You died collapsing the human pyramid in gym class

You sunk your eyes deep into the Cap'n Crunch before you, hearing the clacking of your stepmother's absurd heels she had just about broken in so that her feet no longer disfigured themselves in an outward bend while she accelerated her gait down the oak staircase your real mother had once lost a tooth on and it'd been difficult to distinguish between the blood and the red wine. Your father had left for work as he always already had, and it was always just the two of you until you were saved by the pneumatic sigh of the school bus that gave you exactly enough time to wipe the milk from your lips and press them momentarily against the cheek of the awful woman across the table and avoid anymore conceited motherly advice until at least the afternoon when t.v. was no longer allowed and she would suggest well since you never have any friends over that don't make her want to puke shit, that perhaps holding the Cutex (until the inevitable fucking up of her diaphanous green toenails) would be a fun thing to do. But sitting there just then, there would be excruciating minutes to fill.

A certain conversation materialised out of nothing, just the innocent clinking of a spoon against fine china versus the sawing of bacon and those fingernail-to-chalkboard slips of the fork as she tore away at a Full English Breakfast well beyond your privilege, screeching into words suspending your spoon en route to mouth, words on you, the girl, becoming a woman, and that youth is taken for granted and spent all too soon. Becoming that woman can wait my dear no matter how hard your biology wants, it can wait. From the face on your stepmother that you could barely glance at, it was not even a thing, just an order veiled as a suggestion as she wielded an oily shard of scaley dark pigmeat on a fork that was more than eager to take an eyeball to any argument: raising it to be a good idea from now on, as a girl entering teenage years, if you made an effort with the help of her meditative breathing exercises, to supress all future menstral discharges say, up until some time soon after your wedding maybe?

She leaned back in her chair and continued to consume as though the matter had been settled. The woman who would only months later swindle your father out of two-thirds of his orthordontist's salary, to stick it to him for spending so big on your stupid funeral (like she'd have to be dead before he'd even do something so nice), felt that it was her honest duty to cordon your newly acquired powers of sexual readiness like the ephebic nymph she knew you so truly would come to be.

The practice was entirely healthy, she had assured you, and the next morning she carried out a ceremony of burning your tampons at the breakfast table, she stood them up like birthday candles in the margerine tub, lighting them from their cotton fuse lines, and if there was a word of this to your father well how about we all go have a look inside those Doc Martins above your wardrobe for, what's that: a bag of amyls and this dogearred copy of Kickin Back Mickies with Penis H Christ? As she waved infront of you two items of pre-planted incrimination you knew that this was one of those moments that while you weren't entirely sure of the gravity of what those things meant, that it was likely this was your last sizeable chunk of childhood innocence being not only defenestrated but also landing to slide down the inside of an unflushed public toilet.

* * *

Heading for what may well have been a morbidly obese adolescence, the fun run was never going to be your shining moment. If you could just get through the thing without well, dying, then that would be victory enough for you to walk home with an Oreo McFlurry in each hand and a schoolbag steaming up from the heat of some bedtime McNuggets, but unfortuately the one thing you and your peers feared more than death itself--the fear of humiliation--struck you down with an unfairness you never had the chance to question, nor to seek retribution against the heinous threats of a woman (you had no way of knowing, besides a nagging intuition) born a man fit to be tied over the complete set of female sex organs he would never entirely possess.

You'd been keen on chocolate milks that lunch time, though it didn't occur to you until you were out on the track the price you would pay for your over-consumption. What was it you were trying to prove running up ahead past your usual crew of sluggish lards, up past Jessica Kebel in her Adidas get up she had her mom write a note for and the sports bra that wouldn't need replacing until after babies, you powered on until the stench of a particular row of bushes hit your lungs like that time you were jetlagged in a Berlin rumpus room and your dad was smoking fat ass cigars so not to look like the pansy ass geologist who couldn't even hold a job in a mine because the particles he might inhale scared the beejesus out of him, there in front of his uncle-in-law who wasn't even at the wedding and you already began to recognise how there's no getting men--this was about the time you fell into one of these stinky bushes and you felt the warmth of liquid running down your leg.

First you'd just pissed yourself, but then there was blood. With the help of a mysterious powder your stepmom sprinkled onto your cereal every morning, you had already missed several periods, but really they had just been bottled up somewhere you preferred not to think about, backed up with no exit strategy. Placing your body in an exhaustive state allowed you to finally release, but along with this came everything else. Not just pissing; you were clearly aware that you'd released the contents of your bowels, and on top of that you were puking what was left of the flavoured milk across the fence separating the school from a junked out backyard complete with barbed-wire-collared staffordshire terrier on maximum apeshit, each snap of its teeth commanding from you another heave of liquid in every direction.

* * *

Unfortunately it didn't kill you, and neither did the embarrassment. You would have to wait another excruciating twenty-three minutes until you'd cleaned yourself up in the burns shower and were wearing the spare uniform they keep in sick bay that must've been last worn by someone who died of ballooning titties that expanded to the size of human heads before exploding because that shit was sagg-ee, and so you were sent back with fiery cheeks to the oval where a test of endurance along the lines of just get up on top of this pyramid of bodies barked from the mouth of your spam-necked Phys. Ed teacher and if you had half a brain you might've considered to check your socks for pissy shit that caused at first a dry heave in Gavin Wheedus which soon led to the real thing puking a river and forfeiting his vital load bearing responsibilities throwing you into the cement pathway at the bottom of the hill where a moment later you would be met by Llana your sea cow bff obliterating your already fractured skull a second too long for the surgeons to piece you back together.