Bubblegum Bitches

They are women before they are girls, learn how to tear the plastic seals off lipstick tubes before they learn how to count to three. They crawl under thousand-year-old ironing boards and watch their mothers’ bird-bone fingers iron their fathers’ picture-perfect Ralph Lauren polos, smoothing away every crease as if they could mend a lifetime of broken promises and unfulfilled dreams the way they could a torn apron. When their mothers bend down to pick up their empty laundry baskets and walk out of the room, they swear they’ll never love a boy until it’s the end of the world, until they have nothing left to lose.

When they’re in elementary school, they’re the first to realize that even if you bake gingerbread kingdoms that thrive off seven milky seas in order to convince Santa Claus that you’re worthy of his gilded gifts, it won’t matter because he isn’t real, just like they realize that Prince Charming’s kisses don’t taste like hearths but like blazing hellfires. 

They don’t care about sitting alone during recess, just sink their teeth into Smuckers-smeared sandwiches and chew until the girls stop pretending that they’re royalty and the boys slink away with hunched shoulders as they realize that the girls they love will never love them back.  

They trade their cocoa butter chapstick for drugstore gloss on the first day of middle school, pop a piece of bubblegum into their mouths instead of doing their algebra homework. Everyone used to see right through them but now the boys are haunted by their hourglass hips, want nothing more for Christmas than to hear their names rolling off their raspberry pink tongues. The boys write them love letters in their neatest handwriting, tell them that they learned cursive just to get a chance to see their crescent moon mouths curl up into million-watt smiles. The girls stomp their twinkle toes to steal away the boys’ attention, but iridescent lights are nothing compared to liquor lips and strawberry blonde locks. So they clutch onto their envy as if it were a talisman, christen them with a name as unforgettable as the searing anger they felt when every boy they laid their eyes on was too busy building unattainable futures to notice their flushed cheeks and crumpled confessions tucked inside the depths of their school bags. 

Bubblegum bitches.

But the bubblegum bitches don’t lose sleep over their notorious nicknames. Instead, they learn how to sleep in the arms of all types of boys: prep boys who recite the periodic table of elements as they pepper kisses all over their freckled faces, jock boys who grab their waists as if they were their tennis rackets and twinkling trophies after tiresome tournaments, goth boys who lull them to sleep with the sound of My Chemical Romance songs being played on the strings of a battered guitar, just name any kind of boy whatsoever and they’ll cross them out on their never-ending checklist in less than five seconds. 

They shed their innocence like rattlesnake scales, slither into high school house parties and learn how to stuff bubblegum down a boy’s throat as they make out with them until dawn. They arrive as prisoners of their beauty and leave as Scheherazade, whispering tales into the ears of their one-night stands of how they’ll yearn for the sweet taste of their shared kisses for seven years before they free themselves from the circle of their arms and leave their beds without ever looking back. 

They’re only seventeen but they’ve died a thousand and one deaths: they’ve died watching their mothers’ brittle backbones bent over laundry baskets made of seagrass, under fluorescent lights and rickety floorboards, and the moment their doll eyes caught sight of the rarest boy of them all--the boy who made them believe in happily-ever afters even if they knew deep down that they only lasted for five minutes, the boy they gifted their first kiss to, the only boy they’ve ever loved--kissing the prom queen’s Jolly Rancher red lips in the middle of their high school gymnasium. 

They realize that it’s the end of the world, that they have nothing more to give except their alabaster hands to lovestruck prep boys asking them for a dance.

Bubblegum bitches never cry, but as they lay their heads on tweed tuxedos and swallow their flavorless bubblegum, purple teardrops stain their cheeks as they sway their pinup hips and finally let themselves break their oath.