avant/fiat

19

I didn’t think about girls very much at all except in private or when I watched Angelina Jolie movies or Michele Pfeiffer's catsuit in Batman Returns. I somehow understood that I wasn’t a girl in the way people talked about girls. Girls as in the Beastie Boys song, as in Jordan Catalano shrug ‘just a girl’ after he kissed Claire Danes in the boiler room in My So-called Life. I had only a loose notion of why - a sense of a poor fit, a stone in the shoe, an abstract shame that kept me silent in conversations about boys, marriage, clothes. I was abnormal, that was clear, but I also knew abnormality was a kind of freedom. Perhaps if I was abnormal, the rules didn’t apply to me. Perhaps I could wear what I wanted to wear, listen to what I wanted to, form my own opinions. And so, at least in the privacy of my Maryland bedroom, I did.

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