Chapter 4
706 Words
Chapter 4All that togetherness made one thing particularly difficult for me - getting dressed. Around twelve or thirteen, all the girls in school started to develop, and I didn’t. I was already on the young side for my year in school, and physically I was a late bloomer. I got really sensitive about my body, especially my small boobs, and I dreaded showering and changing in the locker room after PE and track at school. I managed by going home sweaty after practice when I could, and by finding a locker in a secluded corner and showering after most of the other girls were done when I had to.
Sharing a room freshman year wasn’t a big deal - Jamie often spent her nights elsewhere, and was never around during the day. Ellie was around a little more, but our morning schedules were usually different, and I took my clothes to the bathroom with me when she was in the room.
But with Anne, we were pretty much always showering and getting dressed at the same time, twice a day when we worked out together. And Anne wasn’t sensitive about her body at all. She’d come back from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, unwrap herself to dry her hair, and get dressed. She’d sometimes even have a conversation with me stark naked while looking for something to wear. It wasn’t immodest; it just wasn’t a thing for her. I think maybe doctors are a little different from the rest of us - they spend so much time around bodies that the mystery disappears. Anne wasn’t a doctor yet, or even a med student, but she had already started to think like one.
So I spent a lot of time, spread out over days and weeks, looking at Anne’s naked body. I didn’t go out of my way to look, but after the first week or so I didn’t go out of my way to avert my eyes either. And I really admired what I saw. Anne was compact - four or five inches shorter than me, so maybe five-five - and fairly thin. There was nothing exaggerated about her figure, except maybe her narrow waist; she just looked exactly the way a beautiful woman is supposed to look. A statue come to life. She was a perfect hourglass, with nicely rounded hips tapering to powerful, smooth legs. Her breasts were round and full, the focus of much of my jealousy. And thanks to that workout program of hers, she was fit and even muscular, but her skin was soft and smooth, and a uniformly deep, healthy tan. Coffee with lots of milk. I also noticed that she shaved most of her black pubic hair, leaving just a little strip. It looked really neat and tidy compared to my fuzzy light brown bush; I thought maybe I should do the same.
That left me with a problem - I was still sensitive about changing in front of anyone, even Anne. After a very awkward week and a half of getting dressed in the bathroom every morning, which was not at all comfortable, I decided I was being silly and it was time to get over myself. So on Wednesday afternoon after working out, we both showered, like we had before, but this time, I just went back to the room in my towel. And when we got back to the room, I said, “Look, I know what you said about Dana and all, so I don’t want to offend you, but I’m pretty insecure about my body. Just so you know why I’m being weird about changing in front of you.”
And then I took off my towel, dried my hair and got dressed. It felt really strange, but not bad. Anne didn’t say anything at all, and I was grateful for that. After a few days, it didn’t seem like such a big deal, and I started to wonder why I had fussed so much in the first place.
With Anne’s workout program, my body image even improved a little. One afternoon in early October, I caught my reflection the mirror, wearing just my underwear, and I wondered what had happened. I was still skinny, and my boobs too small, but I looked more like the popular, athletic girls I had so envied in high school than my old self.
- Writer
