Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Ruth pulls me down the grimy stairs of a nightclub in Tel Aviv. She is twenty-two, and I am only seventeen, so I have her old driver’s license tucked in my pocket, all brown hair brown eyes dead stare. The ID looks more like me than it does her— her hair now glows platinum beneath neon lights. She takes me into a bathroom stall and informs me that her dinner that night was vodka lemonade and a line of cocaine. From the inside of her bra, she fishes out a small plastic bag, slick and sweaty, and offers it to me. I stare at it, mind churning. I do not speak the local language, I am half-drunk and dizzy, I promised a man I would dance for him if he bought me a drink, and I smoked a joint for the first time in my life five minutes ago upstairs, crammed in a circle of men who keep staring at my tits and her tits and trying to get us to leave with them. When it comes down to the two of us in that bathroom stall and the white powder between us, I decide to take Ruth up on her offer. She holds her apartment key up to my nose and commands, inhale.
In one of many psychological evaluations, a psychologist describes my child-self as “strong-willed and obstinate” before describing my present-self as “generally demoralized and anxious.” I am also often called “fatalistic.” I appear to believe everything that can go wrong will go wrong. I resist the urge to tell the psychologist that this is seventh-grade chemistry knowledge; everyone knows about entropy.
Ruth understands something powerful about femininity that I do not. She knows how to weaponize it, how to use it to pry open the minds (and wallets) of men. I watch her apply mascara in the bathroom while she talks about the time her house party got busted by the cops in D.C. She tells me how she swallowed ten packets of ketchup to fool the breathalyzer. I have the recurring desire to peel the skin off her bones and see how I can function more like she does. Her perfume smells like peonies. I inhale.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary: gender, n. The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones. It is also gender, n. That which has been engendered; product, offspring. Obsolete, rare.
We leave the hostel at two in the morning after Ruth gives me another bump of cocaine— inhale— and sprint down to the Tel Aviv beach. Humid, sweating, sand digging between our toes, we strip down to our underwear and plunge into the water, shivering slick vibrant alive. The world is made of bright, colorful splinters of glass. (This does not actually happen. Beaches at night are dangerous— and besides, neither of us want to get arrested. But I pretend that it does.)
A psychologist once wrote: “Response patterns indicate she is experiencing significant emotional distress.” He did nothing to remove me from the situation causing such emotional distress. To this day I remain quite bitter about that fact.
We bloom outwards into healthy competition. Ruth takes me under her wing and shows me all sorts of things— the way my chest looks in that push-up bra, how to tease a man until he buys you a drink, how to roll a cigarette, how to blend your foundation down your neck. I follow and follow and I feel like I’m clawing my skin off, piece by piece, trying to capture whatever fleeting femininity I have, to become that captivating, coveted creature that takes pictures in the bathroom mirror with me. An angry and festering thing inside me only grows.
In October, I answer a call from a residential treatment program. They want me to enroll in an eight to twelve week inpatient program instead of finishing the first half of my sophomore year. I scream in fury about it to anyone who will listen, and even after years of silence, Ruth is the only one who responds. I’m still struggling, too, she says honestly. It never goes away. I learned to live with it and you should too. I stand there in the freezing rain, thinking of the time I held her hair back as she forced herself to vomit, the time we got drunk on cooking wine together, the time we changed into each other’s clothes and she loved the white lace bralette I had and never gave it back. A brutal violent envy surges over me, as white-hot as a flame held to my palm. Rain drips down my hair and bleeds across my phone.
Twenty-four months prior to that call, I am so drunk that I have my eyes shut, flat on my back on the bathroom floor, praying to God I wouldn’t throw up. Ruth sits next to me— same amount of drinks, half the amount of drunk. She laughs. She says that I’m not much of a drinker. Unspoken, all I hear is, I’m not much of a woman.
I remember sitting across from the psychologist, a middle-aged balding man, earnestly lying to him about how I felt. What he ended up writing was: “Troubled by recurrent feelings of hopelessness, self-doubt, and worthlessness, she often feels unhappy with herself and her life.” I read the evaluation over and squirm; at the way she, her, and herself are used to describe me, at the way I thought myself a good enough liar to fool him, at the way that the sharp, hollow core inside me bled through no matter how much I tried to hide the truth.
The truth is this: I had known all along, but I realized some time ago that Ruth was twice the woman I would ever be. The thought used to haunt me, until it turned out that perhaps I did not want to be a woman at all. Perhaps I had never been one in the first place.
Rachel is an undergraduate student at Kenyon College, originally from San Jose, California. They are an emerging nonfiction writer and look forward to finishing their English degree in spring 2024.