Eleven Vocabulary

Because I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky, so tiny—tiny you have to close your eyes to see it.

It’s an ugly sweater with red plastic buttons and a collar and sleeves all stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope.

Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five.

I wish I was invisible but I’m not.

And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t.

It’s an ugly sweater with red plastic buttons and a collar and sleeves all stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.

I move the red sweater to the corner of my desk with my ruler.

Except when math period ends Mrs. Price says loud and in front of everybody, “Now, Rachel, that’s enough, ”because she sees I’ve shoved the red sweater to the tippy-tip corner of my desk and it’s hanging all over the edge like a waterfall, but I don’t care.

Only today I wish I didn’t have only eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box.

Except when math period ends Mrs. Price says loud and in front of everybody, “Now, Rachel, that’s enough, ”because she sees I’ve shoved the red sweater to the tippy-tip corner of my desk and it’s hanging all over the edge like a waterfall, but I don’t care.