First the boyfriends broke up with their girlfriends. Rick Winkler started it. The boys would do whatever Rick Winkler said. So when he told them, “dump your girlfriends,” they did it, they dumped their girlfriends. Rick Winkler had been jumpy ever since the rumor that he humped the plush pews in the school chapel during communion. I started that rumor. I started that rumor on account of what he did to Angela, which can never be repeated. Next the boys started sitting at their own tables in the cafeteria and walking only with each other in the halls. Clearly, we were being punished. But we were happy because the measures the boys took to avoid us proved that we were real.

Then came the shunning. The boys wouldn’t so much as look in our direction. We no longer knew how to dress or what to do with our hair. Larissa, who’d been victim to the mass dumping, shaved her ponytail clean off. We stood in the hall and pointed at bald Larissa as the boys passed, and still they did not look. The boys did not even look the day Quinn wore her red pushup bra as a shirt to first period. And before all this started happening, Quinn’s cleavage was all the boys could talk about. They used to throw pen caps down her shirt for points. Points for what, we didn’t know. The boys had always operated within their own system. But this was different.

The final straw was when they invented their own language. They taught the male teachers their new tongue and boycotted classes taught by female teachers, so that soon enough, we were a school divided. Principal Lewis threw up his hands. “They’ve formed an unstoppable union,” he said on the morning announcements. Then he started speaking the new language, too. The boys threatened to quit their sports teams and withdraw from school entirely if forced to once again interact with us. They communicated all of this through their new grunts and hisses, so we could only guess what they were saying. What made us angriest was how content the boys seemed without us, how little the shapes of their lives changed now that we were no longer in them. It was like they had never really needed us to begin with. 

We were morose. We asked the female teachers, “is there precedent for such excommunication?” and they told us to look it up in our Bibles. But we couldn’t find anything about boys inventing their own language to avoid girls. And we again felt that God—whom, all our lives, we’d been taught to picture as a man—had forsaken us.

Molly did it first. Molly was always doing things first. In fifth grade, Molly had made a big show of pulling a crinkly maxi pad from her cubby before recess. So we weren’t surprised when Molly flicked her pink lighter in the courtyard after seventh period one afternoon and lit her arm hair on fire. I watched as she dragged the flame from wrist to elbow in a slow, deliberate squiggle. The air smelled like when Mom used her old hair dryer. “Takes it right off,” Molly said, returning the lighter to her backpack. Lucy, who the boys used to call “gorilla arms,” back when we could still understand them, looked on with envy. Molly’s arm hair had been so delicate and fine, like baby fuzz. Before she burned it off, it glistened gold in the sun.

“What does it feel like?” Lucy asked, petting her arm hairs into place.

Molly said, “it tingles,” and we followed her out of the shadow of our school building and into the sun, where her new bare arms shone magnificently. A group of boys walked by with Principal Lewis, speaking their boy language. “Molly lit her arm hair on fire!” I shouted. They didn’t glance at us. We knew then what we were capable of.

We started rolling the bands of our uniform skirts until our panties showed; we wore lipsticks in forbidden shades; we stopped wearing bras. The female teachers stopped, too. We could tell by the way the fronts of their shirts rippled like waves. The morning uniform check—once a daily horror—was abandoned, now that male attention had been removed. We wore our smallest shorts to school. The female teachers wore unflattering dresses that looked like sacks. The boys moved like gangs through the halls, grunting and burping. We moved like gangs, too. We burned off all our arm hair.

It didn’t stop there. The prudes burned their leg hair up to the knees; the sluts burned all the way up their thighs. Our limbs shone like diamonds beneath the cafeteria fluorescents. The boys faced their tables away from us and so they couldn’t see, they couldn’t see our gemstone calves. We would never have been caught if it weren’t for Mary-Rose. Coach Abernathy—whom we’d long suspected was a lesbian, and seemed impervious to the new way—walked into the girls’ locker room as MR was holding the lighter to her crotch. The email to our mothers went out that evening. ALARMING BEHAVIOR, the subject line read. Alarming, we told our mothers, is what the boys have done.

“Why don’t you just shave?” Mom asked. She didn’t understand. Shaving was what we did before, when all our rituals were for beauty. Shaving didn’t belong to us. “You have your whole life to be concerned with men,” she said. I didn’t know how to explain to her that my whole life was happening now.

We had to be more careful after that. We could only burn in private. Kayla called a sleepover. Bring 🔥, she wrote in the group text. Mom had hidden all the lighters after the incident with MR but I found a box of old bar matches in the junk drawer. Kayla’s father was asleep on the couch. She had stuffed towels beneath her bedroom door. Molly was there with chic, pencil-thin eyebrows. Lucy’s arms were riddled with dots of black stubble. MR held an ice pack to her lap. Kayla said, “Girls, I want perfect armpits,” and then, “but I can’t reach them myself.” She laid down on her bedroom floor and Lucy straddled her torso while Molly held her right arm down against the carpet. “You do it,” Molly told me. I reached for my matchbook. “No, dummy, with this,” she said, handing me a long candle lighter. I flicked the flame and held it to Kayla’s armpit, a thicket of dark hair, and waited for the hair dryer smell. “Ach, yowch,” Kayla whimpered softly as the fire kissed her shoulders. “Should I stop?” I asked when mascara tears started rolling in black streams down the sides of Kayla’s face. But she said, “keep going,” so I did, I kept going. She looked like she might have to be sick. The hair finally revealed raw
flesh and MR placed her ice pack on Kayla’s singed armpit. “The other one,” Kayla said, thrusting out her left arm. “Do the other one.” Two black dots spread out onto the beige carpet where her tears fell. Kayla examined her new armpits in her dresser mirror. “I love them,” she said. “What should we do next?”

Soon, none of us had any body hair left to burn. MR suggested we go after our braids but we told her that was idiotic and only a fool would want to be bald. Then we apologized to Larissa, whose pixie cut was still in its awkward phase. We waited for our arm and leg hair to grow back, but it was slow and returned in unsatisfying patches and tufts. The heat mounted outside and the sun lapped at our raw skin. Someone always had aloe. We covered the grassy scent of it with perfume, which burned where the flames had touched us. Soon it would be summer break, and we were worried our boys would disappear from us forever. We resorted to the only thing left: Prayer. At morning chapel, halfheartedly led by a despondent Ms. Crane in a floral muumuu, we prayed for our boys to come back to us. We asked forgiveness for sins we once swore we’d keep secret. I asked forgiveness for the impure thoughts I’d had about Lucas Bogel, about the time I’d slipped my tampon applicator in and out while I thought about Lucas Bogel, about the rumor I spread about Rick Winkler humping the pews during communion, which I only started because we’d heard he asked Angela for a blow job on the school bus.

Maybe not all the girls were confessing as hard as I was because the boys did not return. Days remained before the school year ended. Something had to be done.

“Enough is enough,” Molly said the morning it happened. She arrived at school carrying a red can of gasoline. She carried it with her through first, second, and third, the gasoline sloshing against the inside of the can. The female teachers chain smoked cigarettes behind their desks and swiped on Tinder. They had long ago stopped watching us. Molly carried her gasoline can to the cafeteria during lunch. That is when we understood what was to happen. The boys sat facing the far wall. We watched from our tables as Molly knelt at the cafeteria’s center and overturned the gasoline can above her head. We watched in silence as she pulled her pink lighter from her pocket in one elegant swoop, gave us a single wink, and flicked the flame. The fire took over quickly, like nothing we’d ever seen before. The flames rose, licking the ceiling andspreading in an uneven circle around where Molly knelt. The boys, alerted by the sudden flash of heat, turned around to face us. They sprang into action. Rick Winkler searched for a fire extinguisher. Joshua Landis started throwing on any liquid he could find—bottles of water, cartons of milk, cans of soda. And for the first time in months, we understood the boys when they said, “Girls, help us!” and, “Girls, do something!” We understood them but we could hardly hear them, all we could do was look at Molly, who was disappearing amid the crowd of boys who would soon, we knew, come back to us.

Hannah Smothers is a writer from Texas. Her stories and essays have been published in HAD, Wigleaf, Hippocampus, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere.