I’m starting the story in the bathroom because I like that image: four horny sad girls in full Catholic school uniform checking out the height of their skirts in the bathroom mirror. I am The Saddest and take pride on etching the tristeza on my face — un poquito de blank stare por aquí, un poquito de indignant air por allá — like I’d seen my tías do. It’s the late nineties, I’m thirteen and, already, as you can see, I’m a professional at the performance of suffering. A professional in reeling you in with with my ayys and sighs and nobody will ever love me — the essentials of Colombian girl world — which brings us back to the bathroom: I take first dibs on the only bathroom stall with a lock and start rolling the top of my skirt so it goes from monja-below-the-knee to chica-chévere-above-the-thigh. I sigh and sigh at the sight of my skinny hairy legs remembering how mami wanted to take me to the wax lady earlier in the week because, apparently, no man will ever love you con ese fur de osito that you have en esa pierna de pollo, nena. But today these chicken legs will win. Today I stare at my chicken legs with admiration because hoy es el día they will get touched, felt, wanted.

I can hear my three girlfriends locking the bathroom door, giggling, opening the back window then lighting a cigarette while talking to their imaginary boyfriends in the mirror. While practicing the cruising that’s about to come, sashaying up and down the bathroom sucking on their cigarettes giving the imaginary boy-audience the sexy look we’ve been working on then making out with their hands, sucking on their arms. Así así es que you kiss, R says to everyone then attacks her arm with that mollusk tongue. Inside the bathroom stall I close my eyes deeply, stick out my tongue and give my arm a full rumbeo —hickey included. My arm, my invisible lover! Where have you been all along!

The goal: we need to get fucked or at least fingered by the boys from the school next door through the fence at the edge of our school that overlooks theirs. We need to be desired, wanted, objectified in our own terms. We need to cut this coy niña de bien routine with cuchillo. There’s no boys in our school other than the bakers from the panadería and the priest. Everyone else—and this is not a hyperbole—wears a skirt, a cross and a terrible cara de longing.

What do we want? To be touched!
When do we want it? Now!

The plan: we cut science or math or history. We hide in the bathroom. We turn our puta lookz: skirts up, mascara on, intentionally messy ponytail. With puta look on, we run along the classroom corridor out of the building and into the back of the school. We hide in the pine trees that smell of eucalyptus, piss and soil. We light another cigarette there on the shade—for what? Because it looks good. And in this monochromatic homogenous bland-ass school—where the most precious item of clothing is a orange-checkered skirt with a green sweater — nobody cares how anything looks. But we do. We care so much. We want a piece of another world, one outside of the confines of the nunnery, the Ave Marías, the kneeling and beating of chests. We want the world from our cunts. The fantasies swimming between our legs. We want that yearning to take center stage and rage. So we walk around the periphery, far away from Sor Inés’ theology lecture, far away from the sanctity of our bodies careful not wake up the security guard.

We’re not the first ones to do this.

We did not invent this game and the four of us are not even good at it. There is Dani G, the most gorgeous girl at school —the girl we all either want to fuck or be. I want both. Dani G gives zero fucks about modesty and rules, she shows up at the school with the uniform all tight around her, fitting her like an outfit, a dress, and not the homogenous trapo de pendeja that we all wear. She sucks on a lollipop so her lips are always candy red. I remember Dani G like a queen. Wavy brown hair, full magenta lips, mascara always on point. I remember she sun bathed on the basketball courts right in front of the panadería, skirt and ass up, making sure the bakers working inside the bakery saw her. Every day rumors of her fucking the bakers circulated during class. Letters passed from hand to hand to hand with details of Dani’s sexcapades. Everyone talking shit about her: ay she’s such a perra, such a puta, and who fucks a baker? Gross. And yet we all consumed the details of her puta life with such intensity. What she wore, how he fucked her. What she felt. In reality, we all wanted a piece of her freedom. Dani G got laid while all we got was a bloody jesus with a six-pack nailed over our beds.

Sobra decir: anyone caught skipping class will be severely punished. And anyone caught smoking, wearing makeup, disrespecting the uniform or The Lord will receive the ultimate punishment. Parents will be called, girls will be kicked out of school. Public shaming will ensue. We’ve all seen it happen: the entire school called upon to witness the expulsion of the heretics.

The inquisition of our cunts is on.

The nuns got eyes everywhere. We got something better: imagination. Although our skirts can be policed, our hands slapped, our bodies shamed in public— our imagination, that boundless space, is filled with orgies.
And we’re willing to risk it

For us is about life and death. Because there’s so much longing at this school. So much denying of the bodies that carry us from class to class to church to class. From 7am to 4pm. Everyone around us— the nuns, our finger-waving mothers, The Colombian Society—surveilling our tesoritos with all the talk about modesty and purity and waiting. But you know what doesn’t wait? Sex fantasies and our bodies pulsating with yearning like a dying animal.That swirling energy that we are barely starting to understand but that pulls us with such force, such energy, the adrenaline of the fantasy—skirts up, fingers in, tongues out— is so potent. We follow the fantasy, we follow the feel pulling us to the edge of the school, that borderland where anything can happen.

Bitch, we’re ready.

Every day after school I undress in front of my Salserín posters. Door locked. The posters are taped inside my closet: boys with long hair, baggy jeans, hand signs and ridiculous sunglasses. I also have posters of The Velvet Underground, The Ramones and The Cure — those are my background. The crowd that cheers me on. The music as I wrap a blanket around me, as I walk slowly with a mirada fija, holding my cigarette, staring at the eyes of the salsa teenagers like I’ve seen every mujer bella at every telenovela since I was a kid. This is my moment. I am the fanciest hoe. The most desirable. I let them wait for me. I walk slow, sure to showcase my legs, my shoulders, all curls down and flowing about to devour the pieces of paper meat in front of me. They all whisper amorcitos to me. They all want me. And I do too. I devour them so much the boys’ mouths have all faded from so much kissing. In my room they’re all alive, pleasing me as I say.

Finally, we reach the fence. A circle of eucalyptus trees make the perfect hideout. The grass is tall, unkempt. We hear the barking of the security dogs and our hearts stop. The four of us hold hands and pray that we won’t be found out. I imagine being walked up to the center of the church during mass and chastised by the nuns and made an example of failure. I don’t want to be kicked out of school but I feel like I have no choice. Deseo mata miedo. The dogs eventually leave, we breathe. We light a cigarette to pass time. We help each other with our makeup. Minute after minute passes and the only boys we see are too far from our reach. Should we yell at them? There was no discussion of what would happen once we reached the fence. Do we call them? Do they? How does one really cruise? We knew how to perform for each other but now it was real and nobody seemed to know exactly what to do.

I sigh deeply, bored after 15 minutes so I stand up and begin walking down the fence. Away from my girlfriends but, also, away from our hideout. I am willing to risk it. My girlfriends whisper for me to come back but I can’t stay still anymore, I can’t keep waiting, I need to take charge. I need to be in control of this. The adrenaline turns my entire body into one beating drum. Chicken legs out, I admire them as they walk one foot in front of the other on the dirt path until I see the shape of a boy smoking a cigarette. A halo of curls around his head. By now, I’m far away from my girlfriends, which is both exciting and terrifying: I am only performing for myself now. And maybe this boy. I stand by a tree and look at him. I give him my best mujer bella stare, así. He sits on a rock and finally looks up at me. You made it here, bitch, walk up to him. So I do.

It is not until I hear his hola, do you want a cigarette? It is not until the softest of his voice reaches me that I realize this boy is not a boy, not a boy like the other ones but a girl in the shape of a boy

I look back and catch my girlfriends talking with the boys on the other side, passing cigarettes and alcohol through the fence.
I take the offered cigarette. He lights it. It’s the first time in my life that I see a girl as a boy: almond-shaped eyes and his beautiful brown face cubed by the shadows of the fence. We don’t say anything. We smoke next to each other. The fence both keeps us close and far away from each other. My body is still pounding, harder now. He smiles at me and my cunt becomes a river. All that practice — all that practice! — and now I’m frozen.

For what seems like an eternity nothing happens: birds chirp, cars rush outside, the smoke of our cigarettes blends with that 1 p.m Bogotá sun. I have no idea what I want other than to stay there. Stay there for as long as I can. Stay close to this boy, far away from the nuns, closer to the dirt and the sun and his lips finally blurting a I gotta go to class, here’s another cigarette. He lights it for me, then passes it through the fence. I suck on it, feeling its wetness. I stay close to the fence and watch the boy walk back to class.