My friends have established a book club in our Discord server and this month we read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. It was short, but I liked the premise—the main character, Keiko, works in a convenience store for nearly 20 years because she genuinely enjoys it. She likes having the guidance of the employee handbook and using her coworkers as templates for how she should behave. Other people do Not get it. Keiko read as neurodivergent and her recollections about struggling socially were all too real to someone who felt Wrong all the time growing up but wasn't sure why.
Anyways, Convenience Store Woman is now on my 2026 reading list and I am probably going to read some more Murata soon. And since this book got me thinkin about it, here is a bonus piece of mine that's in the same realm.
Sky-Sky Stole My Underwear
The concept of girlhood was foreign to me. Exotic, repellent, it slid off my shoulders when I’d attempt to try it on. It wasn’t something girls were eager to share. I’m not sure it was something I even wanted. I was neither girl nor boy—something else, like a bug. Something different, maybe something worse.
In kindergarten, I had about three friends. One of them was a loud redheaded girl named Megan who still wanted to spend recess on the monkey bars until her palms calloused. Megan was maybe more girl than me, but she was also bug, extra legs and feelers there that poked outside the girl box, strange imagined worlds inside her head that often synced with mine. Together, we would play Sky-Sky, a game where we were squirrels who stole and ate underwear. Sometimes, the game entailed just threatening to steal and eat a pair of Monday panties or a lacy thong; other days, it was drawing the squirrels stashing their plunder for winter in elaborate tree cities. On some occasions, we would tell the main pageant girl of our class, Bailey, that we had already stolen and eaten her underwear, and it would piss her off. Girls didn’t want bugs getting a taste of what was theirs.
When we went to the reptile house, I remember Megan jumping over the big snake, Baby, who they kept in a bathtub. Some other kids also jumped over the big snake but I did not. Can you imagine stepping on the big snake? It’d be like stepping on yourself, all neck, just one long throat.
I did get invited to the party of one of the girls in my class one time and it was a tea party where you got to wear jewelry and fancy hats. Invite list: girls and girl-adjacent-bug-things and no boys; it was a small class and etiquette rules girl world, after all. The birthday duchess’ name was Dakota and her dad shot some rattlesnakes on their ranch once and made the rattles into earrings for her. I thought she was so beautiful; I wished she’d shed her jean jacket and I could crawl right into it and take the shape she was. The girls navigated the tea room naturally in their gloves and feather boas; my head drooped under a flower-coated brimmed hat while I watched, enraptured, as they fondled floral tea cups. Everyone got sick off the finger sandwiches and punch afterwards.
In fifth grade, my main friend was called Kyle. One of the girls hated me because I got to skip fourth so I think the other girls maybe hated me too for that, just a little. Girls like to hate in groups. People like to hate in groups. It’s one of the great unifiers. Sometimes you can become hate and transcend girl altogether, just for a little while.
Anyways, Kyle was boy, thoughtlessly, and he wore his freckles and reinforced-knee pants like some sort of divine right. Together, we’d draw our strict German teacher, uglier and uglier, on our desks in dry-erase marker until the markers got confiscated. Kyle approved of how hideous I’d make her and the way I’d do his work for him in art class sometimes.
One thing I thought would make me very normal, always, was to get a boy to have a crush on me and maybe take me to a dance. If we could touch each other red-hot to Lips of an Angel by Hinder in the lunchroom after school hours with all the luau themed decor up—oh! To be elevated to a show-and-tell object from the lowly status of bug, my pockets would drip with social capital and my wide, white-veneered smile would shine with normalcy. But I could not have a crush in a normal way; as ever, I felt the urge to feed and become. I’d think of Josh from class every time I had to go to the dentist, how he’d want to kiss me for my well-manicured teeth and how I’d sink those teeth right into him until he was nothing and I was full. Would I get sick afterwards, finger sandwiches and tea all over again? Would it even matter?