In the shower this morning, I was trying to decide whether I should go running today. My hip still hurts from my last run. What do I tell my doctor if the pain does not let up…I dislocated my hip 25 years ago, it hurts when I run, but I don’t want to stop running?

It made me wonder what I was trying to do by playing football with boys who were much bigger than me, boys who had gone away for the summer, to camp, to stay with relatives, and had come back so changed. Those boys were my neighborhood friends, my baseball team, my bike riding partners, my camping in the backyard buddies.

Throughout my younger life, I have always been friends with boys, taken on a boy’s physical bravado. I would fist fight the biggest boys at recess, ride a bike down the stairs at the school, be on the end of the whip ice-skating on the pond.

I thought that if I acted like a boy, no one would think I was a girl. I could hide from the very specific ways that a boy or a man could hurt a girl, things darkly hinted at, things I already knew too much about. So when I tackled that boy when I was 14, and felt something go wrong with my hip, I got up and walked home. I kept my back as stiff as I could, and tried not to limp, I didn’t want to be excluded from playing the next time we organized a sand lot game, I didn’t want to be called a girl, didn't want anyone to know I could be hurt. But really, that hip crunched out of its socket, that was the beginning of the end.

That was freshman year in high school. The year of that strange transformation, as I got breasts, traded glasses for contact lenses, got my braces off my teeth. The year boys who had been my friends started trying to look up the skirt of my mandatory school uniform. The year a boy who was in my group of friends tried to trick me into coming to his house when his parents were gone overnight, to get me alone and vulnerable, and all the other boys helped him deceive me. The year a boy with whom I had spent so many summer evenings playing soccer until it was too dark to see, him and his sisters against me and mine, pinned me to the ground, put the weight of his body on my face and forced something strange and horrible down my throat.