In the earliest stages of puberty, I pack on weight. I am eleven in 2001 and the front-row seat I have to our transition into a post-9/11 world is forever linked to my bodily development. The mass hysteria of color-coded security levels sync up to my irregular and painful periods. I’m afraid of the Patriot Act and I’m afraid of my body. A woman’s body is terror.

On my First Communion, a family member gifts me an illustrated book of saints written by Sister Wendy. It’s filled with beautiful gilded paintings of pious pubescent virgins cradling their severed breasts and eyes- taken in punishment by lecherous pagan kings and Romans. A woman’s body is a danger if it is too well made and it is a shame if it is not made well enough. Not even God can save her.

It piles fat in corners and sides that make no sense, preparing for a shape I can’t imagine. I rapidly outgrow my uniform skirts and unflattering front-pleat bermuda shorts. I have one single pimple on my chin that is enflamed and red for what feels like the entirety of fifth grade. I’m repulsed when I catch sight of myself in a mirror at Ikea one day. I didn’t look like this a year ago. I didn’t look like this six months ago. I have become a monster quite suddenly and I wonder if anyone else can tell. My body isn’t becoming womanly or curvy, it’s just becoming lumpy.

It comes to a head one day in Shelley’s, a dance supply store in West LA. It is dark inside, barely lit by yellow halogen lights. It smells like dust. The owner, a sturdy woman with close-cropped, bleached blonde hair and a tribal arm band tattoo watches from afar while her seamstress fits us with costumes for some school fashion show.

The seamstress is a foreign woman with a thick accent, poking and prodding us and handing out a bedazzled crop-top number.

I will say that it doesn’t look great on my little potato body.

The seamstress calls her boss over. “This is no good, she has a little belly, yeah?” They go back and forth, discussing their options while taking furtive glances at my hideous form. The Seamstress leaves, returning with a pastel blue turtleneck bodysuit and velour sweats. I am a pastel dancewear sausage. I am humiliated. I wonder if my mother, who has congregated with the other mothers in a corner of the store, knows that I am grotesque.

I tell her what was said to me later in the kitchen of our painstakingly-restored Midcentury ranch. I refuse to make eye contact with her, choosing instead to play with the heavy wooden sliding door separating us from the dining room. I am sure that I have done something wrong. My heart beats just like it does in Confession.

Forgive me Mother, for I have sinned.

She is furious but not, as I had feared, at me. She calls the store. She calls my school. She makes me potatoes and chicken and tells me not to mind what anyone has to say. My body is my own and no one else’s.

The next day I’m called into Sister LaReina’s office. Sister LaReina is our principal; A kindly older nun with close-cropped grey hair. When it rains she orders Diddy Reise cookies for the students. On 9/11 she sits with the children who came to school in tears until they are convinced of their safety in the tiny brick schoolhouse on the other side of the country.

I don’t remember a single thing she says, only that she hugs me and tells me that God made me perfect just the way I am.

And I know that this is all meant to make me feel better, but all it does is confuse me. I am suddenly aware that there is this upper echelon of older women- and in that there are women like the store manager and the seamstress and there are also women like my mother and Sister LaReina; And I don’t know which one of them is right. Am I normal or do I change? Is my body God’s image or is it blasphemy? Do I go to war with it?

And I still don’t know who was right. I question myself over and over in my head as an adult. My body is still my enemy, something that threatens its clearly and painstakingly defined boundaries; Something that will explode and expand at any moment, taking me with it. Trying on crop tops at Forever 21, standing on the scale in the morning, when I am so depressed following a breakup that I plummet down to 112 lbs and everyone says I look amazing when I know I am a zombie inside- I hear her voice in my head.

“She has a little belly, yeah?”