The Girl No One Wanted to Be (2011)
Women’s Wellness wasn’t the first class I had failed, but it was my favorite. Maybe that’s why I took it so personally.
In high school, I had failed gym and math. The stakes were a lot lower then. I just had to report to summer school with the other slackers, who played paper football while Mrs. Duerr wrote on the whiteboard (this was before smartphones). They made fart noises and called Mrs. Duerr, “Mrs. Do HER!” at audible volume.
I didn’t feel a sense of belonging there.
I did feel a sense of belonging in Women’s Wellness. This was college, not high school. These weren’t the scalawags from my public school. These were gals from Nassau County and Yonkers and Rhinebeck, girls whose transcripts bespoke 3.5 GPAs. They were headed to law school, or to Bing University’s MBA program, or to entry-level marketing jobs in Manhattan. Watching them glide through the doors of Women’s Wellness was like watching scenes from Mona Lisa Smile, only instead of knee-length skirts and Eisenhower curls, they had North Faces and blonde balliage. And Uggs.
Everyone in class was pretty, and we were all girls. We were here to discuss periods, birth control, hook-ups, abortion, the history of abortion, endometriosis, pregnancy, menopause, body image, and any other topics that might arise as a result of our XX chromosomes.
