort, to guide night trolleys through the maze. Julianne’s blonde and Kate is, like herself, a brunette. They’re both clear-skinned, slender, smiley with white teeth, and friendly to her.

The girls chat as the trolley bounces along. Kate and Julianne’s clothes and makeup are just a tad dishevelled, but not offensively so. They’re tossed together but complete, like two forgotten-about homework assignments pounded out minutes before the deadline. They’re carelessly slovenly, yet they’re them, finished, endearing. She imagines that, back home, they’re both popular at their schools. Girls who can get away with being just a little messy that easily are always popular. They’re glamorous, by default, because they don’t try. They don’t have to try.

Her parents, pleased to see her socializing for a change, tell her she’s lucky to have found some new friends right away. She does feel lucky, sort of. She’s far too aware that she’s one type of girl and they’re perfect specimens of another. They’re both so beautiful and fresh, while she really looks like she just came off the plane. She regrets choosing to travel in black leggings. Black leggings cling. She’s sticky and gross. She’s not together. She’s duct-taped and falling apart. She has a lumpy body and it’s clad wrong. She wants so badly for these girls to like her. Or, at the very least, to not be repelled by her, as some girls at her school are, with their pencilled eyebrows forever raised at her sweat stains and her spotty glasses. Her questionable hairstyle choice, held together with plastic clips. Her refusal to wear the uniform kilt in a sexy style, opting for the plain trousers instead. She cannot, and doesn’t, keep up. She can’t keep up with herself.

She’s lucky, though, for once. Kate and Julianne like her. For one week, partly thanks to their lack of choices on that enclosed and isolated getaway, they can like her. They can like the duct-taped her. They accept her as one of their own. For one week. she’s going to be allowed a small taste of what being a different type of girl is like.

They pick a meeting place for the next day. The palm tree with the twisted trunk near the beach, after breakfast. They will meet there and go to the beach and work on their tans. She’s so excited the next morning that she can hardly finish her fruit juice and eggs, and her mother has to remind her to bring a bottle of sunscreen with her.

On the beach, they lounge across towels like postcard models, three in a row, three sweltering young beauties on display for the passerby. She smears sunscreen across Julianne’s back, counting the little dark brown moles as she works her way down the sweltry flesh. One, two, three, four. Julianne’s skin is warm beneath her touch, almost toasty. Kate says something funny about the family playing volleyball nearby and they all laugh. By the time it’s noon, they’re cooked.

They eat their lunch at the poolside bar in the adults-only section of the resort. It strikes her as they sit down to eat: they are allowed to sit there. They are not children today. They are three girls together, but they are not three girls together. They order three pizzas to share, and in order to remain in that chic eatery they must not be too fussy about those pizzas, nor can they contribute too much to the noise. Their chatter must be contained, levelled, below the music. They must do lunch like grownups.

Before the lemonades arrive, the girls ask her if she has a boyfriend back home.

“No,” she answers. “Not yet.” She didn’t know it then, but she would be using that excuse for years, to keep her nosy relatives at bay. I don’t have a boyfriend… yet. That “yet” will become crucial to her survival.

“We’ll meet some boys here. We’ll find you one,” Kate promises, really promises, like an encouraging parent with a child struggling at math.

During lunch, she makes the mistake of showing them one of her stories-in-progress. She hands over her notebook, more than a little nervously. At home, only her teachers read her stories.

“I don’t understand,” Julianne confesses when she finishes reading it aloud. She really read it all the way through, from beginning to end. She put in a reasonable amount of effort, for someone so clearly accustomed to putting extraordinarily little of herself into anything. She even throws in a dash of outrage. “Why doesn’t she just tell them?” 

Kate agrees. She doesn’t have an opinion of her own, so she latches onto Julianne’s. Signs her name on it. Julianne closes the notebook and hands it back. They all go silent, mulling over Julianne’s question. The teenage heroine in the story is hiding a dirty secret from her family and friends, which the author realizes then and there must be nothing to the adventurous Julianne, who must have many, discarded casually, overflowing the wastebin she never bothers to empty. It’s not daring enough. There’s no new ground broken. Julianne’s cracked it.

Julianne sits on her lap later when they meet up with some older college boys at the resort’s coffee bar. It’s swarmed with guests smoking cigars, and sipping away the cool, overcast afternoon. There aren’t enough seats for everyone, and she obliges to being Julianne’s. She enjoys the weight of Julianne, the clean, sweet smell of her hair, and the lingering, sultry scent of the sunscreen rubbed into her back and neck. The sensation of participating in something a bit offbeat, something she wouldn’t do at school, where there were plenty of places to sit. Hard, plastic folding chairs, classroom chairs, benches, and wooden pews in the chapel. Julianne, here, has chosen her lap. The boys think it’s funny, a girl on another girl’s lap. They think it’s girlishly cute. They have just become girls again, despite their efforts at lunch.

She doesn’t think much of the college boys Kate and Julianne collect at the resort as the week progresses. They’re not that special, she privately decides. They’re not that much fun. They’re just like the boys at her school. They are older, but hardly. A few years and a short climb up the education ladder have made little to no difference. They’re all the same. High school boys, college boys. Annoying. Careless. Boisterous. Always laughing at everything. Always elbowing their way into all the free space. They never inspire her. They’re never featured with great care in any of her stories, which are all about girls. But she’s sixteen now, and she has to at least try to like them, because that’s what a girl is supposed to do when she turns sixteen. She must learn to be all about boys.

They follow one into his hotel room later. She wonders if something’s going to happen there, as something always happens in the movies when teenagers find a room to occupy. She’s never smoked weed and wonders if today she finally will. She doesn’t. The boy just wants to show off his surfboards. Disappointed, she flops down with Kate on one of the beds, waiting for Julianne to finish play-acting being impressed. She senses Kate’s restlessness beside her like the tremor of an approaching earthquake. She imagines this happens often between her and Julianne at home. This is a dynamic, one that she’s been unknowingly dragged into, as a bystander, a silent participator. Julianne shamelessly flirts, Kate restlessly waits.

Kate and Julianne suggest going to the resort nightclub that night. The age for entry is twenty-one, but they have a plan. Everyone at the resort has a wrist bracelet, white like a freshly pressed bedsheet for the adults, and mango-orange for the children and older minors. They’ve figured out that if you flip the orange bracelet over on your wrist and carefully peel back the top layer, it’s white underneath. They’re geniuses, she thinks. She never would have discovered that on her own. Kate and Julianne are her first realization that there are many sneaky shortcuts to the privileges of adulthood.

The bracelet trick sweeps them through the nightclub’s doors thirty minutes to midnight, helped along by the meticulous consideration put into their makeup, jewellery, and low-slung summer dresses. Effort. Effort at last. Effort with a purpose. They fool the bouncer, and when she catches a glimpse of herself in the full-length, gold-bordered mirror on the wall beside the coatroom, she almost fools herself. She’s not sixteen anymore. She’s dusted off from the high shelf of a Catholic high school. She’s passing as twenty-something and she’s part of the real world, finally.

They head straight to the bar to do shots. Feeling emboldened by her new maturity, she jokes about her hot-blooded, vodka-swinging Russian ancestors, boasts that this will be easy for her. It isn’t. The vodka burns. It scrapes her throat. Kate and Julianne laugh at her and convince her to try another. Her early history of sampling alcohol is embarrassing. At thirteen, she got drunk for the very first time, on champagne at a wedding. She recklessly flirted with a second cousin. Her future will be worse. At twenty, she will drink too much cheap pink wine at a college party. She will drink a whole bottle she brought for herself because she doesn’t like beer. She will break down crying in front of strangers and fall asleep on the host’s top bunk bed after somehow making it up the ladder. She’ll wake up with a pounding headache, confused and guilt-ridden. But for now, she’s sixteen and she’s forcing down that second shot and then that third shot and then a fourth. She’s sixteen trying to be twenty, but twenty is continents away.

Soon, she’s drunk.

Kate and Julianne’s college boys arrive soon after. The fifth round of vodka shots is a group effort, as the boys have already been drinking back in their rooms. Now, she’s dizzy. Her friends are ready to dance.

She dances like wild, with Kate and Julianne. She feels almost feral, detached from herself, spiritually connected to a ghostly Russian somewhere up her family tree, jumping about to keep warm in the snow, tossing shaggy hair, plotting revolutions, brimming with vodka and intensity. She’s them and they’re her. They’re trying to be fire and she’s trying to be snow, a blizzard. Something that rages with the music. Something with a strong pulse.

She dances to a slow song after, with a boy, some boy, one of Kate and Julianne’s boys, a blonde one. The boy smirks down at her the whole time. She can tell, he finds her innocence and her grownup playacting funny. He has no intention of kissing her or taking her back to his hotel room. She can tell he can tell she’s sixteen. He’s probably guessed what she’s done with the wristband. She, Kate, and Julianne think they’re the first ones to come up with that trick, but they’re not.

He holds her hips as they sway to a soothing love song in a language neither of them understands. He thinks she’ll topple if he doesn’t hold her. She thinks he thinks he’s doing her a favor, holding her up like this, paying attention to her like this, being indulgent. Her two friends are much prettier. He probably likes Julianne, the blonde one. He’s probably imagining this girl’s dress on Julienne. Then, off Julienne. Never mind that Julianne’s sixteen too.

Her head feels too heavy. She leans it on his shoulder. He smells like a pine tree sawed open, the vapors escaping. The vodka’s swirling around in her stomach and inside her head. She doesn’t have any special thoughts or feelings for this boy. The vodka washes out everything and anything she could feel for him. Right now, he’s just a bony shoulder, a pillar she’s clinging to while she waits for the world to stop spinning. She feels just like she just got off the teacup ride at Disneyland. She’s beginning to understand why the hatter and the hare went mad like they did, why they baffled poor, young, innocent Alice. Parties are too much when you’re not a natural-born partyer. It might have been vodka they had in their cups. Vodka passed off as tea. A sixteen-year-old can sometimes pass as twenty. Is nothing real anymore?

At some point in the night, Julianne disappears. She feels Julianne’s absence like a phantom limb that cannot be reattached. She knows she’s gone off with one of the boys, maybe the tall one, maybe the short one, maybe the one with the freckles, or the unfortunate acne. Damn their names, she can’t remember them. Longing sinks into her like a body in a weathered mattress. Or two bodies, wrestling, grasping, pressing into the springs. The boy she dances with, bored of her now, leaves her too. She doesn’t care about him anymore either, doesn’t wonder where he’s gone. She leaves with Kate, both of them swaying on their heels, supporting each other, on the verge of collapse, teetering, crumbling landmarks together. They’re followed by a dark-haired boy who likes Kate. The evening outside is cool and salty. That nightclub was too hot. They’re all slick and rank with sweat. They head for the beach.

She’s curled up on a stiff beach chair now, feeling sluggish, drained, bored, and done. Very much the child who’s tired of playing in the park and wants to go home. She’s watching Kate and her puppyish boy-of-choice on another beach chair nearby. He’s flat on his back and Kate’s on top of him, straddling him with her thighs. They’re stacked, perfectly fitted together, two puzzle pieces embraced and separate from the bigger picture. They both seem to know what they’re doing. They know where to put their hands, somehow. The strong, salty night wind attempts to pry them apart but succeeds only in lifting and playing with the strings of Kate’s hair. They are locked together, a single entity. A wet, squirming sea creature upheaved on the beach. She decides she doesn’t like looking at it.

Kate doesn’t hear or respond to her when she announces she’s going back to her room. She’s had enough of being a grownup for one night. She wants to sleep, and dream like a child. She wants to relapse back to being five years old and thinking being a mermaid when she grew up was an attainable career option. She wants to dream about this idea. She wants to be a native of the ocean, with the confusing love affairs happening only on the beaches, on the beach chairs, no concern of hers. She doesn’t want to be sixteen anymore.

She carries her shoes in one hand. She carries all of herself with some spare ounce of willpower fetched from somewhere deep within. The grainy boardwalk is rough on her feet, as are the sharp, bumpy stone plates of the walkways in the residential area. She’s done something wrong tonight, and because of that, she hasn’t ended up with a boy of her own. That is what matters most. Boys. Scoring boys. Scoring enough of them so that your name stays on the board and in the game. While she’s walking, her feet ache relentlessly, and she’s relieved when a resort worker pulls up beside her in one of those trolleys, smaller than the one she rode on with Kate and Julianne the night she met them.

“Would you like a lift, miss?” the driver asks her politely. He’s an older man, though not old. He’s probably closer to her second cousin’s age, around twenty-four or maybe even twenty-five. Not a boy, but a full-grown prince who’s spotted a damsel in distress. She’s too tired now to overthink it. She nods her yes and climbs in the trolley with him.

“Where’s your room, miss?” he asks her.

It takes her a moment to remember. She thinks, 'mermaids don’t need to remember room numbers'.  “Room…room…” A number eventually exits her lips, and he promptly turns the key in the ignition.

They drive for a bit. She slouches in the passenger seat. She’s still so drunk. His eyes are shifting sideways at her, regarding with casual interest her young, ample cleavage, shiny with sweat, and the new tan on her skin, the mark of the leisurely tourist.

"You’re out very late," he remarks. They’re driving along slowly. On their left, the hotel buildings, as artfully arranged as the suburbs, with the occasional window light still blazing. On the right, the beach, empty and dark. She is in the passenger seat, closer to the haunted beach. “Where’s your husband? Are you married?”

She shakes her head no. She’ll do it again, over and over again, in the future. No, I don’t have a husband… yet.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.” She huffs this answer, bristling at this unwelcome interrogation. Who was this man, the resort minister? The village priest? Why does he need to know if she’s married or not? And couldn’t he tell that she’s only sixteen, and drunk?

“What?” He reaches out with a free hand, cups her chin with playful, greedy fingers, and makes her turn his way. Makes the vodka swish swish in her head, as his other hand grips the steering wheel. “A pretty girl like you?”

Something wet then brushes her mouth, which is parted slightly. It takes her a moment to register that it’s his own mouth, kissing her, or more accurately, trying to playact something resembling a kiss while they’re still driving. She freezes, only her heart inside of her moving, her mouth tingling with what she at first mistakes for pleasure, because she’s read somewhere that pleasure feels like this, this tingling, like a bee sting. But his mouth really makes her want to throw up, or scream and run away. Run back to the beach, back to Kate and her boy. She’s so drunk. She’s so tired. Why is this man doing this to her, this man who’s supposed to be driving her to her room? Why is he kissing her instead?

“Do you want to make love?” he asks her when he breaks away, finally leaving her lips alone. Tears escape her eyes and roll fast down her cheeks. Is he drunk too? Her response to his entreaty is to jerk her head away from him, reach for the door handle, and jiggle it furiously, only to discover that it’s locked.

“Stop that,” he pleads gently, but this elicits from her a hoarse sob. She demands, in turn, to be let out of the trolley, or she’ll scream. She’ll scream loud, the promise of this being in her sob.

They’re still driving beside the hotel buildings, crammed with sleeping people on vacation, alert to the sounds of any disruptions to their peace and quiet, something they could complain about to the front desk the next day if she did decide to scream. All she has to do is scream, and someone will come running. He’ll get caught. He’ll lose his job. He’ll go straight to jail. Yes, he will. She just has to scream loud enough. Sense suddenly returns to this man. He stops the trolley and lets her off.

“I’m sixteen!” she snaps at him irately, as she slams the trolley door shut behind her. He watches her flee up the stairs to her room. She feels him watching her, feels his eyes sweeping her backside.

In her room, where her little brother is already snoring in his bed, she buries herself under the covers of her own, once again the little girl who fears the Boogeyman. She wraps the blanket around herself to prevent the possibility of someone crawling underneath and touching her. Sleep reclaims her, eventually, from the older man and his gross, wet kiss.

The next morning she’s groggy, sore, undone, and far too aware of her younger brother also awake in the room, watching her creaky, tentative movements with that keen curiosity younger siblings have when they suspect their tight-laced older sibling has strayed. A deep, intoxicated, coma-like sleep has diluted the face of the resort worker who kissed her in his trolley. She doesn’t remember his features, his nametag, or even his smell. She recalls only his voice, asking those dangerous questions, and his slimy, prying lips on hers. She considers this as she brushes the foul flavors of the night before from her teeth and tongue. There are hundreds of workers at this resort and they all look alike in their uniforms. She will never find out who he is. But will he recognize her?

Her plan to avoid this is to gather up her hair, twist it into a loose bun on the top of her head, and sweep a sunhat over it. She adds sunglasses and a different coloured lip gloss. She throws out the one she wore the night before. Her parents don’t question it when she appears at breakfast like this. They ask her if she had a good time with her friends last night. She lies and says yes. 

Later, she knocks on a hotel door with one hand. In the other, she holds an offering for her two goddesses, some doughnuts from the breakfast buffet wrapped in a cloth napkin. The cinnamon sugar spills out of the napkin and sprinkles the floor, mixing with the sand carried back from the beach by certain pairs of feet. Kate’s sand, from Kate’s feet. Julianne’s sand, from Julianne’s feet. Kate’s mother answers the door.

“They’re still asleep,” Kate’s mother says. It’s ten-thirty. She lost the night and they’ve lost the morning. She decides to wait for them to wake up. Give them another chance to make being popular seem worth it.

In her head, she’s practicing how she’s going to tell her friends what happened to her. But when they finally rouse themselves from their beds, she listens to what happened to them instead. Kate went night-swimming with her boy, and Julianne went to bed with hers, in the room he’s sharing with his friend from college.

“He pulled out fast,” Julianne confides to her and Kate in a conspiratorial whisper. She leans forward so they could smell her acid-like, peach-scented body spray. A little giggle lags lazily behind, eventually catches up with Julianne’s smell.

She wonders how that works, how that’s even coordinated. She bites into a doughnut that’s gone a bit stale, chewing slowly as she considers the details. She thinks about health class, the scandalous gossip about her classmates back home. She thinks about the trolley driver who kissed her. The doughnut swims in her stomach, too sweet, unwelcome, the wrong breakfast to have after a night like last night. She feels queasy the way she had when she got off the plane five days earlier.

Kate’s story is less interesting because it doesn’t end with sex. She left her boy in favour of a dry change of clothes and a few snatched hours of sleep. They both had better nights than her. Something in her locks up her own story, traps the words in a notebook that doesn’t open. She doesn’t tell them about the trolley man. They never ask, and so she never tells.

The rest of the week passes in a fog of quiet paranoia that the man who kissed her would reappear again. Do it to her again. She’s jumpy, constantly looking over her shoulder, but he never appears. Meanwhile, her resort friends gloat about their satisfaction with their vacation. It has gone exactly the way they planned for it to go. They’ve escaped their parents’ watchful eyes for a week, if their parents were ever watching at all.

She hugs them goodbye the day they leave. They’ve exchanged phone numbers and vows of eternal friendship. “Call us when you get home!”

She knows they’ll never call her. When she and her family get home, she can’t bring herself to call them either. There’s this sense that she blew it, that she didn’t play their games well enough, made a cinnamon-sandy-sticky mess of it all. They’re grown up, miles ahead of her, and she’s just a trolley stranded with broken wheels. So she doesn’t call. Not on purpose, at least.

There is another girl named Julianne on her phone’s contact list. A procrastinating, exasperating classmate from school she’s doing a project with. She doesn’t want to work with that particular classmate, but the teacher doesn’t give her a choice in the matter.

“You don’t always get to choose. Work with Julienne,” her teacher insists.

Julianne, or Julianne. She dials the wrong Julianne. She dials her Julianne, her resort Julianne. She demands, enraged, of her Julianne, “Did you finish your part yet?! You were supposed to send it to me yesterday!”

“Umm—! Who is this?” Her Julianne cackles on the other end. There are other girls with her, cackling with her. She hears them, clustered in the background. She’s provided the entertainment at what is clearly Julianne’s outing with her real friends. She’s already faded from Julianne’s memory, the dorky girl from the resort, the awkward girl whose lap she’d sat in. The girl who writes odd stories. Julianne asks, “Who is this?” as if none of that had happened. Julianne is laughing at her.

Mortified, she hangs up fast. Her cheeks burn like the harsh tropical sun did. Clutching the flip-phone in her sweating palm, she ignores her mother’s curious inquiry.

“Let me guess. She doesn’t have her part done?”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t speak at all. Nothing comes out of her mouth. It remains firmly closed to all entries or exits. She remembers that resort worker’s mouth on her mouth. She remembers Julianne’s mouth, dusted with cinnamon sugar. She feels like the ocean tide is carrying her away from the beach, away from Kate and her boy on the beach chair, away from everything. She never tries to call Julianne again. She never calls Kate, either. Not purposely, not accidentally. Just…never. Both their names disappear from the contact list, the lifelines cast out and cut off. She’s not allowed to be a popular girl anymore. She got her week and that was it.

For a while, she imagines them talking about her when they’re together. She imagines they make fun of her. Her clothes, her hair, her failure to snag a boy that night they went out dancing at the forbidden club. Then, miraculously, she gets busy with school and a new part-time job at a grocery store bakery. She forgets them and the older man who forced a kiss on her, with time’s help. She turns seventeen in October.

A decade later, she’s twenty-seven, going on twenty-eight. She suddenly remembers them again. Kate and Julianne, her best friends for a week. A killer virus is rampaging its way through the world and she’s stuck at home. She can’t go on vacation like she planned to. She can’t go anywhere. She has far too much free time to remember things best left unearthed and undisturbed, like the tombs of the dead.

Yet she finds herself writing the story down, bent over her laptop every day after dutifully teaching her online classes, squinting through the smudge time has made with its greasy thumb. Trying to make sense, or at least sensible art, out of what the hell happened to her when she was sixteen.