Stepping on the Legs of My Shadow

Isabella Venutti

(she/her)

Stepping on the Legs of My Shadow is an exploration of the complexity of adolescent female friendships, and the navigation of discoveries that both repulse and entice us on the precipice of young adulthood. The story follows an unnamed protagonist, who recalls a circumstantial summer friendship of her youth with a dorky and eccentric girl named Laura. In crafting this piece, I was reflecting on this formative period, as a teenager who came of age in the years that bridged the relative ‘before times’, and a near complete digital age. What do the emotional beats of the bildungsroman look like for kids in suburbia chained to their desktops playing Sims? What if the stumbled upon corpse in Stand by Me was a disturbing link accidentally clicked on? In exploring early internet culture as inextricable from early 2000s adolescent development, I wanted to render the memories of my protagonist as mesmerically as the archetypal physical milestones of childhood's past. In this story, for Laura and my protagonist, the internet is effectively a setting or place; a site of exploration and play that symbolises the intrigue and fear that loom at the periphery of this time of immense change.

Image from Noah Baumbach’s 'Margot at the Wedding' (2008).

Even though the girls at school called Laura Borg Laura Bog behind her back, and I knew I’d abandon her one day for more advantageous friends, I didn’t mind spending the afternoons and weekends that my Mum worked at her house round the corner. Her hair hung in grease curtains over her face. She was always trying to draw photorealistic dragons and vampires in her visual art diary with a special gold tin of faber castell pencils that she took everywhere. She’d change from her uniform after school with her chin tucked down, pulling on her pyjama pants under her pleat skirt before unbuttoning it, not revealing an inch of skin in the process. 

Laura’s main draw was the free reign she had over her family’s desktop. A big black Dell monitor, always coated in a thin veil of furry grey dust. We’d set up camp on two swivel chairs up in the cramped little study, wads of dog-eared printer paper and empty ring binders stacked over every surface. My Mum took our laptop to work- we only had bad dial up anyways. Laura’s Dad had a job that that we didn’t really get, in recruitment, but high-speed broadband was his God, and so she knew ways of being online that before then I couldn’t have conceived of. Crazy free flash games, button bashing the keys to kill pirates, or deliver pizza in oncoming traffic to the pulse of a countdown timer. 

Mouths popped sedately open in front of the blue light’s flicker and fade, we played dress up games, dragged and dropped miniskirts and halter tops onto anime girls with doll waists and huge tits, posed like Greco-Roman sculptures in bright 2D malls. We trawled creepypasta forums and made ourselves sick over teen boys disfigured with acid and knives, abandoned Disney land attractions where murderers allegedly hid out in old mascot suits.  

I spent close to an entire month straight there. The dry, scathing peak of a Victorian summer that bites the skin, incapacitates the thinking mind. We’d eat all the crap considered contraband at my house. Fluorescent fruit roll ups and Cheezles that left a greasy orange film under each of my fingernails. Her Mum would bring plastic cups of pine-lime cordial to the dining room table and make us try on these magnetic energy bracelets she sold for a pyramid scheme she’d been recruited for at church. “This one helps with digestion. Tell your Mum!” 

Ordinarily Laura and I were too chicken to get in the pool if her brother Tyson had marked out his territory, bringing round acne pocked friends who sloshed foolhardy up and down the granite steps and pissed on the tanbark under the palm trees. But a Saturday of persistent forty-degree winds had rendered us desperate, so we tentatively lowered ourselves into the deep end in our ill-fitting speedos, two little pot roasts tied up tight with twine. 

Tyson thrashed about with two public school kids that he’d met at the skate park earlier that week, a stocky boy he called Fathead, but out of respect, and a girl called Renata with a fried blonde side fringe and a dangly playboy bellybutton ring. They all passed a McDonalds coke cup back and forth, wincing when taking a sip. 

“There’s a fucked story going round our school”

“Yeah?”

“So apparently this guy Jayden Cobham’s brother knows went down on this chick he was seeing, and she’s real kinky, so she said, oi, let’s put a few skittles in there. Anyways, afterwards he was like ‘yeah babe I ate all four of them’, and she was like, ‘what? there was only three’. Turns out he fully ate a herpes cluster!”

“Fuck. That’s rank. It can’t be true.”

Renata flicked a dribble of coke at the boy’s heads with the plastic straw. 

“That’s definitely not true. I reckon I’ve heard about five different versions of that same story.”

She gestured to us with a blotchy tanned hand.

“I bet those two have probably even heard it going round the convent.” 

I managed a shy laugh. Laura just glared and plunged under the surface, a hard stream of bubbles jutting from her nose.

Sometimes Laura and I would type random things that we liked followed by .com into the search bar, to see if a new site of interest would pop up to explore. Harrypotter.com, egyptology.com. One afternoon we’d tried the title of a series of YA novels about three teenage girls at a performing arts high school– Starletz! and found something that we weren’t prepared for. Laura’s hand clapped to her mouth, “ohmygod, ohmygod”. 

On a dodgy, pink website covered in Sans Serif hyperlinks, nine thumbnails of pornographic scenes loaded quick, bar by bar. CHECK OUT OUR DIRTY LITTLE WHORES!!! 

The image that disturbed me the most, that stirred me from sleep in the following weeks, was square in the centre of the page. Two heavily made-up nude women, both licking what looked like a huge bright blue icy pole with long pointed tongues. 

We’d both started to panic. We ran down the stairs and through the front door and sobbed on the drought ravaged nature strip for the better part of an hour. 

We sat separate in health class when Ms. Carlisle projected the whiteboard with anatomical diagrams of our guts cut in half. Startling red tunnels we’d not known were there. A plump guest speaker wearing a pink beaded cardigan with hair raked severely back, made us all stand in a circle and flail our arms ritualistically, “wafting” like fallopian tubes. She frightened us all with the crack of the plastic pap smear forceps that would one day pry open your terrified crotch. I watched Laura gulp hard, supressing the hack before a spew.

The website had repulsed me, but it stirred up the tyrannous intrigue that seized me at random, a hot wire trailing from my chest to abdomen. My wet bathers bunched up in my ass crack, my grandmother’s gardener’s oily bare chest and barbed shoulder tattoos. Tyson and his girlfriends, kissing hard at the back of the bus, mouths like prized-open wet molluscs. The hard waxy breasts on a Zoo magazine cover. 

I sort of knew where it was all going to lead me, gyrating blankly at the seam of my stockings like a brainless sea creature that’s nothing but a cluster of nerves. I wasn’t explicitly ashamed, but Catholic school lore still loomed at my periphery. I reflexively flipped over my hands in the mornings to be sure they weren’t sprouting any thick, dark hair. 

One night Laura’s Mum dropped us off at their Parish’s youth group meeting. It was held in an echoey scout hall that smelled vaguely of moth balls. They screened a strange, propagandic DVD, a low budget kid’s film about two archaeological explorers who’d been searching for a ‘mighty God sword’ but discovered it was actually ‘the mighty God’s word” that was worth finding. Afterwards we wove woollen friendship bracelets, and I won a cracker eating competition, polishing a whole sleeve of Ritz in record time. The grand prize was a fridge magnet with a picture of a cartoon owl on it that said Hoo-hoo can you trust? GOD! 

Laura was beside herself with pride, grinning so wide she exposed the two thin, milky elastics strung between her braces I’d not known were there. When her Mum picked us up, she recounted the evening, breathless and motormouthed, emphatically thwacking the dashboard. Her Mum met my gaze over her shoulder with a grave-eyed smile that said thank you. 

The next day at school Laura began to exhibit a clinginess that would quickly come to erode my good will. The second Mr. Nguyen said we’d need to pair up for a task at the Bunsen burner she’d grabbed my wrist, my hand stiff and recoiled like a rat in a snap-trap. She chased after me at recess, stepping on the legs of my shadow, waving a neenish tart in a white paper bag that she’d bought me from the canteen like a race flag.

In our fourth period RE class, Miss. Wright struggled to set up a VHS screening of Brides of Christ, labouring over a tangled three-pronged black cord. While we waited, two beautiful girls, both called Sarah, were proclaiming that even though Miss. Wright insisted you couldn’t explicitly ask for things in prayer, just guidance, that they’d figured out that some small, simple sacrifice tended to do the trick. “You just need to think of something that God might want!” 

Carla Milosevic chimed in, claiming she’d been granted her first actual pash via this method, and in turn she’d donated her brand-new Tony Bianco clogs to a St. Vinnie’s op shop. Laura slipped me a note when she got up to empty her pencil shavings into the bin. It was a shitty little drawing of her and I as an RPG wizard and elf with a bubble-lettered message- You and I should pray for a free premium RuneScape membership!!!

After school, as we legged up the stairs, Laura said she had something exciting to show me. She booted up the desktop. We waited in silence for the screen to light up as it drew its big droning breath. One of the swivel chairs had been taken elsewhere. 

“Tyson’s probably playing COD downstairs.” She plopped into the lone seat and clicked frantically over the internet explorer icon. 

I watched her, in her synthetic Elmo boxer shorts and monster feet slippers, and acknowledged that at times, Laura did feel quite dear to me. Her soft, round face, like a sweet little plush toy that appeals to your heart but seems so deeply cringe when you yank on its ring-pull and it starts to speak. She pulled up a colourful webpage and planted a hand over the screen so as not spoil anything. She spoke quietly, eyes lightly tacked to the carpet.

“...You could just sit on my lap?” 

Hesitant, I lowered myself with a tight smile onto her fleshy pink thighs that felt like warm hot dogs against mine, her shallow asthmatic breath hot on my ear. 

Quickly, she retracted the offer, clearing her throat with a grunt.

“It’s actually a bit heavy”

I sprang up. 

“I reckon I’ll just sit on the floor.”

The surprise was a website she’d made in IT class, with 3D dancing gifs of goblins and unicorns, glittering rainbow word art. It was plastered with photos we’d taken on her Dad’s Nikon digicam, rollerblading with Tyson on the asphalt beside the Rooney Street oval. One was of Laura pretending to hold Tyson in a headlock. One of me pointing to the boys playing footy behind the wire mesh fence, eyebrows raised and tongue popped out. The memories were warm. My heart said, these might be your people, be nice. But I think I knew then that I’d dole out quick moments of cruelty to keep her at bay, like a dog kept in line with a clicker tool. 

The following week I convinced Laura’s Mum that my own had the week off work, that I wouldn’t need to carpool with them for a bit. Monday after school I rode my bike around for hours without seeing anyone. Old Italian women glared from their front porches on cracked plastic lawn furniture. Sprinklers stuttered over the crisp yellow grass. The old man at the Thahn Thahn bakehouse slipped me a free donut that I ate alone in the sun, which somehow felt unholy and tragically sad. I had an hour to kill till my Mum would pick me up from the Borg’s driveway. I sat in a bush out the front of their house, mindlessly fiddling with the plastic flowers pegged to my wheel spokes. I looked over to Laura’s razor scooter that she’d left out, buckled on its side like a tipped metal cow. The air was so poisoned with quiet it felt as though the street was on the precipice of some strange disaster.

When the silence was finally broken by the whisper of a pop song from a passing Subaru, it could very well have been dreamt or imagined.