needing an abortion at the age of 13, freaky porn, and how Muslim teenage girls know everything
trigger warning: sexual assault and violence
Note: Details were drastically changed to protect confidentiality. Consent was also confirmed to write and publish this piece.
I think about how when I was young, I knew everything and anything. Now at the ripe age of 23, I know absolutely nothing.
It was a few weeks after my 13th birthday when I got my period for the very first time. I was on the toilet, sobbing while looking down at the pool of blood, wondering how I was going to break it to my mother that her only daughter was dying before I was handed a pad (not a tampon because I learned that day that only bad girls used tampons) that I thought was a diaper.
When I asked her why my stomach and legs were hurting so bad, she said it was because I was no longer a girl but a woman. And that becoming one would mean enduring the most ferocious pain since nothing was more excruciating than being a woman in this world.
I stuck out my swollen stomach as it was bloated with baby fat, because I was still a baby, puffed out my training bra chest, loomed over my younger cousin, and announced, “I am a woman now.”
She marveled at me, looking up as if I had known every answer to the world. And she was right. Because I was a teenage girl, and by default, I did.
When I thought I needed an abortion, it was only a few months after my 13th birthday, after my period cycle began, and had painfully morphed into a woman.
It was early in the morning on a fall day when I had made the awful mistake of missing the yellow school bus because I wanted an extra 10 minutes of sleep and decided to take the train by myself to school. After all, why would a sixth-grader not wanting to miss homeroom to see her crush be such a dreadful idea?
Rush hour was over and the train carts were empty, except for me and a drunken man. I gripped tighter onto my fiery red mp3 player covered in peeling kawaii stickers, blasting Katy Perry into my tangled headphones, tugging at the sleeves of my long knee-lengthed pink jacket my mom got me from a back-to-school sale.
In what felt like hours or even years but also a few short seconds, it eventually became stained with my own murky blood, a puddle of my sweat, and maybe even his too. I managed to convince my mother that it was just my period blood and nothing else. In some way, perhaps I was convincing myself too.
Within the next few days, it seemed like everything I had known was somehow absorbed out of me, leaving me empty. Hollow. Except for the lingering feeling that something bad had happened, which I didn’t really understand. But I knew it was bad, and thus, that made me bad too.
I had come from a sheltered Muslim home where I thought the worst thing you can do is hold hands with a man that wasn’t your father and practiced the unsaid rule of walking to the other side of the street when you see a boy.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in geometry class when two of my classmates next to me whispered about something I had never heard before. I eavesdropped on their conversation, trying to piece together what they were saying between their whispers and breathy childish cackles, taking mental notes.
“Blowjob” giggle “tongue” giggle “pussy” giggle “penis” giggle “sex” giggle “baby”
Baby baby baby. I was unfamiliar with the other words and believed they probably made them up for their own secret girl code, something my little cousin and I did when we wanted to steal extra chocolate from the cupboards.
I quickly went home after school to search up everything I heard. I had learned the beauty of “clear history” earlier that year which came in handy when my screen was flooded with hundreds of porn videos of “HOT BRUTAL GANG RAPE”, “FUCKING TEENAGE GIRL ORGY”, and “SEXY SCHOOL GIRL ANAL” after putting the keywords into the search engine.
I went down a rabbit hole of searching and clicking, searching and clicking everything and anything. Eventually reading articles from a strange blog with ads on the corner flashing Viagra pills and hentai trailers of a girl in pigtails with breasts as big as her head, sucking on a pacifier. Blog posts titled “How to Please Your Man in Bed” and “Baby 101: How to Become Pregnant Quick and Easy”.
Baby baby baby.
Did I have sexual intercourse? I thought. Consent wasn’t something mentioned in the threads. Am I pregnant?
The next day after the yellow school bus dropped me off in front of my home, I walked 40 minutes to a random corner store. Somewhere I knew no one and no one knew me, and plopped 2 pregnancy tests on the cash register. The cashier looked at me and blinked.
“It’s for my sister,” I mumbled.
She blinked again, looking away as if I was just another girl out of the pools of teenage girls who too needed a pregnancy test.
I put my head down in embarrassment, fingers fidgeting, waiting as she ringed up the items. I quickly grabbed a bag of Takis which also felt dire in this situation. She told me the final cost and realized I was short of money. I looked down at the 2 pregnancy tests and the bag of chips before putting away one of the sticks. For 13-year-old me, a bag of chips felt more important. It’s to prepare myself for whatever may happen, I thought to myself.
I quickly stuffed them into my bag, headed down to a McDonald's down the street, and chugged on what felt like gallons of Fanta.
Waiting until my stomach was filled with something other than nausea and pain, I went to the bathroom, pulled my pants down, and whipped out the pregnancy test from my bag. I looked at it and analyzed it as it was my first time ever holding one, my strawberry patterned panties under the stick. A few months earlier, I was learning how to properly stick my pad onto the same pantie and now here I was in a pee-stenched bathroom at Mcdonald’s with a pregnancy test.
I read the instructions carefully like I always do in class, closed my eyes, and peed onto the stick. Moments later, I paced around the bathroom, my strawberry panties wrapped around my ankles.
Baby baby baby.
I looked at the stick and realized a sign emerged. It was negative. I closed my eyes and thanked Allah. Thank you for letting me be a girl for a little more time.
Two years passes by and I’m 15-years-old. I walk into my local Barnes and Noble which eventually became a safe haven for me to buy a novel by John Green. I look around me to see if anyone can see me and quickly fix the biting elastic wire under my breasts.
I walk into the young adult section and suddenly see a familiar face. A man. Fear waves over me, paralyzing me. My breathing from the long walk under the hot sun thinned into a desperate painful wheeze. It’s him, I realize. I look next to him and see a little girl with pigtails. She’s probably about six years old. She holds onto his hand, tugs it, and points at me. My eyes widen as he turns around, both of them approaching me. A blood-curdling scream starts to arise in my stomach, a scream that tells me that either I’m dying or I want him to die. But instead, they both pass by me, and I realize they’re reaching for a toy on a shelf behind me.
I hide behind a bookcase, looking at him and the little girl from afar. She has his eyes, I think to myself. He’s a grandfather. When I thought of the man on the train, it had never occurred to me that he was simply another person with his own life, let alone a family. I stare at the little girl, her little chubby fingers wrapped tightly around his. Someone in this world loves him. I wonder if the little girl will eventually know what I do.
His hair is gray and he is almost bald. His arms brittle and weak, same as the last time I saw him on the train. No, he was muscular and built. Or was he chubby and short?
I stop myself and realized that I couldn’t remember what he looked like at all. Somewhere along the way, my memory became unreliable. Something I thought was the only thing I had control over, had now slipped away without me even noticing. I stand there, still paralyzed by fear but not from being afraid of him but the horrifying wonder if I could ever identify my rapist or trust myself ever again. And so, I leave the bookstore and never went back.
A year passes and I am 16-years old, trudging down the hallways with a denim jacket covered with feminist pins I bought from Etsy. I went to an all-girls high school a few blocks away from my house. A one-floor school shared with a middle school, my graduating class of 60 students mostly consisting of Black and brown girls. I had made the decision myself dreaming of building sisterhood but perhaps a part of me just wanted to stay away from boys.
Everyday, I would pass by a girl who I heard briefly from an ice breaker activity that she “liked baking blueberry muffins and finds snakes very cool-looking” in my English class. Her friends occasionally scoffed at me and called me a hippo while she shyly looked at the floor, trying to change the conversation.
I never thought much of her until one day, she followed me to the bathroom during lunch, her eyes red, her fingers antsy with a familiar fidget, and said,
“Hey, I’m sorry to bother you…but I really need your help. Please. Please.”
So she continued, breaking into sobs, swallowed her tears, then cried again.
“I didn’t know how to stop him. I love him so much, I just didn’t want to scare him off. I’m so fucking stupid. But I haven’t had my period. My mom can’t know, she’ll kill me. Do you understand? They’ll kill me. I don’t know what to do.” She looked down, fixed her hijab, and brushed her tears, and snot out of embarrassment.
I looked at her silently as she tried to collect herself between her panicky wheezes. I wanted to ask why she was telling me all this when we barely knew each other.
The bell rings and it is time to go to class. She looks at me with a blank stare.
I push her hair strands into her hijab. “I’ll make an appointment at a clinic. I’ll come with you.”
Two days passes by and we stand outside the clinic and arrived 30 minutes earlier to her appointment.
“I’ve always wanted to have kids,” she says. “I never imagined this to happen.”
“I don’t think anyone does.”
She smiled lightly and looks at the signboard of the clinic, her skin suddenly looking ghostly.
“I should probably head inside. I don’t think visitors are allowed in so you could go home if you want. It’ll take a while. I think. Maybe. I don’t know.”
I nod and wonder what to say to someone who’s about to get an abortion in a few minutes. An awkward pause stands between us, and I watch her walk into the building. I turn around to go into the nearest subway station when I look up and see a deli. My mom texts me how I’m doing, who thinks I’m studying for the regents exams with a friend. I go in, passing by cheap phone chargers, bootlegged air freshener sprays, and soaps with names like “Febraaze” and “Dovey”, and head straight to the snack section.
I stare at the chips and pastries, realizing I haven’t eaten all day. Then I wonder if she has eaten anything too. Probably not. I stood there for a couple of moments, analyzing every packet of donut and cheese doodles bag. Fuck, I think. What does someone want to eat after getting an abortion?
I look at the bottom shelf and see a line of pastries. I grab mini blueberry muffins Little Bites and two bags of Takis because maybe she likes Takis. I eventually pick up tips after assisting several of my friends to get abortions to get plain greek yogurt instead as they often felt nauseous after the procedure, a normal reaction to the surgery. Perhaps a signal from their bodies reminding them.
I plop the food on the cash register and make an order for two (turkey) bacon egg and cheese sandwiches. The cashier bored gloomy eyes count my single dollars. I could see the clinic from the glass window and suddenly wondered how many people had come to this store after coming out of the red building. How the cashier first started working here sneering at us with our blueberry muffins and takis in judgement before eventually getting used to it.
I go back to the front of the building, waiting for her. I wonder why she came to me for help in the first place when I knew she had a group of friends from school and we only had a few conversations about what our favorite One Direction member was, which was obviously Zayn. I wanted to ask her but knew it wasn’t the right time or place.
She comes out much later than I expected, waddling uncomfortably. She looked at me, surprised.
“You’re still here? Did you…wait for me?”
I nod and hand her the plastic bag of food. “Of course.”
She smiles and there’s a long pause again. No longer delicate but a quiet understanding to leave it as it is.
And so, we each go on our separate ways and went home. I see her at school again, surrounded by her group of friends, chatting away. We never talked much after that day, a hushed acknowledgment made that we weren’t going to be best friends for life. We passed by each other in the hallways, softly smiling at each other and nothing else. There was never a need to speak of what happened ever again, but there was a silent understanding that we were tied together for the rest of our lives. A wordless code that stayed between us forever, something only understood by teenage girls. Because that’s what we were. Two teenage girls.
I see her pictures from time to time. She has kids of her own now and they are so beautiful. Her child has her eyes. A vibrance of light beams out of her.
She looks so happy and I know it is because she wanted this She chose this.
It’s been a few days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and all I can think about is every one that had ever thought about getting an abortion or had one.
While most of us are workers at fast-food restaurants, behind the counter at your local grocery stores, the crossing guard lady who just wants to be a grandmother after being a mother her entire life, a trans delivery man that was about to get on hormones soon, some of us cannot tell our stories.
So we will continue on with day-to-day life, surviving and moving on because that’s one thing we have control over and the only thing left we can do. Our fingers stained with red Taki dust, lips glossed with butter from blueberry muffins, our stomachs filled with a suffocating blood-curdling scream, plain greek yogurt, Fanta, and pain.
A part of me knows that my classmate, my friends, and I are not what you imagine when you think of people that need an abortion. Her hijab wrapped tightly around her dark brown skin, my plump fat stomach gorging out of my stubby hairy body. A societal juxtaposition for who needs an abortion.
So everyday since Friday, June 24th, I think of 18-year-old Fariha Roisin, 5-year-old Lina Medina, 33-year-old Purvi Patel, 22-year-old Brittney Poolaw, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera, 19-year-old Oliver Hall, 23-year-old Kenlissa Jones, and more and more and more and more.
My mind shifts back to when I sat on the toilet in the Mcdonald’s bathroom, strawberry panties dropped to the sticky floor, my piss brimming with orange soda at the tender age of 13. I suddenly feel the sigh of relief that overcame me again when I realized I wasn’t pregnant. Not only because of the negative pregnancy test and I still had time to be just a kid, because that’s what I was, but if it was positive, I knew that I had a choice. A choice that is now stripped away. So now at 23 years old, 10 years later, I am left again with everything absorbed out of me, leaving me empty. Hollow.
With no choice at all. A choice that was taken away from me by the man on the train. Except now, it’s happening all over again.
What the relationship about the revolution and the photos with ladies wearing the hair scarves?
Thanks
I believe on the freedom for anyone in this world either you wearing scarves or bikini. Its absolutely up to the person.
so powerful as always