No shoulders allowed!

Claire Kelly Contributor

As a woman, I am faced with never ending comments; “that’s too small” or “too revealing”. Thankfully, the TDSB dress code is very lenient when it comes to what people are able to wear at school, allowing students to express themselves however they’d like. Why is it that we can wear tank tops in every class but gym? I thought the dress code in gym class was an attack against women showing their skin. Turns out, I was wrong.

If you’ve ever been in a gym class at North Toronto, you’re well aware of the dress code: only loose ftting t-shirts are permitted, no tank tops, or short-shorts. Many students have taken offense to this, seeing it as a rule that objectifes them, forcing them to hide their bodies. I’ve taken NT’s gym and personal ftness classes for the last four years, and am constantly hearing complaints about the dress code, whether it’s the panic of forgetting a shirt, wearing a tank top, or that your cleavage may be “too distracting”.

If you believed that the uniform was about preventing compulsive gazing, it’s understandable that you’d be critical. A grade 12 student taking co-ed gym, thought the rule was about pushing “the idea that girls are distracting and that their comfortability is not as important”. Something we often forget is that these rules are for everyone. For the boys and girls gym classes, we are all given the same dress code rules. However, women are often the most affected or in violation of this rule, at least that’s how it feels. This leaves some students against the uniform code believing that it is unfair and not thinking of women properly. This left the grade 12 student questioning “Why are we still viewing women as objects?”.

To clear up some of the confusion about the reasoning behind these rules, Ms.Chamberlain, my personal ftness teacher, explains that the TDSB dress policy states that “undergarments may not be worn as outerwear”. She goes on to explain that it is often diffcult to determine whether a student is wearing a tank top or an undergarment. “By insisting that everyone wear a t-shirt, there is less confusion and it makes it easy for students and teachers”.

Ms. Chamberlain explains that the uniform or dress expectations for Health and Physical Education classes do not include tank tops, not because they are

Who Loves the Sun?

“inappropriate” or “show too much skin”, but rather because uniform expectations are based on teachers wanting all students to be comfortable while in a ftness or gym environment. Additionally, it ensures that everyone is treated the same regardless of sex or gender identity.

The dress code given to students who take physical education

The 2nd place-winning short story in this year’s TCTE Short Story Contest.

Ava Reitmaier-Stone Section Editor

Late summer. Sweat sticks to the buzzing air, Lehna’s toes dig a hole into a balding patch of crabgrass. Sprawled across a lawn chair in her backyard, sporting only a sagging pair of bloomers, Lehna chainsmokes and reads the same three beaver magazines with the solemnity of a monk. The world has taken on a decided staleness this August, with everything adopting the limp itchiness of unwashed bed sheets. All the grass in Alpharetta, Georgia has turned the colour of duck bills. The tap water has started to taste like pepper and milk powder. The price of instant coffee has risen by 75 cents.

The Sun beats down relentlessly. It seems that this summer, the nature of its glare has shifted from merciless to desperate. Lehna never found the Sun to be particularly joyful. It always seemed a bit perverted to her. Voyeuristic. But then again, even the lobsters at the supermarket seemed a bit perverted to her. If one has been alone for a long time, they start to become very protective of their aloneless. They start to get selective about the things that can crawl through their windows. Lehna has stopped letting the Sun through her windows. If she ever wants to see it, she gets as naked as she feels like being and lays in her lawnchair.

She is 48, she’s never been kissed. She never left the obsessive virginal phase that most shed in their youth. It has stayed with her, mutating as it survived past its anticipated expiration date. With all the perverse naivete and jumping eyes of a teenage boy and all the apathetic discontent of a middle aged woman, most people fnd Lehna off putting.

Lehna looks at the grass. She wonders if watering it would help, or if her hose has been what turned it this colour. She tries to remember the last time she made boxed mac and cheese, and what it had looked like. She had been stoned, she recalled. It hadn’t been a good kind of stoned, it never was anymore. It was the kind of stoned that had made her quit her cashier position, the kind that had you feeling like a sack of shit dangling over a ravine. With an achy dread, she thinks of her bed. Sleeping another night with her head on the same pillow makes her want to cry hot tears. The underside of her breasts are sweaty, and the folds of her stomach, the backs of her knees, armpits. She has been mixing canned ice tea concentrate into her tap water to make it taste less like diner dishwater. It has rotted her breath. Her hair is thin and pin straight. Her face has a lot of beauty. It sits on the tops of her cheeks in red constellations, in her cupid’s bow, in the corners of her eyes.

A peeled orange sits among a dozen unpeeled oranges in a plastic shopping bag on the concrete.

A chain link fence stands to the left. It separates Lehna’s yard from the abandoned one next door. The fence stops abruptly in the middle of the shared lot, defeating its purpose altogether.

The Sun hisses and pops, it’s been doing that lately. Nobody else has seemed to notice. Lehna squints at it.

“Gotta smoke?”

Lehna turns her head, squints harder. A face has appeared above the fence, an arm languidly extending beside it.

“Sure.” She makes no effort to offer the face one, standing up wasn’t on her afternoon itinerary. Besides, if she can make it uncomfortable enough, maybe the face will go away. Her gruffness doesn’t seem to bother the face however, which Lehna can now make out is ringed with the kind of peroxide locks that make her sour.

The face belonged to one 23 year old Cadey Lebowski, the kind of girl who sits in the backseat and gets dirt under her manicure. The kind who can’t cook.

“You gonna offer me one?”

Lehna has returned to observing her magazine, she jerks her head to the right indicatively, cigarette ash dribbles onto the pages of Escort.

Flouncing around the fence, Cady seats herself between the half naked woman in the lawn chair and the bag of oranges. Lehna wordlessly hands her a cigarette and a light. The Sun sputters. Looking at the sky with vague concern, Cady rolls her painted lips into her mouth. She’s still young enough to smudge her lipstick.

“Have you noticed that it’s been doing that?”

Lehna fxes her eyes on the Sun.

“Yeah.”

“Ever happened before?”

Lehna shrugs.

“I’ve never seen it.” She looks down at her magazine for a moment, then she looks at Cady.

“The wind has stopped too.”

“There’s no wind in Alpharetta.”

Lehna half turns and points to the weathervane on the roof of her bungalow. Cady tries not to fxate on the grotesque twists of the woman’s skin, she’s frmly resolved not to care.

“Moves all the time. Well, it used to. Hasn’t budged in a week.” She turns back.

“It’s like a lightbulb you know? It’s gotta burn out eventually.”

“So what? Some man in a plane is gonna fy up there and switch out the Sun?”

Cady’s brow furrows, consumed by the technicalities of changing the bulb in the sky.

Lehna sucks air between her teeth.

“No, they can’t fx it. Or else everyone wouldn’t be ignoring it.”

Lehna waited for Cadey to start crying. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat quietly for a while, and then she asked Lehna if she was in the mood to fx her some lunch.

“How long till it goes out?”

Standing in her kitchen, poised like a French monarch, Lehna fries eggs. She doesn’t respond to the pile of limbs in her leather recliner, how was she supposed to know? Cady hauls her elbows onto the armrest of the recliner, dropping her neck so that she is staring at Lehna upside down. The woman is still practically naked, her bloomers an indescribable nothing kind of colour. Her kitchen a at North Toronto has sparked many conversations. Many students are unsure of the reasoning behind the dress code and therefore think of it negatively. By having this explanation, and understanding that it is not sexism behind the rule, NT students can not just comply, but understand the meaning behind their actions. swarm of taupe and russet. Cady likes looking at her, the way that she likes smelling gasoline.

“A week?”

“A light bulb only starts sparking like that a few days before it shuts off”

“So, soon then.”

Lehna splits the eggs onto two plates and walks them over to the recliner.

“Soon.”

Cadey pushes her soles into the armrest opposite the one on which her elbows rest, pushing her knees into her chest like a loaded spring.

“So what the fuck? How come nobody cares? Asked my friend about it this morning, looked at me like I was crazy.”

Lehna sinks into the suede couch opposite Cady. Even after so many years, her legs are still taught with the anticipation of being touched by another person. Lehna examines them the way that a young girl would: with the eyes of a man.

“It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that if they admit that it’s happening then they have to confront it.”

“But like it could all end today, shouldn’t we all be shooting up or something? Getting our goods while we still can?”

“The kind of people that would do that already have been doing it. Everyone just wants to keep on living the way they have been.”

Outside, the Sun spits.

A seafoam light fxture hangs to the left. A cluttered coffee table sits between them. It’s covered in empty cigarette packs, tarot cards, Playboy’s, rolling papers, a water bong, two untouched plates of eggs. The light is turned off, and its dead stillness makes the room feel like one big blanket with a rock in the middle. Cady looks at it anxiously, then she asks Lehna for another cigarette. She sucks it as she looks out the screen door, hanging ajar.