Period One with the Radical and Period Two with the Priest
Period One:
My gym teacher told us in Sex Ed that we could ask anything we wanted and by anything, she meant anything that she wasn’t allowed to bring up herself. Short, cropped blond hair, muscular arms folded across her chest, she glared at us, her face firm and defiant as if she had all the time in the world to listen to fourteen-year-olds in crisp white shirts and kilts talk about their after-school activities. I wondered how many times she fought the system to allow us the right to ask, I wondered what risks she was taking with her own career to teach us to protect ourselves, to control our own futures, to own our bodies, their changes, the life that could grow in them, the choice to decide what life would have in store for us. As she stood there in front of us, I could hear in the silence the fears, the what ifs, the maybes. But nobody asked.
Period Two:
A priest visited our religion class to tell us about sex. He sat there, an emperor before his kingdom. We sat in front of him, row after row of teenage youth, open minds teeming with questions, like how far am I allowed to go, is it OK to feel good, and will I be disowned if I’m attracted to someone like me? In the name of the Father, we were ripe in our knee-highs, hormones throbbing through our neatly ironed uniforms. The priest stretched a brand new twenty-dollar bill in front of him and said, this is your body. There was a collective shudder as he crumpled the bill, poker-faced and cloaked in the shadows of wisdom. This is your body after you give it away. I could hear the crackle of the bill, our bones and flesh, as his fist tightened around it, his knuckles whitening as we all watched. Afterwards, they passed it around, a used specimen on display for us to examine. I felt the wrinkles in the bill, the permanence of its scars. There was no ironing out these grave errors.
Caroline Fernandez is a writer from Toronto, currently based in Dubai. She has been published in Torchlight and Tipton Poetry Journal. In 2020 she was nominated for the Allegra Johnson Writing Prize. She holds a journalism degree from Concordia University and is pursuing an MFA from Vermont College. You can find her on social media as @caro2point0