The Goddess of Second Chances
BOOK ONE:
Becoming Oneself
Kennedy Sangiovese
Chapter One
It’s not easy being a girl. You have to get everything just right or the other girls will avoid you for fear of infecting themselves with your unfortunate fashion sensibilities. Any breach of decency in your attire could be an invitation for wolf-pack-like behavior from boys. But this is minor compared to the complete disaster that will befall you if the ruse fails and you are discovered!
This was the second month of my senior year of high school, second period. No, not that period—which I wish to God I had—but the one after first period, I think it is English class, nobody is listening—it is too early! I play with my new purple pencil, watching it as it bobs perfectly, not breaking in my graceless hand. I look at the girl beside me, noticing her petite, feminine fingers impatiently tweeting, “I hate reading this Ayn Rand shit!” Her pretty, vexed face is punctuated by blonde curls bouncing with her inner rage. I’m noticing other students around me are also regretting their late hours spent tweeting, sullenly resisting our balding, opinionated teacher’s insistence—whose politics appear to be to the right of Mussolini—that we appreciate the novel most feminists denounce as patriarchal. I had to protest this early morning assault on our reveries and raised my hand. The professor noticed someone awake and happily called on me.
“Ayn Rand’s Objectivist fantasies regarding women, cis and otherwise, would play well with Dr. Seuss’ dehumanizing caricatures of Japanese Americans, all but assuring their eventual imprisonment—actual and societal. These are excellent candidates for the bonfire in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451!” I declared, looking quite the suffragette in a mini skirt. “Will you be having us read Mein Kampf next?” I finished, with what I thought was biting scholarly wit, my cheeks flushed with early morning ire.
The teacher just looked at me, puzzled. He furrowed his brow, lifting his coffee, determining how best to squash this little irritant piping up in his holy sanctum.
“Well, I…” But suddenly the bell rang; there was a collective stampede toward the door and I found myself in a teenage running of the bulls down the corridor.
“Excuse me,” the blonde girl sitting next to me said to me as we walked. “I think what you said today was really great!”
“Thanks!” I said. “I noticed he was pissing you off too.”
My rage was extinguished by the laughter of my small group of outcast friends that huddled before each class, like terrified feeder fish in the pet store dropped into a tank of hungry Oscars.
“Hi everybody!” I said as I adjusted my skirt, by which I mean pulling it down below my panty line, it having inched up on the hard wooden chair a moment ago, throwing the teacher momentarily off guard and allowing my escape. I slowly tuned out my sweet, petite, blonde, coquettish friend Lena’s description of her sexual partner last weekend, turning my attention to a more pressing matter—something was making its presence known, barely hidden below the skirt I now wish was Heidi’s mountain maiden dress.
This morning I put on makeup exactly as Sofia, the precocious sixteen-year-old YouTube girl with fifty shades of makeup, prescribed.
“OK ladies, let’s pat on a little rouge like so,” she instructed, as I clumsily attempted to brighten my pale, boyish face, then used mascara to lengthen lashes nature clearly intended to attract small field mice rather than men.
Sofia then drew her lips, the contours of which I marveled at. I admired the gods’ artistry, struggling to find similar signs of their generosity blossoming like passion fruit on my own face—nope, it’s Botox injections for me.
I flicked off the video—I just needed the basics as I did not have half a day to prepare myself. Still naked, I teased my wayward hair into a curly tempest over my shoulder, then brushed a little down my forehead to soften my face. I added a bit more blush and I was almost ready. The pantyhose swathed my hopelessly large feet, my thin feminine legs, and then addressed the difficult part: tucking my genitals into my body to form a facsimile of an exuberant vagina.
That’s right, I’m biologically a boy. What a burden!
I slipped on a training bra, covering nicely developing breasts I imagined inflating by sheer willpower and the prodigious amounts of estrogen I siphoned off from my mother’s pillbox. Lastly I pulled on the thin cotton pastel Dolce & Gabbana knock-off Italian dress, surreptitiously acquired from the Goodwill store, that gently hugs my narrow hips, exposing smooth legs and round shoulders untainted by toil—those nasty garden chores my dad tries assigning me, usually involving sod mixed with recent animal droppings and dangerous rotary blades. The low cut also reveals my promising bosom—objects of my deepest affection, growing in equal measure with their cup size.
Perfect. I slipped on the slightly worn black Gucci heels I managed to secure before the others, having spotted them through the window waiting for the Goodwill doors to open. A long coat covers all of this up. Hood over my face, I whisk past my mother, quietly reading her Bible—probably thanking her God for normal children—on my way out.
“Bye, Mom.”
Mom looked up, a tired but religiously satisfied look, comfortable that her staunch beliefs will hold up in the court of heavenly law, her reward due any day—perhaps a rocking chair and some new knitting needles by a heavenly fire? But not of the underworld variety, mind you, busily roasting the bones of the unworthy; rather a warm, crackling wood stove perhaps, something you might find in the less tolerant regions of the country—a conspiracy theory or two popping like warm embers into the night.
This all depended on the unlikely event the prophecies of the fanciful Reverend were correct—the learned scholar who finished most of high school and probably earned a diploma from a matchbox seminary, while serving time for petty theft—pickpocketing souls left unguarded for the first conspiracy theory offering them false solace from their dull, unreflected lives.
“Bye, sweetie. Love you!”
Whew. Always a close call. I could already see the sad judgmental horror on Mom’s tired, fervent, yet still beautiful face when she finds out. But what else can I do? Be untrue to myself, the person God made me? Not a chance.
So here I am now, in the hallway between periods, surrounded by my group of friends, experiencing an abrupt…situation. My carefully tucked anatomy starts to unravel. Oh God! This could be embarrassing…I decide to do a fifty-yard dash toward the girls’ restroom, sliding along the wall like a Roomba. Then, bam! I bump into none other than my drama teacher, who decides this moment is as good as any to lavish praise on me for my rendition in the dress rehearsal of Agrippina of Rome last weekend in the school theater.
“You were a perfect vixen, Goddess! But you’re very thin. Not starving yourself for the stage, are you, dear?” she says, studying me as if I were lines to be memorized, her wrinkled face and wire-rim glasses peering into my very soul.
“I will try to eat more, Ms. Littleton,” I offer in reply and wiggle away…only to run smack-dab into three formidable, meaty jocks, who eye me curiously, possibly lustfully, as a sweaty waft emerges from their lockers, still bearing the original fading paint from decades ago. My eye catches a half-used box of condoms in the corner. These guys comprised the popular set I watched from afar. I was careful not to veer, like Icarus, too close into their orbit for fear my newly spreading wings would melt from the scorn lying just below the surface of their smiles—proffered to my popular counterparts, possibly rejecting their gallant offers to reduce the inventory from the box I observed in the drab, smelly locker.
“Ohh, hi,” I giggle in panic and awkwardly shift the topic of their conversation. “Did you guys see my performance last Friday?”
“Um, no,” one of them says, momentarily disarmed.
“Pity.” I casually slip by them, within reach of the ladies’ room.
Thank God I made it. I burst through the restroom doors, a safe haven in the blackboard jungle. I avoid the girls standing in front of the mirrors, scampering past them as they preen themselves like passenger pigeons ready to deliver details of the next sordid secret they overhear. Once inside my sanctuary stall, I exhale a sigh of relief.
Safe!
I sit on the hard toilet seat, contemplating how I got to be this trans-cendent yet fragile, in my hitherto unremarkable existence.