I'd always identified with Judge Selah Lively, in Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology:
SUPPOSE you stood just five feet two, And had worked your way as a grocery clerk, Studying law by candle light Until you became an attorney at law?
Excepting in my case, it was Suppose you stood just four foot two, and had a ten-inch dick.
That pretty much sums up my story.
Except it doesn't really. You probably want to hear more.
More about how I got from there to here. Okay.
Even before I maxed out at four feet two, I was small for my age, and bullied. Not just by the boys, although God knows, they never ceased picking at an easy target, but by the girls as well. When I was young and naΓ―ve, I already knew how to avoid the tall boys, with their fists and feet, but I didn't yet know about the girls. When they were friendly to me, I rushed to accept their overtures, looking for friends of any stripe.
But when they had me alone, I found that they just wanted me to be their "living doll". They'd hold me down and dress me up in baby clothes, try to get me to drink from a bottle, wear diapers. I ran screaming. I grew very leery of girls.
Years later when they approached me to again be a baby, they pointed out the rewards such cooperation could bring. I went along with it, dressing up as a baby and sitting in a stroller as they wandered through stores. Below the sight lines of the clerks, and dismissed by them as an infant, I was able to grab quite a bit of merchandise and hide it beneath me in the stroller. It was profitable for a while, but eventually I grew too large for the stroller. But my partners in crime had remained friendly to me for a while, allowing me a seat at the table at lunch. But then their high school friends teased them about their freak boyfriend, and to protect themselves they joined in the teasing, the pranks, and the humiliations that my diminutive stature seems to encourage in the average teenager.
I grew up lonely. When I did find a friend, it never lasted. They'd find new friends and drift away; become interested in the sports I couldn't compete in and that would consume their time. Or like the girls, they'd just give in to the teasing and torment that only I couldn't escape for long.