My absence of self worth perhaps coupled with the fact my family was due to return to Australia, making me a problem that would also be easily removed made me susceptible to Roger's crude charms.
And it is these people who girls will think of years later when they remember sitting in a living room at 13 years of age, clutching a drink they are too young to have as a man who is decades older than them tells them to be brave.
So, when we ran to the front yard and jumped in the snow, he totally saw us! Then, her body becomes public property and any attempts she makes to fight back are ridiculed or even met with violence.
It was a good run.
I wasn't brave enough to go through with what had been implicitly building between us.
There's a lot of resistance to feminism from people terrified of what a world with gender equality looks like, but one of the powerful things it does is reframe girlhood as something that exists even when there is no one else around to look at it.