Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Read Online Free PDF

forty-three!” I crooned. “That’s still mobile!”
    In my fantasies, we were always riding side by side in an MG convertible. For some reason, I was always wearing a white cotton pique dress with a kerchief tied under my chin and incessantly opening and closing my purse. I’m not sure why I chose to dress up as an old woman for these imaginary wild rides through the countryside.
    My taste in men wasn’t the only reason I didn’t exactly fit in with any of my friends. There was also the issue of trying to cover up what was going on in my house and the fact that I sprouted hips when I was eleven. They weren’t sexy hips and they didn’t come with premature womanly breasts. They were just hips that showed up out of nowhere—unruly appendages that made no sense whatsoever in relation to my height, my age, or even my personality or background. Why I had hips that started two inches above my waist, I’ll never know. I was always pulling my sweaters all the way down and was forced to bend slightly forward to hide them, which threw off my gait and made it appear as though I had a backache. As time went on, the constant bending did, in fact, give me a backache. I was certainly the only twelve-year-old I knew who needed to hold on to something in order to get up. “Damn these stairs,” I used to say while the other kids were sliding down the railings and flipping over the balconies.
    When I got a little older, I noticed that Cher had the same elongated hip problem I did. I noticed it because someone called it to my attention.
    â€œHey, you have the exact same hips as Sonny!” my best friend announced at one of our late-night soirees.
    â€œYou mean, Cher?” I asked
    â€œYeah, whichever one’s the girl,” she said, chewing her hair, not a care in the world. “If you measured her hips—top to bottom—they’d probably be two feet long. Maybe you’ll grow up to look like her,” she said encouragingly.
    I looked over at my best friend, sitting in the lotus position, with her long, lanky legs that screamed this is how you’re supposed to look, wondering why God felt it was necessary to give someone legs that shot right up to her neck, and me, the hips of an aging belly dancer.
    I also couldn’t help wondering if I’d gone to a different school, where I wasn’t best friends with the tallest, skinniest, most popular girl in our class, if my status would have plummeted to that of, say, Blubber. The possibility loomed large, but the truth is, I wasn’t blubbery at all. At least not in the Linda Fischer sense of the word. I was actually quite muscular. It occurred to me, sitting there watching Cher flick her hair around, in her backless, second-skin evening gown, that my biggest problem was that I didn’t know how to dress properly for my body type. Jeans are all wrong for girls with long hips. And I must have been wearing the wrong underwear, too, because Cher had no visible panty lines whatsoever.
    I thought about writing Cher a letter asking her what type of underpants she wore and where she shopped for gowns, but I didn’t want to take the chance that she’d read my letter on TV or something.
    Because of the uniqueness of my figure, I much preferred socializing with my mom’s friends. They, too, had figure problems! When they confided in one another that everything they ate went right to their thighs, I totally understood. There I’d be, slapping my hips, yelling, “Ain’t it the truth, ladies!” But I just couldn’t muster any sort of real enthusiasm when my own friends told me secrets about their bodies. Every time one of them announced she’d gotten her period, I’d hold her hands in mine, jump up and down a few times, and force myself to do a creaky old cartwheel, all the while wondering if the blood rushing to my head was my first hot flash.
    It wasn’t only the cushy