Context.

A girl's world.

I’d like you to imagine this: A long, wide hallway. Perhaps the length of a football field. Warm and natural colors. 

At one end are the open doors of a library, a fireplace bigger than life itself at its center. The shelves are filled with books telling the tales of girls navigating life across every region, time period, and sprawling land of make-believe. 

At the other end is another set of doors leading into the office of the headmaster whose - in front of students, anyway - poise never faltered, whose voice was always clear and firm but never raised, and for as long as I knew her sported a signature head of striking silver hair. 

The youngest of us, age four, would enter this building by the library. The oldest of us, age eighteen, would enter this building by the office. Day in and day out this hallway would see five hundred girls at every stage of childhood. The headmaster knew every single one of our names. And for anyone coming through that library entrance, she would stand there each morning bending down to look you in the eyes and shake your hand. And if anyone mistook her title, she would only need to correct them once: “It’s Dr., not Mrs.” 

As a four-year-old in 1998, I could look down that hallway and see who I could become. The older girls always looked so cool in their high school uniforms, dressed for sports, carting beautiful pieces of art to their display place, carrying instruments, their backpacks overflowing with books, and always in the spring coming in suddenly with sweatshirts emblazoned across the front: “Princeton,” “Northwestern,” “Stanford.” 

As an eighteen-year-old in 2012, I could look back and see how far I’d come. And in the times we’d get walked down to the pre-k and kindergarten classes to introduce ourselves and spend a little time with them, it always made me become more aware of how I was presenting myself because I’d remember how excited I was on those days. I remember thinking, “This girl has all the knowledge of the entire world.” 

From 7am to 6pm, Monday through Friday, nine months out of the year, for fourteen years - this was my environment. Students, teachers, coaches, cafeteria and janitorial staff, all women and girls all the time with every personality you can think of. But that was normal. I’d never known anything else. And neither had my older sister. 

Just like my mother and aunt, my sister and I are five years apart. And as the younger sister, there was that familiar element of wanting to be like her. Desiring her company. Wanting to be included in whatever she was doing. But our age gap was just wide enough that in her eyes, this quickly went from being endearing to being a total drag. Getting the memo, I resolutely evolved into wanting to chart my own path by the time I was ten or so. On the bright side, observing my sister was like the up close and personal version of gazing down that long hallway. And observing my mother and her sister was like gazing at the ends of the earth. 

Between them exists a similar rapid-fire yet dry humorous banter. The jabs dangerously toe the line between jovial word combat and an actual argument, tipping over from time to time. My mother, just like myself, effortlessly brought home impressive report cards. My aunt, just like my sister, sported the emotional bumps and bruises of a test pilot strapping into life and hoping for the best. But the older sisters didn’t get all the action. My mother once snuck off to Atlantic City with a boy and I almost set the kitchen on fire. But in both instances, for whatever reason, the fault of these adventures was placed on our older siblings who “should’ve been watching us.”

But no matter how opposing our personalities were, in both sets of siblings remain a resigned - if distant at times - affection and understanding. We have each other even when we don’t want to. 

My life was insulated. Carefully curated. An almost perfect bubble. But again, it was all I had ever known. And I was happy even as an otherwise angsty teenager. I was always excited - if at times, slightly apprehensive - by the prospect of life’s journey and by what would happen after reaching the end of that hallway. That focus was singular and constant. Doubt was a rare companion.

Between home and school, I came to know sisterhood which I define as “a meaningful bond between women.” 

If you asked me at the age of four what the differences between boys and girls were, I would not have been able to tell you in any significant detail. I probably would’ve said, “Girls have long hair and boys have short hair.” Perhaps if I had puzzled over it longer, I would’ve said, “Girls have babies.” 

Sure I had a father, grandfather, a cousin, and a couple of uncles. But mostly, in my mind, boys were the kids in the school across the street from ours. Aside from not being able to have babies and having short hair, I might’ve said that rumor had it boys were stupid. They certainly looked stupid from a distance. But I didn’t have any firsthand evidence… aside from my cousin who did fit the bill.

That particular setup - the street dividing the two schools - made my relationship with boys automatically adversarial in a competitive and territorial sense. They were the “other” like a rival sports team or feuding fiefdoms. We had our territory and they had theirs. But by age seven, they were shuttled across the street to our cafeteria for the combined after school program where we’d be unleashed upon the art rooms, playground, blacktop, and field. Despite the free range given to us, the groups from opposing territories did not mix. Different art tables. Different sets of swings. Different sides of the blacktop. 

But the boys were great at taking up space. Being disruptive. Getting in the way. Most notably, each day they’d claim the entire field for themselves. In particular, they liked playing soccer. My classmate also liked playing soccer and admitted one day she wished she could spend some of that after school time doing just that. But she couldn’t because the boys were there. 

I took it upon myself to approach them, telling them that we wanted to play. To my (by this point) born-nine-years-ago surprise, they said no claiming that only boys could play soccer. With diplomacy failing, in a blazing display of - in my view - righteous but definitely unsportsmanlike behavior, I picked up the ball, tossed it ahead of me, ran circles around half of them, kicked and shoved the other half to the ground, dragging them by the collars of their uniforms for good measure, and scored multiple times. 

In my victory, I won back a section of the field from the infidels… for an afternoon.

In my childhood, boys were very much “out of sight, out of mind” save for instances like the one described above which were few and far between. They played no significant role in school social dynamics. How far you could get on the Oregon Trail computer game, however, was very much a status symbol followed by how tall you could build your block tower and how fast you could inhale a plate of spaghetti on Thursdays - pasta day. 

Nonetheless, social dynamics between girls - as opposed to boys - are often described as bonding over sameness rather than creating a hierarchy over who can outdo the other. And I suppose that was true. While there were groups of friends - evolving into full-blown cliques by middle school - there wasn’t really a hierarchy between them. It was the 2000’s so my friends and I all grew to like anime and emo bands but due to the nature of our small school, there’d be just as many of us in the school play or on the lacrosse team as the Jonas Brothers-loving pink nail polish-wearing blondes. 

While our exteriors were different, the relationship between groups - unlike my relationship with the boys - was not adversarial. We were simply different neighborhoods in one community. Though upon reflection, it was probably a very intimidating environment at first for newcomers. I’ve seen it play out enough in teen movies: Walking into the cafeteria, people at each of the tables turning to take a peek at you. But there were always people jumping at the opportunity to be the official welcoming committee. And I’d just be wondering if we’d be adding yet another “Emily” to the class list. There really were too many kids named “Emily.”

As is part of life, conflicts would arise more often within groups of friends than between groups of friends. If it got serious between groups of friends that would catch the attention of the teachers and an assembly very reminiscent of the one in the Mean Girls film would take place and we’d grow past it. 

My class was well known for causing trouble. Sure groups of friends bumped heads in middle school, but by 8th grade, we’d have our lounge taken away from us after quite an expansive graffiti incident, a future school trip canceled because of a shoplifting incident, and making our counterparts at the boys' school run away screaming because we put tampons covered in red marker in their urinals - payback for them spreading a list (also quite Mean Girls-style) ranking us all by appearance. 

“I will address you as young women,” our teacher fumed while pacing in front of us during one of those infamous assemblies, “because you have demonstrated that you are certainly not ladies.”

By senior year, these conflicts were only a few threads in the tapestry that told the story of this fourteen-year-long journey from fresh out of daycare to becoming the leaders of the school.

During that journey, I’d take that same attitude to summer sports camps - also all girls. By the second half of middle school, I’d wholly entered my military phase only carrying the bare essentials to lacrosse camp with my hair secured in cornrows. While I wasn’t overflowing with self-confidence back then, the one thing I knew for certain was that I was a very good lacrosse player and that there were very few in the league who could ever outrun me. My roommate at this particular camp was practically a living doll: Pink from head to toe, blonde French braids, ribbons, hairpins… the works. I didn’t pick up on it at first but she was terrified of me and all my olive drab. My parents later joked that I was probably the first black girl she’d ever shared such close quarters with. 

I asked what position she played. She said defense. I said I also played defense and that I heard this was a tough camp. “Buddy system?” I suggested. 

By the end of the camp, we were a well-oiled unit. She started going on and on to her parents about how we’d wake up early together to stretch and prepare for the agonizing morning runs and how good of a team we made on the field - how our group won the scrimmage tournament. They were shocked and later sent my parents a letter thanking me for the transformation their child had made over just a couple of weeks. As a goodbye, we saluted each other.

While I certainly felt affection within me, my sense of sisterhood was never blatantly outwardly so. It never involved walking arm in arm or swapping secrets in the dark. It wasn’t contingent on us spending every waking moment together. I never stood on stage and poured my heart out to the people I cared about. But just like my carefully crafted environment, my relationships with my friends and my larger peer group weren’t plagued by feelings of uncertainty or instability. 

I felt there was respect and mutual understanding. We may not have all been cut from the same cloth, but I felt we’d ended up in the same quilt through studying together, playing sports together, and singing together in chorus class. And it was the small moments of emotional vulnerability - a nervous Olivia gripping me in the stage wings before walking out for her first performance in a school musical and me telling her to breathe. 

Each girl in that school was a brick in the foundation of my life in one way or another. In that sense, there was nothing temporary or trivial about it. My relationships there, in my view, had no expiration date. No dramatic endings. They weren’t a placeholder.  

Instead, it was the boys who were the temporary anomaly. Couples would get together one week and break up the next. By the age of sixteen and seventeen, gossip in the lounges the boys weren’t allowed to loiter in was always piping hot. If one of us had been wronged, the group solidarity was swift. At combined school dances it was mainly Caroline and I who would spot the girls who were about to puke up the alcohol they shouldn’t have been drinking in the first place and make sure they didn’t end up drowning themselves in a toilet bowl. 

But out on the dance floor, I would feel unfiltered distress watching the boys pull my peers close, their fingers like talons on their arms, on their waists. It was a distress so acute they may as well have been holding a knife to their necks.

I’d found out what sex was by accident inside the school computer lab at age twelve through what I eventually understood was erotic material telling the story of an underage girl falling in love with a man after being raped and impregnated by him.  

I did my best to forget about the mix of images being pieced together in my head. Out of sight, out of mind. Such things had nothing to do with my decidedly female world. 

Sex education at age fourteen added a clinical component to the violence. A slideshow of STDs. Careful instructions on how to apply the condom yourself because boys won’t want to or if they do, they could poke a hole in it without you knowing.   

But my mind still pushed all of this away. Sex was for married people. You marry your best friend. And I’d never be friends with a boy. They were to remain across the street, outside the gates, and I couldn’t imagine any hormonal cocktail that would change the very essence of who I understood myself to be, of what I understood my world to be.

However, for the first time in approaching the end of that long hallway, after occasional more evolved and more mature versions of old playground soccer spats, the thought occurred to me. The thought that perhaps the world I was stepping into was unlike anything I had known until that point. That the world I was in was a male one. That the boys across the street were just the first obstacle of many. That their talons couldn’t even cut butter compared to what was to come.

At the age of eighteen in the August of 2012, I arrived in New York City. The long hallway had been replaced with avenues that touched a concrete horizon. I walked along the crowded streets with timid confidence and boundless curiosity. It was entirely unfamiliar while at the same time feeling like getting the keys to my own backyard. I was ready for this next step.

It was time to put my foundation to the test.