In the days when we were young and free at 12 or 14 or 22 or somewhere in between, we walked and danced and ran and sang and we were the girls who were not killed. We went to the mall with our best friend, just two blonde girls or brunette, buying pink frosted nail polish and 45s for a dollar. Our mothers, one or the other, dropped us off there to spend the day. We ate hot pretzels and tried on cheap spaghetti strap tops and sometimes we bought something for five or seven dollars that maybe we wore to school on Monday.
We were there when our mothers picked us up again and we went home for dinner, when other girls just like us did not meet their mothers for pick-up and were never seen again. We didn’t know them but the stories bubbled up and so we trusted less and hid sometimes until that truck that seemed to be following us drove away.
We were naïve in our power but those men let us know that we had some, we just had no idea why or what to do with it, and it wasn’t the kind of power we wanted anyway, weirdo.
We rode our bikes on dirt roads and still came home for dinner, parched and spent but alive and right there where are mothers could see us and tell us to do our homework or clean our rooms or time for bed.
We went to the movies and if someone strange, a man, tried to sit by us, we moved. We giggled…
