“Do you know what I’m going to do?” she said. “I’m going to spread my legs.”
“That’s a bit early,” I replied. “I thought you were waiting until you were married. Or has that gone out of the window now you’re 16?”

Her boyfriend shifted uncomfortably. There had been plenty of stories about them deliberately not spending time together ‘just in case we have sex’. A year or so later, of course, I had no such qualms. I both admired their steadfastness and was baffled by it in equal measure.

“No, that’s not what I mean,” said the Floof. “I mean I’m going to do it here. Now.”

I looked up into the sky and indicated the summer sun beating down on us. Our picnic had quickly devolved into inane chatter and we were now just killing time before church. Spread legs were a new topic.

“I think people are watching,” I pointed out in mock scandalised tones. “Why don’t you do so in your bedroom tonight instead?”
“No, I want to do it now,” she insisted. “I want to know what it feels like for a boy.”

I rolled my eyes. Zounds, was it this again?

Much as I liked the Floof, she did have some ideas about gender which I found a little outdated. She was, after all, the one who always wanted to hug me, but not when I was crying because ‘boys don’t cry and I don’t know what to do in that situation’. She wrote me a letter once in which she assumed that ‘when we’re young we all think our daddy is the strongest man in the world’. At one point, she also clearly thought I was gay. No reason, she just did.

One of the things that she had brought up – and one I genuinely hadn’t thought about before – was that boys always sit with their legs apart, whereas girls never do. That was the way genders sat, and since she didn’t believe trans or NB people existed, they didn’t get a mention.

As a boy who had, in his own sixteen years of existence, had his legs in all sorts of positions when sitting, I was a little confused by this. In her very long elucidation of the subject she had also mentioned that, the more confident the boy was, the wider apart his legs would get.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The amount of male confidence is in direct correlation to the distance between their knees when in a sitting position.

this is what the floof actually believed

Much as I didn’t agree, once she’d said that, I couldn’t unsee it. While I could get the concept that external genitalia made it slightly more comfortable to sit with one’s legs slightly apart, there were clearly some rowdy boys at school who were keen to show off their manly confidence by taking up as much space as possible. There was one guy in my class who seemingly spent most of his time trying to do an impression of a croquet hoop.

I’m genuinely surprised they didn’t start walking like that, doing the waddle that cowboys in westerns do.

“Anyway,” said the Floof, “boys do it, so I’m going to.”

At which she unsealed her legs, spread them akimbo, and immediately experienced some kind of transcendental experience. Her eyes shone with an immediate realisation of a better world, all the other light in the immediate vicinity dimmed in comparison to her pure radiance, and an exclamation mark appeared in the air above her head.

“Hey!” she trilled. “This is really comfortable! It’s no wonder boys like to sit like this. I’m going to have to do this more often!”
“Not in church, I trust.”
“Well, no, not right in front of the minister. I mean, what would he think?”
“I don’t know. Probably that you’re getting comfortable, I suppose.”

At which point a rounders ball came out of nowhere and hit her right between her thighs.

“AAAAAAAAH! MY FANNY!!!” she yelled, in a way I’m sure her minister would have not approved. “That does it! This might be comfortable, but I’m never opening my legs again!”

But, considering the fact that she later married the boyfriend and now has two children with him, I’m fairly sure she did so… eventually.