Like A Baby’s
An SPH Experience by Electronic_Pea_2830.
There were six of us total. Me, two other guys—Pete and Sam—and three girls: Zoe, Clair, and a girl named Hannah who barely factors into this story except as a witness. We’d all known each other through university, various overlapping friend groups that had fused the way friend groups do when someone has a car, and someone else knows a cheap place to stay.
I should describe Zoe and Clair, because they matter.
Zoe was sharp. Not mean-sharp, exactly—not in the way that makes you cross the street when you see her coming—but she had this quality where she said whatever was in her head and didn’t much care how it landed. She was short, dark-haired, quick-witted, the kind of girl who was always at the center of things because she made things happen. She talked loud, laughed louder, and had zero filter. If she thought something, she said it. If she saw something, she commented on it. This was mostly charming. Mostly.
Clair was different. Taller, blonder, quieter. She wasn’t shy—she could hold her own in any conversation—but she had a gentleness to her, a way of smoothing things over when they got rough. She was the peacemaker of the group, the one who’d notice someone sitting alone and talk to them, the one who’d diffuse tension with a joke that wasn’t quite as funny as Zoe’s but was kinder. She was also, I would learn that summer, fiercely loyal. She defended people even when she didn’t have all the facts. Especially then.
I should also describe myself, in the interest of full disclosure. I’m six-one. Broad shoulders, reasonably fit, the kind of guy who looks like he should be… well, proportional. I’ve been told I’m good-looking. I’ve been told I have a presence. I’ve also been told—by a friend I trusted, in a text message that I can still quote from memory—that I have a “teensy-weensy tiny penis.” She wasn’t wrong. Five inches on a good day, on a six-one frame, which is the kind of math that doesn’t work in your favor. I knew this about myself. I’d known for years. But knowing it in the quiet of your own head is different from having it discussed over cherry pancakes.
—
The day it started was our second full day at the hostel. We’d spent the afternoon at the beach—a scrappy stretch of sand near the harbor, not much to look at, but the water was warm, and we’d rented a dinghy and a couple of bodyboards and made a day of it.
I was wearing swim shorts—long ones, baggy ones, the kind that came down past mid-thigh. I’d bought them specifically because they were modest. Because I was aware of my situation and I didn’t want it on display. What I hadn’t accounted for was the inner lining—a kind of netting material designed to keep everything in place—tearing. I don’t know when it happened, maybe when I climbed onto the dinghy. Maybe when I was scrambling back into the water after a bodyboard wipeout, all I know is that at some point, the netting gave way, and whatever minimal security it had provided was gone.
I didn’t feel it happen. I didn’t notice anything different. I swam, I bodyboarded, I lay on the dinghy with my legs up, I stood in the shallows talking to Pete about where we’d eat that night. At no point did I think, Oh, by the way, my shorts are compromised, and my business is potentially visible.
I had no idea.
—
The first sign that something was wrong came later. We’d all gone back to the hostel to shower and change. The girls were in their dorm, the guys in ours. I was sitting on my bunk, towel around my waist, scrolling through my phone, when Pete came in from the hallway looking like he’d swallowed something uncomfortable.
“What’s up with you?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Okay.”
He sat on his bunk and didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “Zoe and Clair are having a fight.”
“About what?”
He hesitated. “I don’t think I should—”
“Pete. What?”
He shook his head. “Girl stuff. It’s fine. They’ll get over it.”
I let it go. Zoe and Clair were always having some kind of disagreement. They were different people—Zoe was a firecracker, Clair was a calm pool—and they clashed regularly over stupid things. Who forgot to buy the snacks. Who was taking too long in the bathroom. Whose turn it was to pay for petrol. It was background noise. I didn’t think about it again.
Until later.
—
We walked into town that evening to find food. The hostel was a fifteen-minute walk from the harbor, and the harbor had a strip of restaurants and cafés that catered to the summer crowd—mostly students, mostly budget travelers, mostly looking for somewhere that did decent food and didn’t check IDs too carefully.
We found a place that did burgers and pancakes. Not together, but on the same menu, which felt like a red flag that somehow turned out to be a green light. The burgers were fine. The cherry pancakes were genuinely excellent—thick, fluffy, loaded with dark cherry compote, the kind of thing you’d remember years later for no reason other than it was the last good thing you tasted before the evening fell apart.
We pushed two tables together on the terrace outside. Six of us, plus a couple of pints each, plus the lingering weirdness between Zoe and Clair that I still hadn’t been told about.
The atmosphere was off. I could feel it. Zoe and Clair were sitting at opposite ends of the table, which wasn’t unusual, but there was a tension between them that the other three seemed aware of and I didn’t. Hannah kept glancing between them. Pete was very focused on his burger. Sam was over-talking, filling silence the way people do when they’re trying to prevent something.
I ate my pancakes. They were really good. I remember that.
—
It was Sam, oddly, who opened the door. Sam, who couldn’t stand silence and would rather walk into a landmine than sit with one.
“So,” he said, with the forced lightness of someone who knows what’s coming, “how long are you two planning to keep this going?”
He looked between Zoe and Clair. “The argument. The fight. Whatever it is. You’ve been weird all day.”
A silence fell. The kind that has weight. The kind where you can hear the sea in the distance, someone’s fork touching their plate, and your own heartbeat in your ears.
Clair spoke first. She set down her drink, looked at Sam, and said, “All I’m saying is, if it was big enough to flop out the end of his shorts, it can’t have been that small.”
The world tilted.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I sat there with my fork in my hand and a half-eaten cherry pancake in front of me, and I felt every drop of blood in my body rush to my face.
His shorts.
It.
That small.
She was talking about me. They’d been arguing about me. About my penis. About whether my penis was small. In their dorm. All afternoon. And now, here, at a restaurant, in front of everyone, it was coming out.
Clair was defending me. That was the shape of it—Clair, sweet Clair, was arguing that I couldn’t be that small, that there must be some explanation, that what Zoe had seen wasn’t representative. She was on my side. She was fighting for me.
But she was doing it by discussing my penis at a table with five other people.
“You didn’t see it,” Zoe said. She wasn’t defensive. She wasn’t angry. She was matter-of-fact. That was the thing about Zoe—she didn’t raise her voice when she was sure of something. She just said it. “His leg went up in the air when he lay on the dinghy, and I saw right up his shorts.”
My face was on fire. I could feel it—the heat, the prickling, the certainty that everyone at the table could see it. I stared at my plate. The cherry compote looked like something. I don’t know what. I was trying to focus on anything other than the conversation two feet away about the contents of my swim shorts.
“But it couldn’t have been that small,” Clair said. She was persistent; I’ll give her that. She was arguing a position she believed in, defending a friend’s honor with the conviction of someone who genuinely thought she was right. “To be hanging out so you could see it. If it was hanging out, it must have had some length. You can’t see something that small from a distance.”
“I saw it,” Zoe said. And then, raising her voice—not shouting, just projecting, the way she did when she wanted to make sure everyone heard—she said the words I’ve never forgotten.
“It was like a baby’s.”
—
The table went quiet. Not the same quiet as before. A different quiet. The kind where everyone knows something has been said that can’t be unsaid.
I didn’t look up. I couldn’t. My eyes were fixed on my plate, my hands flat on the table, and I was trying to figure out how to be alive in this moment without anyone noticing me. I was six-one, and I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to fold myself into nothing and disappear into the gap between the cobblestones.
I glanced to my left. Pete was looking at his beer. Sam was looking at the sky. Neither of them would look at me. That was the worst part, somehow—not what Zoe said, not Clair’s defense, but the fact that the other two guys at the table couldn’t make eye contact. They knew. They’d been told, in front of everyone, that I had a baby’s penis, and they couldn’t even look at me.
Hannah was somewhere between Zoe and Clair. I don’t remember what she did. I think she looked at her phone. I think she tried to be elsewhere.
Clair didn’t back down. “You’re being cruel, Zoe.”
“I’m being honest.”
“You’re being cruel and honest. They’re not the same thing.”
“In this case they are.”
“You don’t know what you saw. You saw something from a distance, at an angle, through wet fabric. You can’t possibly know—”
“I know what I saw, Clair. I saw a small dick. I’m not saying it to be mean. I’m saying it because it’s what happened. He was lying on the dinghy with his leg up, and I saw up his shorts, and it was small. It was like a baby’s. That’s what it looked like. I’m sorry if that’s hard to hear, but that’s the truth.”
“You’re not sorry at all.”
“I’m a little sorry. But I’m not going to lie about what I saw just to make everyone comfortable.”
They kept going. Back and forth. Clair arguing that it couldn’t be that small, that there must be an explanation—the angle, the water, the cold, the fabric. Zoe calmly insisting that she knew what she’d seen, that she wasn’t making it up, that she had no reason to lie. And me, sitting between them, not saying a word.
Because what could I say?
What could I possibly say?
I could have told the truth. I could have said, “Actually, Zoe’s right. It is small. Five inches. Maybe less when it’s cold. And yes, that’s what you saw.” I could have settled it. I could have ended the argument, validated Zoe, thanked Clair for her defense, and moved on.
But I couldn’t. I physically couldn’t. The idea of opening my mouth and confirming it—of saying out loud, in front of my friends, at a restaurant, over cherry pancakes, Yes, my penis is small, she’s right—was beyond what I could do. It was too much. It was too exposed. It was the most personal thing about me, the thing I’d carried quietly for years, and it was being dissected like a lab specimen while I sat there trying to breathe.
So I said nothing. I let them talk about me like I wasn’t there. I let Clair defend a version of me that wasn’t real, and Zoe describe a version that was, and I sat in the middle, ate my pancakes, and tried to figure out how the night could end.
—
It ended the way these things do—badly, then gradually less badly, then with everyone pretending it hadn’t happened. Zoe and Clair stopped arguing. Someone changed the subject. Sam made a joke about something. Pete bought a round. The conversation moved on.
But it didn’t really move on. Not for me. And not, I think, for anyone else. There was a residue—a knowledge. Something had been said that couldn’t be unsaid, and now six people were sitting with it, and five of them were trying to act normal, and one of them was me, trying to act like his insides hadn’t been pulled out and laid on the table next to the ketchup.
We walked back to the hostel. I was quiet. Zoe walked ahead with Hannah. Clair fell into step beside me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“She shouldn’t have said that. It was mean.”
“She was being honest.”
Clair looked at me. I could see her processing—could see the moment she realized I wasn’t arguing, wasn’t pushing back, wasn’t saying Of course she’s wrong, I’m fine. I was just… accepting it.
“Matthew,” she said carefully. “Is it… is she right?”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. We walked. The sea was dark to our left. The streetlights were orange.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s right.”
Clair was quiet. Then: “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters a little.”
“She was still cruel to say it like that. In front of everyone.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry I brought it up at dinner. I was trying to defend you. I thought if I argued back, people would—”
“I know. Thank you.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence. Clair reached over at one point and squeezed my arm, and I let her, and that was the kindest thing anyone did for me that night.
—
The next day was weird. Zoe was normal—loud, funny, acting as if nothing had happened, which was either her way of moving on or of pretending the previous evening hadn’t occurred. Clair was careful with me, gentle in a way that made it clear she hadn’t forgotten. Pete and Sam were somewhere in between—friendly but slightly distant, like they’d learned something about me that they didn’t know how to hold.
We went to the beach again. I wore different shorts—shorter, but with intact lining. I checked it three times before I went in the water. I checked it again when I got out. I didn’t lie on the dinghy.
I don’t remember much else about the trip. I remember the cherry pancakes. I remember Zoe’s voice, like a baby’s, with the same casual clarity she used for everything. I remember Clair’s hand on my arm in the dark. I remember Pete not looking at me.
And I remember the feeling. The specific, precise feeling of sitting at a table while two people argued about the size of your penis, one of them defending you with wrong information, the other one attacking you with the truth, and not being able to say a single word.
—
Years later, I told a friend about this. Not the whole story—just the shape of it. That two friends had argued about me in public, one saying I was small, the other saying I couldn’t be. That I’d sat there in silence.
She asked me what I should have said.
I thought about it. I think about it still.
I could have said, “She’s right.” I could have said, “It’s five inches, which is average, and on a six-one frame it looks smaller, and that’s the math, and I can’t change the math.” I could have said, “I know what I have, and I know what I don’t have, and I don’t need it discussed over dinner.” I could have said, “Zoe, shut up. Clair, thank you. Everyone else, can we please talk about something else?”
I could have said a lot of things.
I said nothing.
And I still don’t know if that was the right call or the worst one. I don’t know if speaking up would have been brave or if it would have just made it more real, more permanent, more impossible to move past. I don’t know if silence was dignity or cowardice. I don’t know if it mattered.
I know that Zoe was right. I know that Clair was kind. I know that the cherry pancakes were really good. And I know I’ll never wear those swim shorts again.
They’re still in a drawer somewhere. Long, baggy, with a torn inner lining. I should throw them out. I keep them, I think, as a reminder. Of the day someone saw something I didn’t mean to show, said something I didn’t want to hear, and I sat at a table with five people and let them talk about the smallest thing about me like it was the biggest thing in the world.
Like a baby’s.
Two words. That’s all it took. Two words from someone who didn’t know she was going to say them until she said them, and they’ve been in my head ever since.
I still don’t know what I should have said. I probably never will.
The End.
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