Elaboration

She said he was her boyfriend when we saw him drive by in his car one day, exploring the streets of the run-down little neighborhood that we were in.

I didn't understand. He was an adult. He couldn't be her boyfriend.

She turned on me and reared and made me know that he was her boyfriend and they were going to get married when he took her away from here.

The implication that I learned later was that this would happen as long as she followed his rules.

What was not implied was that I was not his girlfriend. I was a whore. I was property. Before he even laid a hand on men, I was already lower than dirt.

I'd seen her flirt with the three men who lived next door, and I was confused. I didn't know why they looked at us that way, at me that way. I didn't know why they would look at us that way when they were adults. I didn't know how my mother and her mother could sit on the porch and see them look at her that way and see her talk to them that way and laugh it off.

Girls will be girls. Sexual experimentation is normal in children.

They were not children. They were men.

And I was a wrong thing.