My mom was a horse girl. She won ribbons and had a donkey named, Packey. I was a boy girl. Boys were my favorite pastime. I kept lists of them in my journals. I assigned myself one crush for every class, in order to stay engaged. Inelegant beasts though they were, I felt freedom when I flirted with them.

The most coveted boys in my high school were water polo players. “Gorgeous stoned dolphins,” is how Julie Delpy describes them in Before Sunrise. On the last day of sophomore year, I snuck into the Sleepy Hollow Pool after it closed to triumphantly make out with one such sportsman in the guard shack. Floodlights, moonlight. Totally sober. Who dropped me off? We shared red Gushers, piercing them on our back molars, rouging our tongues, chewing them shapeless. I was surprised to note he seemed as nervous as I did.

It’s July, and we’re still hanging out infrequently. He’s got practice, and I’m without a license until August. I spend the summer redecorating my room, adding gauzy floral curtains, painting a pink mantra on the wall: do you believe in fairies? An ode to my fading childhood, which I’m already starting to miss, as surely as I am trying to leave it in the dust.

That afternoon my parents are gone, so he comes over. I’ve done nothing all day except pad around the cool concrete floors and eat a popsicle. Prime summer. I’m wearing cutoffs; he’s wearing baby blue board shorts. I like having him in my space, but I don’t know what to do with him. Sitting on my carpeted floor, our bare legs akimbo, my chest pounding again. My nose is smooshed against his freckles, his tan hands graze my lower back. His hair smells like chlorine. When I open my eyes to find his baby blue boner lurching suddenly in his shorts, I notice an urgency to get them both out of there.

That was my final and favorite water polo boy. After water polo boys there were emo boys and straight edge boys. Then came Ivy League boys, smart but not always wise. French boys are okay, a bit melodramatic. The boys I like most, despite my best efforts, are still from California.

You hear a lot about valley girls, but the boys are something special too. I took to their tongue before I knew they existed. Like like like like. “Do you know how that makes you sound,” my dad asked when I first picked it up, age 9. “As though you’re stupid. You’re not stupid. Why would you want to sound like that?” He didn’t get that knowing too much is scoffed at; that cool and carelessness always overlap. NO, he would yell as I tried on my new words, NOT WHATEVER. He and my mom wouldn’t let me see Clueless, because of its PG13 rating, and failed to understand the agony of having to be Tai when we played it on the playground. I did not know who Tai was, but I knew it was not good.

When I finally saw the movie, I watched Tai, Cher, and Dion scoff at the valley and its boys, but in my opinion, they’re a treat. Valley boys drive you around Fairfax and Mulholland, pick you up in their old Priuses or Subarus, comfortable behind a wheel. Valley boys say, I’ll scoop you. When you thank them, they respond, my pleasure. They know the dark bars and they aren’t trying as hard as Westsiders. They have pools instead of a beach. They have less of that nervous energy. It can dissipate among the shrubs and lawns and expanse. Less noise. More space.

They keep their rooms immaculate, their weed tidy too. They get the Sunday beauty of coffee stoned on the balcony. They’re polite. Kiss you slow. Have the faintest hint of cowboy drawl, like the far west never left, like they’re still the wild ones on the edge of the world, even as they eat their mom’s matzo ball soup. They’re sturdier than you think, and more fragile too. They really know how to order a pizza.

When you leave in a huff, they don’t even try to win you back. They just fade into their porch, pretending they’re in a film. We never did get the timing right, they intone, delivering lines.

Then you must take to your car. Drive through the streets and dance with your foot on the gas, moving every energy through you. Turn it up and shake, stick out your tongue, and sooner or later, some 818 babes with kingly profiles will motion, call me, as you drive south on the 405, grinning, electric. There’s always more where that came from.

Valley boys are like, you can’t move into that house on Lemon Grove, it’s not safe, is there even parking? Valley boys are all, I like smoking with you.

✿

My friend Lex and I spend our 20s dating valley boys. Julian is on keys and Nat, guitar. They both sing and write lyrics. The first night Nat and I hook up, his boner does not scare me. We have sex in Julian’s bed while he’s in Big Sur. Ew, says Lex, when I tell her later.

The first night I meet Lex is at Nat’s show in Santa Monica. She saunters up at a time that suits her, long after most of us have arrived. She has a cigarette and long intimate pants. They look like something a marchesa wears around the grounds. They skim the small string bows on her Repettos. She says whatever pops into her mind. She acts like she is deserving of luxury, but that it won’t impress her. She does not shy away from confrontation. She talks a mile a minute, and tells you when you’re wrong. It isn’t subjective.

The first night Lex and I hang out just us, she invites me to her cousin’s house in Westwood. There is a black net fence around the pool to keep the dogs out. It’s June gloom, so we sit on the patio instead of swim. She makes me a margarita, smokes us out, and later, heats macaroni and cheese in the oven. She shows me her email correspondence with her favorite professor, Margaret Vandenburg, who we all had a crush on. Lex writes like a forties movie heroine, and speaks like a Whit Stillman one, ending most sentences in, you see. She is a distant relative of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She drives me to the gas station down the hill at 10pm for cigarettes, telling me about her abortion, ashing out the car window into the mist.

Lex and I like to get high and listen to Animal Collective and drive to the Hammer museum, which is the best one in LA except for the Getty. Lex and I like to get high and listen to Soulwax and dance around her porch. Lex and I buy Grizzly Bear tickets from a scalper at the Greek and somehow, through some deft maneuvering I am too stoned to comprehend and too timid to investigate, she gets us into the third row, where we are lost in synth and lights, spinning, sharing her weed pen with the guys next to us as a thank-you.

Lex and I spend the summer at her boss’s house in the hills above Beachwood. She stays in the pool house to dog sit when they go out of town. Sometimes our other friends come, Sam and Shana and Amanda and my sister. Sometimes it’s just us. The sound system bounces underwater. We eat chips and drink beer. We tan and read magazines which get oily from our coconut sunscreen, leaving bright and mottled advertisements on our stomachs. We order food when the sun starts to set, waist deep in warm water, taking in the orange city over the pool’s infinity edge.

I call her Lux, for Lux Lisbon, of Virgin Suicides fame, immortalized onscreen by Kirsten Dunst. Lex has the same sheath of blonde hair, the same ability to drift in and out of this world. Like the neighborhood boys I am entranced; she is all five Lisbon sisters in one. I call her Lux for its proximity to Luz, or light. When I tell her this, she is unmoved, pragmatic: that’s not my name.

We go to our boyfriends’ shows together. The best part of the party is getting ready for the party. As my hair dries, I try on her clothes to see if they look better than my own. She emerges in a towel and rolls a joint. We lean out her bathroom window and turn up the music. I’m fast and sloppy with my makeup; she is slow and methodical with hers. She bronzes her cheeks with a big fat fluffy brush so they shimmer with pretend sun. I pull berry lipstick across mine, war paint, rubbing it into a flush. By the time we get to the venue we are not lucid. In our bags are a flask, crystal lip gloss, weed pen, wallets. The third best part is telling the doorman, we are on the list.

The second-best part is when Julian sings the song he wrote for Lex, and Nat sings the song he wrote for me, and we are the only ones in the audience who know it, and we close our eyes and bliss out and dance a frenzied, special, secret dance. We grin at each other and point our little fingers in each other’s little faces, indicating, it’s you, you’re his, you’re mine, you’re chosen, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else knows, we know. We move like we have nothing to lose, like we are the distant relative of a preeminent literary figure, and her friend.

✿

I lose Nat first. We don’t know how to grow up together. I start to want something else, a different feeling. I am curious about who I am when I am not his girlfriend. When he breaks up with me, Julian also breaks up with Lex. We joke that, like the massages they bought us that one Valentines’ Day when they were on tour, they planned this in the van. We analyze our heartbreaks in a one-mile radius of her house, from yoga to dinner to Elysian Park.

Her front porch had once been a prelude to our evening. We’d launch from it, to a show to an afterparty and wind up at our boyfriends’ places. Now, boys jettisoned, her house becomes beginning, middle, and end. We start on the porch with a happy hour beer. We make dinner in the kitchen. I pilfer her products in the upstairs bathroom and she tolerates it, rolling another spliff. We dance in her bedroom, spinning in the good way. We close the night on the porch before I drive home even though I know I shouldn’t, trusting the back way and my young white cis femme safety net, checking for cops, on high alert, high blood alcohol, high.

I lose Lex later. I move away, she starts dating a guy from work, and we find different worlds to immerse ourselves in. There are no hard feelings, just occasional ache for what once was.

✿

When we met, I was dazzled by how easily she surrendered to her desire. She’d wake up late and order breakfast from the store down the street, roll in late to work and not think twice. She did nothing she didn’t want to do. This was the stuff of my dreams, so delicious it had to be forbidden, but here she was, doing it. She governed herself entirely by her own pleasure, and showed me it wasn’t something that required couching or regret. Being around her made me feel like I could do whatever I wanted and didn’t have to apologize.

Of all the villains that got locked in my head as a child, Carol Burnett’s Miss Hannigan and her animated Disney sister, Madame Medusa, voiced by Geraldine Page, took the cake. Their behaviors frightened and mesmerized me. Miss Hannigan’s slurry voice and slippery kimono, her too-many jewels, her starving arms. Her bathtub and bottles and, most horrifying of all, her open hatred of little girls. Madame Medusa’s reverse ritual, the un-adornment at her vanity mirror, removing layers of makeup, fake lashes a spider she pops off each eye, red lips vanishing completely as she passes a cloth over them. Magic of the most frightening order: that which undoes. She speaks in a sticky melodious voice when she wants something, falls out of her silk dress, reveals too much of herself.

These women are bare in their desire—for a diamond, for earthly beauty and resource. Their longing is painted as greed, their sexuality as absurd. How silly that Miss Hannigan wants a man to nibble on her ear, that Madame Medusa makes up her face; can’t they see who they are?  The absurdity is heightened with foils of other women, or mice-women, in Madame Medusa’s case, who are civilized, sweet, elegant, who love children, who purr demurely and wear little kerchiefs over their heads. Who have accepted aging, and whatever else they’ve been handed, gracefully.

What fascinated me, and what was cast as ludicrous and pathetic, was their unapologetic want. A male want—brazen, blasé—in a female form. They believe they’re entitled to their yearning and say so. They wanted what they wanted, and wanted to be paid, to have enough money to keep living. They wanted jewels and space. Who doesn't?

The part of me who admired these campy villainesses is the part Lex helped free. I like a silk kimono, I like a lacy house romper, I like black thigh-highs and false lashes and baths in the middle of the day. I want diamonds and men at my ear and to sink into a plush pile of pillows and to wear a bangle on my bicep and to express my rage.

✿

Last summer when my future yawned before me I started following the instinct of my desire, which really freaked out my nervous system.  I bought a sticky-sweet body oil with my name on it in script. I painted my toes and pretended to read Leonora Carrington stories, high in my underwear at Dorothée’s Montmartre flat, listening to her records. I slept on Annie’s canapé for two nights as I looked for a sublet to stay longer in Paris, because I didn’t have any real responsibilities at home. No one needs me to feed them. I borrowed girl apartments and fed myself: baked potato flavored potato chips, Milka x Lu chocolate bars.

I was concerned because I was leaving 34 and my mother had me at 34, and this date felt like a limit I wasn’t supposed to surpass. I wasn’t close to having children and wasn’t sure how to get closer, or what to do in the chasm. If I’m not a maiden, or a mother, or a crone, what am I? Maidens have value, and mothers have value. If you’re somewhere in between those things, we don’t have a name for you. I missed being a named thing, the safety of categorization.

In Paris I was reminded that tiny shorts and pussy bows can be dignified at any age. Parisians teach us that sparkles are a tasteful accent. I began to strategize around Mary Jane flats and baby-doll dresses, like I used to. Maybe I could do it in a more refined way. What does an older version of Lolita look like? Miss Agatha Hannigan. I text Sam in LA about my plans.

Lauren Matthews:

            i’m doing an experiment called

Sam Rac:

            Ya love to hear it

Lauren Matthews:

            how slutty can i dress before i am uncomfortable

My want is a moving target. At 10 I dreamt of having cleavage, at 17 I hoped to be so tiny people worried, and now I crave translucence, dresses that leave nothing to the imagination, dresses that I was taught not to wear, for reasons of safety and dignity. Clothing that indicates you want it, whatever it is: attention, enjoyment, self-acceptance. You aren’t supposed to let on that you want.

Annie gives me a dainty red slip she got online and I feel unstoppable. It’s liquid silk and spaghetti-strapped. I buy swimsuits on Vinted for cheap. I learn a lesson called, if the glitter snakeskin string bikini is 4€, just get it, because otherwise someone else will. Who cares if it doesn’t fit.

I am approaching summer’s end. I’m the berry who’s been sunbathing a full month after you picked all the others, hidden enough that not even animals can reach me beneath the thorns. Fermentation lurks, but right now, I’m plump with sun, warm and ready, flesh and juice. The secret in picking blackberries is you want the one that’s about to explode. When all the sugars are ready. If it’s too firm, too strong, it won’t taste as sweet. Anthony Bourdain said this is when food tastes best; not when it’s freshest, but when it’s at its peak, right before it turns. If you’ve ever eaten a plum in August you know what he means.

I’m realizing my power and my youth and beauty on its precipice. I wear tighter clothes and think of all the women who’ve done this before me. Who want too much, so much that it shows on the outside, carves their bones out, engorges their bellies, makes them pointed with desire.

I know this is just the beginning, that I’m on the lip of this feeling. I can see just over the edge, eye-level with the infinity pool, the city of aging obscured beyond me. I know I don’t know what I’m talking about, haven’t yet felt the real pang of being cast out, unseen. I know that something has to die in order for something else to be born; that just because I can’t see over the edge doesn’t mean it’s an abyss. I know this worry is ancient. A familiar hum of not being enough, the old hiss to edit myself into what I think I’m supposed to be, instead of just being the thing that I am. Wanting the thing I want.

✿

My mom was a horse girl. I’m a girl girl. I have watched them for hours. I have studied us for millenia. Their comportment, the cut of their hair and clothes. How they race and prance and soar, braiding each other’s forelocks, swishing their manes, trotting around, tricking lesser beings, showing off, bucking unfit jockeys, eating apples, tolerating no fools.

I hope my fervor for girlhood emerges from a part of me that knows what’s coming. A bigger, taller, all-seeing part who senses a new title, a different belonging. I hope this is a swan song, that I’m gripping to what I know, what I’ll miss, because I sense a new phase. 

But that’s not really my business. My business is to Mary Oliver it, to let the soft animal blah blah. To follow my strawberry-scented eraser heart. I want short-shorts, cat eyeliner, cherry earrings, bubblegum lips. I want to dump out my purse on the concrete, empty it of receipts and sand and dust and all the shame I’ve carried for so long, around being too girly, too slutty, around like like like like, around my visible thirst.