Chapter 37: Connecting the Dots

Fitchburg is a city of hills. The path between my home on Weymouth Street and Fitchburg High School was a ten minute trek up and over a steep hill, then down the cobblestones of Jay Street (which at a forty-five degree angle was the steepest street in North America), onto Pleasant Street and the back entrance of Fitchburg High School.

One sunny day in late April or early May, about a month before I was due to graduate, I was on Pleasant Street, almost directly across from the school’s back entrance. I was just about to cross the street to enter school when I saw the young girl.

She was standing about fifteen feet away from me and she had a beautiful face and a developing figure and looked to be twelve or thirteen years old. Her features suggested a Mediterranean heritage.

The nameless girl’s stringy black hair hung in strands down to her shoulders and she was wearing a plain white, one-piece cotton sundress which appeared almost translucent in the bright morning sunshine. As the girl stood in her yard, we made eye contact. She held my gaze with a strange, desperate and pleading look. As we stared at each other, she half-smiled at me and lifted the hem of her dress to her chin.

I was stunned to see that she wore no panties beneath her dress as she displayed her naked body to me. A thin patch of pubic hair was just starting to grow. As I watched, she slowly swayed from side to side, all while keeping eye contact with me. I was trying my best to process what I was seeing – without much luck. People don’t show their nude bodies to strangers for no reason.

I wanted to say something to the girl but no words would come out of my mouth. After many seconds, she turned around and exposed her bare bottom to me for a few moments before turning again to face me. I admit I was curious but I was also scared. She slowly lowered her dress and motioned me to follow her as she walked up the stairs and into her house.

I knew exactly what her “come hither” look implied. My level of fear rocketed off the charts. Nothing about what I was seeing made sense. I could perceive a level of danger I could not define

The entire incident left me speechless and too freaked out to react. Instead, I bolted for the school’s entrance and barely managed to make it to my seat before class began. I found the entire troubling experience to be more weird than erotic. What would cause a girl, or anyone, to expose their body like that to a complete stranger?

I thought about the incident throughout my Ancient History class. I puzzled over it in Math class. By lunchtime, all I had was a roaring headache and no answers. In the end, I classified the girl as a strange phenomenon of nature, like the brilliant fireball I had once seen in the sky. I pretty much put the incident out of my mind and it wasn’t until I started to write this book that I remembered the flashing girl.

Something about her strange hopeless and pleading look reminded me of myself. I think she was an abused child. She was desperately trying to connect with someone, anyone else. The memory of the haunting look in her eyes triggered a connection in my head between my sexual abuse experiences and emotional issues, which have plagued me throughout my life.