My Library’s Copy of the What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys

by Kate Fridkis

The first porn I ever saw was planted by a pervert. At least, in retrospect I think he might’ve been a pervert. At the time, I trusted him. I was sure he was a normal teenage boy. At the time, it was pretty great.

I got my period for the first time when I was twelve. My mom was ready. I don’t know how. She drove me to the library and pulled two books off the shelf. What’s Happening to My Body? Book For Girls and What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys.

“We’re going to read them together,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”

I was nervous. It didn’t sound like fun.

On the way home, Mom stopped at the Shoprite to pick up a few things for dinner.

“Can I stay in the car?” I asked. I wanted a minute alone with the books.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

I waited five seconds and then took the Book for Boys out of the canvas bag. I opened it and something slithered out from between the pages and landed in my lap. It was a glossy page from a magazine, and it had a picture of a hot dog on it. No, not a hot dog… something else. I knew immediately, instinctively, that whatever I was looking at was bad. It was something forbidden and secret and grownup. I slid the magazine page back into the book, and shut it firmly. I put it carefully back into the bag.

Later, at home, I took the bag up to my room. Mom saw me carrying it toward the stairs.

“Honey — we can go over everything in those books together, so that I can explain it to you,” she said. “And you don’t have to read the one about boys if you’re uncomfortable.” She thought about it for a second and then added, “Maybe I should look at it first, to make sure there isn’t anything you’re not ready for in there.”

“No!” I croaked. “No, it’s fine. Don’t worry. I should probably read it, because I got my period and stuff.” I wasn’t sure why my period meant anything beyond the ruin of my pretty new white pants, but she seemed to think it was much more important.

Alone in my bedroom, I locked the door and again took the book out of the bag. Again, the single, shiny page fluttered out. I began to make sense of the image. There was a man, standing on a playground, with his pants unzipped. He was holding his… thing in his hand. It was definitely not a hot dog. Kneeling at his feet was a woman wearing pigtails and a pink dress with balloons on it. One of her breasts was popping out of the top of the dress, you could see the nipple and everything, and she was sticking her tongue out like she was about to lick the man — on his thing. Penis. I knew the word. She looked pretty happy about it. He looked very serious. There was a caption under the picture. It said, “Things are getting naughty at the playground!” Then there were other captions, for scenes on a different page, that hadn’t been included. I wished that they had been. What else was going on? What did “Sex in a hay wagon! Halloween heats up!” mean?

I knew one thing for sure. What was happening in the picture — that was sex. That was the secret thing that adults did and kids didn’t do. The thing that the characters in the novel I’d “borrowed” from my great aunt were always hoping to do.

I thumbed through the book, setting the sex picture aside, but within easy reach, in case it started to float away and I had to grab it. There was a whole chapter about penises, and I skipped to the illustrations of stages 1–5. There was also an illustration of a flaccid penis sitting next to an erect penis, which was standing up. But there was something better than all this. Someone had written in the book. Comments were penciled into the margins in neat, masculine handwriting.

“Mine is like this,” with an arrow pointing to stage 4. And then, next to the set of images that showed pubic hair growth, “I have this.” This time it was stage 3.

Immediately, I imagined that he was a teenage boy. A teenage boy with a surprising amount of hair inside his underpants. I imagined that he had pimples, like teenagers always did, and wore contact lenses, and had slightly greasy hair. On his head. He wasn’t good-looking, in my imagination. That wasn’t his purpose. He was there to instruct. And instruct he did. I flipped through the book with feverish urgency, looking for his comments.

He thought the girls in the illustrations from the chapter about girls were sexy. He thought all of the pictures of breasts were equally good except for stage 1, which was a little kid’s chest. Fascinatingly, he liked to put his finger in his butt. I knew, because he told me. There was a drawing of an asterisk-y anus, and then a long, empty space, and then a penis, high above. It was as though the artist had crouched between some man’s legs as he lay on his back. The commenter had pointed at the asterisk with a thin, hard line. He wrote, “It feels good to put your finger in here.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but then, I didn’t know a whole lot about boys’ butts.

Staring at the comment about where the writer liked to put his finger, I suddenly realized that I had stumbled upon a secret communication between the boys of the world. I was like a spy, intercepting their transmissions. These messages weren’t meant for my eyes. They were meant to guide boys through the complications of their own bodies.

If the boy with the pencil could see me now, he would be annoyed. “Hey!” he’d snap. “What’s that little girl doing with my book?” He considered the book his property. He was lending it out as a gift to the world. And there was a gift inside the gift. He had intended the glossy present from the magazine for another boy. It was a form of initiation, and it had fallen into the wrong hands.

But I wasn’t about to give it back.

“Kate!” my mom called from downstairs, her voice muffled by the floor between us. “Dinner!”

I leapt up from the edge of my bed and slammed the magazine page back inside the book. I stuck the book in my underwear drawer and faced myself in front of the mirror over the dresser. I looked about the same. It was hard to tell from my face and my knotty hair that my mind was completely different. That I knew infinitely more about the world than I had when I’d come into this room.

I avoided Mom’s eyes at the table. My little brothers were talking about which dinosaur was the most dangerous. My dad was making up dinosaur names. Everyone was being normal. They had no idea what I knew. I was sure that none of them had ever seen a picture like the one hidden in my underwear drawer.

After dinner, as I loaded the dishwasher, Mom approached me. “Let me know if you’d like to start looking over those books with me tonight,” she said.

I kept my eyes on the utensils. “I don’t know,” I said, playing it cool. Don’t blush. Don’t blush. I knew I was a bad liar. But if enough of my hair fell in my face, maybe she wouldn’t notice.

She was washing a bowl in the sink. “Maybe we can start tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll read the chapter about menstruation.”

Oh! Right! I’d forgotten about the girls’ book.

“Okay!” I said, too eagerly. “I should learn more about that, probably.” I had to keep her distracted. There was no way I could let her see the Boys’ book. If she did, she would be horrified. She would be upset at what I’d seen. But more than that — her motherly innocence would be interrupted. Her eyes would be opened. She would know too much. I had to protect her.

That night, with the secret knowledge of boys’ burning a hole in my underwear drawer, my mom sat on my bed and read the chapter about menstruation aloud to me. It wasn’t very interesting. And I felt awkward, looking at illustrations of tampons and pads with my mom. She was trying not to be awkward. She was trying to be really upbeat about the whole thing.

A few days later, I asked if we could go back to the library. I told my mom it was because I wanted to pick up a Sweet Valley Twins book. But when she went into the little kids’ section with my youngest brother, I hurried over to the returns counter, pulled What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys out of my book bag, and tucked it into someone else’s stack of books. No one saw me. Thank God.

It took her a few weeks to ask me if I’d gotten a chance to look at the other book — the one for boys.

“No,” I lied. “I don’t think I’m really ready for that.”

She smiled. “That’s okay. You don’t have to be.”

I went upstairs and opened my underwear drawer. Buried under piles of pink socks was a wooden box with a silver lock. My aunt had given it to me for Chanukah. It was a little treasure chest. I fitted the tiny key into the silver lock, and turned it. I opened the box. Inside was a tightly folded piece of glossy paper. My perfect secret. I unfolded it, bit by bit, until it was whole again. I had folded and unfolded it so many times that it was creased and worn, flecks of white showing under the once-shiny image.

The next boy who read the book would see the comments, but he wouldn’t know about the picture. The glorious, forbidden picture. It was mine now. I would face adolescence with a blank, innocent face, armed with the secret knowledge of boys. I knew exactly what a penis looked like. In full color. I had nothing to be afraid of or alarmed by. I was ready.

Kate Fridkis blogs at Eat the Damn Cake and tweets at eatthedamncake and has grown up reasonably well-adjusted, despite everything.