Lost Innocence

Apples on a stick,

Makes me sick

Makes my heart go two-forty-six

Not because I’m dirty

Not because I’m clean

Not because I kissed a boy

Behind a magazine…

I was a bookworm growing up. Although I made time to play outside and knew that Mary most probably peed behind the lavatory and not the lemon tree, you would always find me reading on the stoep.

So great was my surprise when my mother gave me a speech about feathers at the tender age of thirteen. The speech basically came down to the fact that a girl’s name is like a bag of feathers. People never remember you for all the times you behaved, but choose to remember every wrong you ever did. That her name if she was not careful could lie around town very fast, and it would be very difficult to try and pick up every feather once the wind got hold of it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not a saint, but I was too bookish to ever worry about boys. And I had way too many other interests and worries to really be bothered. Sex was really the absolute last thing on my mind. I was one of those girls who use to spell out s.e.x as if even saying the word was sinning. Lol. I remember how we used to speak about actually kissing a boy. And although one or two of my friends had, the majority of us hadn’t yet experienced the pleasure yet. (I was a late late bloomer, and I think I’m the one who held out the longest by a mile)

Those were the days of innocence and being told to practise on the back of your hand, although everyone refused to admit they did it. The days of writing a boy’s name on a piece of paper and calculating the percentage of how much he loved you and how much you loved him. And spelling his name a different way if you didn’t get the percentage you wanted. Those were my high school days. Exploring who I was, dreaming dreams, taking the first tentative steps towards adulthood..

I’m quite close to my siblings. My youngest brother is fourteen. A laatlammetjie who will always approach me before he ever goes to our parents. He didn’t know quite how to begin. But soon blurted to me that our fourteen year old cousin (who goes to same school as him) is wanted in some dodgy suburbs. Because she had been sleeping with some girls’ boyfriends. Please note the plural.

Now trust me I know that today’s kids are doing way more than we ever did, but come on? A fourteen year old with multiple sex partners. Her parents would have a fit if they find out. So many questions are running through my head. Do I tell them or not? But I have told them about her so many times before. All the times guys she picks up from Mxit pick her up after school. Grown men who picked up a 13 year old who was in gr. 8 at the time. She’d be supposedly punished and following weekend be out again.

It’s as if they saying because she has white friends they can’t be bad. (Lol if only they knew her very white best friend has a reputation as a taxi rot. That almost every gaatjie and driver in area they stay has been with her… in the bush if not in the taxi.) They living in another world where their daughter with angelic face gets everything right with them. What will it take for them to stop enabling their daughter’s outta control behaviour? It almost looks as if I have something against her already.

It makes me so mad. I wish I could talk to her, but she has a houdingtjie that makes me want to klap the eyeliner off her face. Because she will end up in a coffin very soon. If not from some drugged up teenybopper who shoots her, then from AIDS.

And its times like these that I so glad I grew up the way I did. As sheltered as I did. As naïve as I did. Because in the big bad world you discover, that there are indeed double standards for sexual history. And that girls are labelled sluts very quickly.