A Young Girl's Body

Tea felt guilty the rest of the day. She didn't know what got into her—maybe it was the thought of working extra hours at the restaurant, or the big test she had to study for, or the fact she didn't have a present for the birthday of one of her best friends, or she was getting her period, or she was hurt because, ever since she got breasts, her father wouldn't hug her anymore.

Be that as it may, she thought, it was still no excuse to hurt anyone's feelings. Even Kaiba, who was a jerk, was still a person and deserved some consideration.

She wondered if she should apologize to him, or how. Kaiba was intimidating. The way he looked at her today…she had to find some way to appease him, or he could really cause trouble for her, or worse, for her friends.

In the shower that night, she scrubbed herself as briefly as possible, only scrubbing her hair and face, and letting the rushing hot water take care of the rest. Her body felt too curvy, too conspicuous, too dangerous. As she toweled off, she was embarrassed to look at herself in the mirror, and embarrassed to look down at her nudity, so she toweled off with her eyes closed, only opening them when she had on her nightgown. Her nightgown was baby blue and had lavender stars and yellow moons scattered all over it. It was a little girl's nightgown, but her breasts still rose underneath it, more fitted for a stripper's teddy than for sweet sleepwear. But Tea's body didn't match anything else about her—not her teddy bears, not her stubborn fear of the dark, not her wish that she could sit on her parents' laps again. Only Yugi understood this, and she loved him for it. But the spirit inside Yugi was a man, inside her best friend's body, and that made the spirit safe, and she loved the spirit for that.

Kaiba was a man, too. He was tall, and he had that presence that only a man could have—self-assured, powerful. His eyes were also different from the other boys' eyes. They were hard, and deep, and knowing. She had noticed that, recently, and it made her nervous. That gym teacher was a man, and he was going to hurt her, until Yugi had tried to save her, and the spirit saved them both. Whenever she thought about what that man would have done to her, she thought about Yugi and the spirit, and how they saved her, and she felt such a swelling of love she wanted to both laugh and cry.

When she had gone to Pegasus' island with her friends for that tournament, she had felt absolutely safe having their bodies near hers. They were good guys. They didn't feel lust, only love. Whenever they talked about other women, it was just a joke.

One time, she had steeled herself up and asked Tristan if he had ever wanted to make out with her.

"Make out with who?" Tristan had asked.

"Me, Tristan." She was already sorry she brought it up.

"WHAT with you?"

That was actually the easiest one. Joey had just laughed. "It would be like sucking face with my sister," he had said. She hadn't even dared to ask Yugi—he was so innocent. The spirit would probably want nothing to do with her, but would let her down gently.

Without desire, there is security, she concluded, so she didn't mind sleeping next to the boys on the sweet-smelling grass. Bakura had been there, too, but she wasn't sure if he even had ANY sexual feelings at all, despite, or maybe because of, his angelic beauty. HIS spirit had bigger fish to fry, what with trying to send them all to the shadow realm and all. There was one person that scared her on that trip, even more than Pegasus, and that was Bandit Keith.

It wasn't because he had waved a gun in Pegasus' face, or that he had a violent temper, the fact that his knuckles were scarred, or that she could see white lines along the veins of his arm. It was because of what happened during Joey's duel with that zombie kid, Bonz. She had looked over at Keith, while the boys were engaged in the game, just to glare at him for being such a coward. He took off his sunglasses, and his glazed blue eyes ran over her body, slowly. He groped her with his gaze. When his eyes returned to her face, he smiled, his tongue running over his sharp teeth. Then he puckered his lips and kissed at her. She turned quickly away and kept watching the duel. When Keith trapped them in the cave, she felt relieved. She thought he had forgotten all about her.

Later, at the dinner Pegasus hosted, one of the wait staff handed her a drink, along with a wrinkled, neatly folded piece of paper. Then he walked away without a word.

She looked at the paper and glanced around the table. Nobody else had seen. She opened it. It was a receipt from a liquor store, for Boone's Farm and Trojans, purchased by Keith Howard.

Scrawled all over the receipt, at the top and bottom white spaces and over the fading purple printer ink, Keith had written her a note. The ink was a dark, dark blue. The handwriting slanted to the right.

I'm gonna suck the tits right off of you, sweetheart. I hope you can take a big, all-American cock, honey, because if I catch you alone on this island, I'm gonna make you moan. I'm gonna get a serving of your sweet cherry pie, pretty baby, I don't give a fuck if it's ready to come out of the oven or not. I'm gonna POUND your hot little ass. So brace yourself.

Tea balled the note up in her clammy fist, as much to stop herself from shaking as to hide it from her sight. She thought she could feel his sweat on it, his fingerprints, his sloughed off skin cells still clinging to it, and she dropped it to the floor. She could feel his eyes on her, glazed and blue and probing. She felt his smile, sharp and wide, his chapped lips stretched tight, as much as if they were pressed into her cheek. She felt like she could be sick, like she WANTED to be sick, but she didn't want to humiliate herself, and she didn't want to distract her friends from the following tournament.

She had seen Bandit Keith's eyes before, on the gym teacher's face, and that smile, no, not a smile, she would not debase the sweet sunshine that beamed from Yugi and Joey and Tristan's faces by using the word smile. It was a rictus on the faces of the former gym teacher and Bandit Keith. She had been relieved when Keith was thrown into the ocean below the mansion.

Just thinking about it now, in her bedroom with her posters of New York and ballerinas, made her palms sweat. She clutched her hairbrush the way she clutched the note.

Keith, if he was still alive, could forget about Tea, but Tea would never be able to forget him, or the gym teacher, even after the gym teacher was put in jail for attempted rape. They both had taught her something. They had taught her that her body was a whore's body, a body meant to be used and then forgotten. Her body was a body that no nice boy, like her friends, would ever want anything to do with, or anything her father would want to hug. It was bait for sleaze.

Only when she was with her friends, who didn't notice her body, or when dancing, when she could feel her strength and grace, could Tea feel totally comfortable in her skin. Those were the only times she wasn't aware of the fleshy tumors growing out of her rib cage.

She climbed into bed and clutched her teddy bear. She wished she could talk to Mai again. She felt Mai could clear some things up. Even if she wanted to, Tea couldn't imagine what those men would have done to her, if they had caught her alone. It was a dark, frightening mystery, and yet, in spite of herself, she sometimes wondered what the solution would be.