Content Disclosure: Mild Violence; Mild Language
Often, as thirteen-year-old Nelson moseyed through the hallways of Oak Ridge Middle and Upper School, he wished he was living in the Old West. This was his first semester in regular school—his mother’s newfound fame as a bestselling author and sought-after speaker meant homeschooling was no longer a tenable option—and he frequently had the urge to tell his new teachers to call him Jasper. The halls were not halls to him but rather Main Street of yet another dusty town. Students were townsfolk; classrooms, places of business. To his left, the English room was the local store, full of odds and ends. Directly across the way, the history room was the hotel, where in a few hours he would rest his weary head after weeks on the trail. As he continued in a gait stiffened from straddling his trusty, imaginary steed, he passed the town’s restaurant, actually the cafeteria, where he could finally eat a hot meal that wasn’t cooked by himself over an open fire. All these locations sounded mighty fine to him, but on this particular day, they would have to wait because he had another destination in mind, a need that required tending even before his empty belly or worn-out joints. As he headed toward the girls’ locker room it ceased to be a locker room and became a bordello, a word that he preferred to brothel or whorehouse because it didn’t sound to him as morally reprehensible.
In fact, this bordello was the primary reason he wanted to be a cowboy; the rest was just role-play. As he stood staring at its front door, he thought about how great it would be to just once actually go inside: to push his way through the door and not have anyone, inside or out, think less of him—not even himself. Over the last year, he’d begun to imagine the opposite sex in ways he knew were demeaning and objectifying and misogynistic, words his mother had been using in his presence for as long as he could remember. Nearly every TV show, every movie, every song, he knew, was guilty of undermining women’s agency and underscoring men’s inauthentic authority. He was old enough, his mother had been telling him for years, to recognize the false hierarchy that popular culture perpetuated by incessantly sexualizing women, and though for much of his childhood he hadn’t known what she was talking about, he just recently had begun to notice the way guys turned girls into mere fantasies, nothing more than props for their own imaginations. He noticed this because he was guilty of doing these things himself; no matter how hard he tried not to or how ashamed he felt, he couldn’t help—
“What are you staring at, perv?”
At first, briefly, he thought it was his conscience speaking, but then he refocused and realized it must have been the eighth-grade girl—he recognized her but didn’t know her name—who was scowling at him while reaching for the locker room door handle. He swallowed back any lame excuses he might want to offer because he knew that the name she had called him was well deserved.
