About a Boy Day.

the summer I constantly pretended to be a boy.

“Bros not hoes, this is Beckett.”

That’s how I answered the phone a few, scattered, fated days in the Summer of 2002. Boy Days. My friends Kimberly, Ava, and myself dreamt up this idea that we wanted to be boys for a day. This particular summer was such a funny one in so many ways. The three of us friends all worked food service. I was working at Chili’s as the To-Go person. We were all trying to separately save money and not crash our cars and watch as many movies as we could afford from Blockbuster and burn as many mix CDs as we could without giving our family computers too many viruses. The summers in Texas are brutal, but the summer nights in Texas are sweaty magic. Everything feels as electric as the bug zappers that lived on the back of our back porches. When we weren’t doing Boy Days, we were swimming in Kim’s pool, listening to Pete Yorn, or hanging out with our friend Evan Gardiner, taking turns picking Blockbuster movies to watch in the club we called E.R.A.K. (Evan, Rachel, Ava, Kim.)

I LOVED Boy Days. We wanted to do “boy” things. So we donned boy names and the summer I turned 17, I basically played pretend as a boy every so often. As did Ava and Kim. My boy name was “Beckett.” Kim’s boy name was “Hayden.” I can’t remember Ava’s boy name! I wanna say “Clyde,” but that might be me thinking of Clive, the actual boy who worked at Blockbuster who we were all in love with. But I know we all referred to each other as these names and made our few (read: none) other friends refer to us as these boy names throughout the day. I changed the outgoing message on my cell phone—my navy brick of a Nokia phone. Kim took photos on a disposable camera that she swears she still has somewhere, but since this was well before social media and digital cameras (for us) the evidence is semi-safely locked in our semi-trusty memories.

On Boy Days, our inhibitions were low as we did things we thought were super masculine. Ava was the toughest amongst us, who I couldn’t imagine her not doing most of the Boy Day things on normal days (save a few ridiculous things). Kimberly LOVED a theme and an adventure. She was the shyest and most guarded of us all, but “Hayden” was down for anything. I was annoying about everything I did as a teen. I was definitely that Jesus-loving teenager who was like, “look how much fun we can have without alcohol!” Boy Days were one of those fun days. We wore long cargo shorts and let them sag. We listened to metal music and head-banged as we drove around town. We went to Hooter’s one sad lunch on a Tuesday. We spit. We burped. (I will say, we didn’t fart, which feels counterintuitive to Boy Days. I’ve just never thought that farts were funny and always thought they were disgusting.)

Okay, Fart-Focused Side Quest Note: I know I KNOW that I’m in the minority here—that farts are funny. But as long as I’ve been able to remember, it’s been a not-joking-don’t-do-that thing I’ve shared with my friends and family. This is—obviously—except for when I fart in front of Evan. But that’s not because I think it’s funny. It’s because a doctor told me that I had to.