NO FAT CHICKS

I am fifteen when the Monica Lewinsky scandal becomes the background noise of the country. It plays on the television while my mom makes dinner, flashes across magazine covers in grocery store checkout lines, hums through late-night monologues that feel less taboo and more like lessons in how the world works. I am old enough to notice who gets protected and who gets punished. At school, the lesson arrives in a language I understand even more clearly. It isn’t discussed as politics or power. It shows up as humor.

In the hallways, the boys say Monica Lewinsky’s name like it’s already a punchline. One of them scoffs and says, “He couldn’t find someone hotter?” Another says something worse, and they all laugh like her humiliation is group entertainment. No one really talks about him. The president exists in the story as power, as authority, as someone whose mistakes become scandal. She exists as someone whose existence becomes a joke.

Standing there, listening, I understand something that no teacher or parent ever says out loud: the boys are calling the shots. They decide what is desirable. They decide what is embarrassing. They decide who gets laughed at and who gets admired. And without consciously choosing it, I begin studying the rules like they are survival instructions.

A boy in my history class wears a T-shirt that says NO FAT CHICKS in block letters across the front. A teacher eventually tells him to turn it inside out, but the message has already landed. His shirt is a public announcement about who gets to set the terms and who gets measured against them. The girls register it, adjusting ourselves inside our own bodies.

One night, I sit on the floor of my bedroom flipping through a magazine with Monica’s picture on the cover, studying her face like there might be answers hidden there. I am not trying to understand politics. I am trying to understand how not to become her. I take note of how easily a woman can become a cautionary tale.

What I understand, without anyone explaining it, is that there are ways to be a girl that feel safer than others. That approval can function as protection. That being liked can keep you from being humiliated. I begin studying what earns boys’ approval in high school — be attractive, but not intimidating; be confident, but not loud; be funny, but never funnier than the boys.

I notice how popular girls laugh at jokes quickly, how they brush off compliments like they don’t care but still glow when they get them. I notice how they know exactly how to flirt without ever being the first one to cross the line.

I begin to understand that popularity isn’t just about being pretty. It’s about being easy. Easy to sit next to. Easy to date. Easy to joke with. Easy to forgive. I watch how the girls who stay safest are the ones who seem effortless, even though I can see how much effort lives underneath it — the checking of reflections in locker mirrors, the adjusting of shirts, the quick comparisons between bodies in bathroom stalls before class.

I begin to understand that being liked can keep you from being humiliated. That if I follow the rules — look right, act right, want the right things, never be too much, never be the joke — I might be spared.

I am exactly the age it is meant to reach me, and I am already learning how to play by rules I did not write.