A Brand New Goth Girl
[17]
What did I just see? That couldn’t have been my benefactor. Not pride talking or preconceptions, even though I had to acknowledge certain internal biases. If that entity I just spoke with turned out to be the benefactor, then they were far more of a chameleon than I ever imagined.
I didn’t feel fear or menace when I was changed, and the arrival of neither message seemed scary. Especially when I received my little flashlight, it was a moment of quiet and curious possibility, reminiscent of receiving an unexpected gift. What I was currently reeling from was a sensation like when the Wolf first spoke to Little Red Riding Hood. Or a Man in Black disguising their predatory presence. The way he spoke and how close he got overrode any charitable credit or friendly doubt I might grant him.
His invocation of angels especially appeared to set him apart from them. I wasn’t sure what to do with his reference to souls when it came to the flashlight. That seemed like a strange thing to potentially lie about. Perhaps it was intended to guilt me about its use. Not only did the light irrevocably change people, but it was also fueled using souls. Like some demonic weapon.
The strange man had done something to me though. He breathed around my eyes and removed my certainty about knowing Rosalie before yesterday. Part of me just wanted to swing around and head back to the dormitory to make sure that something worse hadn’t befallen her. But what could I possibly do in that case? The only tool, the only weapon before me, was this strange light. It felt more like wielding an item of mutually assured destruction. Changing others hadn’t helped anything. It just brought on bitter currents within, which spread entirely over and upon my shoulders.
Breakfast at least mollified the worst of these twisting concerns. A surprisingly heavy crowd shuffled its way through the doors this hour. The fancier outfits and vaguely organized glamour mostly fell away for morning ease. Flannel, sweatpants, oversized jackets, rubber bands, and other awkward hair ties, along with copious flip-flops. Even amongst those in the group who were clearly used to being girls before all this happened, the level of clothing choices shifted towards comfort. A rare, scattered handful went the other direction with freshly made-up smiles and subtly poised outfits.
I grabbed fruit first, filling up a plate with a colorful array and a smattering of yogurt. A muffin and scrambled eggs, along with some mixed juice, sufficed for the rest. I expected this rendition of a cafeteria meal to be quietly lonely. Instead, it was like everyone casually knew me for some reason. I helped some random girls with a smattering of questions. Some of them weren’t terribly appropriate for breakfast. Desperate girls brought up menstrual cups with wide eyes and nervously clenched hands. I wasn’t able to provide certainty but, at least, I offered some quiet comfort.
It would be easy to say that all of this seemed more like being cast adrift in a different world with a new language and strange customs. But it wasn’t that weird at all. Some of the specifics were peculiar. I thought of it as though we were all given a strange assignment, and certain upstarts needed help understanding the subject matter. However, once again, I got pegged as some sort of inexplicable expert. Countless girls either found me intimidating, inspiring, or endearing. I got a lot of random contact information added to my phone, even though that specific trend seemed more like they were following up on advice from the administration: find and befriend some female buddies.
How many more days would be laid out in a framework similar to this? How would life at home change between semesters? What were the prospects for my career now? So many things were financially up in the air in life in general, stretching from art industries to ancillary fields where I might find prospects. Could that be a problem that I just aimed a light at to fix? What if I didn’t want to handle things that way?
Turning in the light to my benefactor may have been the right pathway to take after all. However, that still left the moment when she hinted at my presence with the parchment and then made a personal appearance in my doorway. I had to be disappointing with how little I had actually used her monumental gift. But then, did it really come with strings attached and obligations for how I had to use it?
The morning both dragged out before me in uncertainty and desperate, painstaking reflection while whizzing by with too much energy and so many missed moments. Life clung to me and left me behind. What was I really supposed to do?
Getting cast into this situation presented so many powerful possibilities. It should’ve been absolutely life-changing, with perceptions beyond my comprehension. I had become a different person than I ever could’ve conceived of before. Despite this intricate new life, so many familiar landmarks distracted from the newness. Still an artist with the same brain fighting to flesh out exactly what I want to say. Depending on the feedback I received from my professor, I expected that exactly the same habits would form around me with frustration and walking to find true inspiration.
One true fate existed. And it was the one I had toyed with and nervously considered: Erase myself and let Beatrice reign. Maybe it didn’t need to be a death sentence or an absolute passage into oblivion. Wasn’t there something to be attempted in the apparatus of the flashlight that would at least allow me a glimpse into the person I might’ve been? Like a skyscraper glass floor suspended in the air that simulated the sensation of stepping out over the ledge without having to fall? The instructions contained so many details, and yet no specifics for this particular possibility.
At least, not yet. A crazy, impossible thought passed through me.
The light could be used to alter things. They didn’t have to be living or human necessarily. Could the flashlight, in fact… alter itself, gaining utility that didn’t exist before? If this entailed altering its instructions, then the problem was that those were situated on the internal structure. Furthermore, enabling the light to twist around on itself would require disassembly. Leaving it in several pieces didn’t preclude the possibility that it might still work.
Otherwise, I could conceive of an alternative where I took a photograph of the instructions and then used the light on that copy to alter them. Both possibilities made me suspect that the light would just give me a failure warning. I had to know though. And I couldn’t just poke around with it willy-nilly because something had happened to me that the Man in Black had undone. Shame I didn’t have any electrical or engineering courses to draw upon. However, I knew that Zach did attend at least one course of that caliber.
He and his roommates tended to sleep late and totally miss breakfast. I doubted even the most extreme changes would alter that trend. Stopping by after class might be helpful. It would require showing off the flashlight to Zach and Connor, but they deserved to know, considering we appeared to be the first ones affected.
Scheduling left me with too much time to easily burn off before class but far too little for broader accomplishments. Roaming the student union seemed like the superior notion. The complex used to be so small.
The original SUB, documented in photos all across the first floor with details of the more recent renovation, sat at the bottom of a pit encompassing the theater arts complex and the classic, small theater room with improv every other weekend. Instead of the current vast array of computers, places of relaxation, and amenities, it had a vague front desk, some weathered couches, and mail. I had apparently seen it in those days, before the start of high school, when Cressman was considered by my sisters for college and I was brought along. My younger mind hadn’t paid much attention to the trip because we went to so many places that summer.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Lisha and Megan, my sisters. The golden girls. The real legacy of our family. Whatever I could do, they had done several times over long before and more diligently. I knew they worked hard and had been through so much I couldn’t even conceive of. But the weight of trying to at least live my life felt insurmountable in their presence.
I shouldn’t have thought about them, because my phone soon decided that constituted a summoning. Lisha Lee’s name lit up and chimed in my contacts. Dread and gurgling pain tried to blot out the noise. I shouldn’t have been scared of Lisha. Oftentimes, she was my biggest cheerleader and a comforting voice when I felt my worst. But whatever expectations she may have had for Beatrice, in this moment most of all, I didn’t feel like I could ever live up to them. I wasn’t her sister. I was barely her brother, and it would be better if she just forgot about me.
The call should’ve just gone to voicemail, but I was surprised when it dropped and started all over again. She was intentionally trying to make her call again. What the heck? Leaving a text message would’ve been better. I could’ve just deleted it. What was she doing? She never behaved this needy and insistent.
The second round of attempts passed into a third round, with me feeling increasingly uncomfortable at the sound being trumpeted to everyone in the vicinity. Putting my phone to sleep would’ve shut it off, but the tenacity concerned me that perhaps something had happened to mom and dad beyond the craziness of the last 24 hours. I quickly answered the fourth call after a deep breath, tightening my resolve.
“Little sister! Mei Mei! Bea!” She also dropped a couple of unfamiliar but warm words that sounded like Welsh and Spanish. She was never particularly well-versed in either of those languages. She sounded almost like she was crying as she continued, “Thank goodness! I’m glad I reached you!”
“H-hi…sis. What’s up? You okay?”
It wasn’t long before she really was crying on the phone. The last time I could remember hearing my sister cry was when she failed to make an archery championship. Blubbering quietly, she relayed that the college said that something happened. Wild fears cropped up with her imagining the worst possible things. And, for her, the worst aspect was that she ignored those messages all last night. Apparently, mom and dad hadn’t thought it was serious. At least they were consistent, but Lisha rambled through so many frantic emotions. She wanted to check in about every single aspect of my last day.
I struggled to fill that with events that made sense. An upcoming project involving artistic collage themes and contrasts. Went for a thoughtful walk that gave me a lot to consider. In place of the total transformation, I fixed a microscope on aspects of Beatrice‘s life, such as the Internet, people she knew, and her perceptions of her body. Then I dropped the bomb of going to an LGBTQ meeting to try and help.
She stopped me there and made sure I understood in no uncertain terms that whatever self-identity or sexuality lay at the truth of my being, it was exuberantly and totally accepted by her without condition.
“I love you, sis. In your darkness and your light. In all that subdued makeup and your brightest smiles. Whatever brings you joy is the joy of my life as well. I want you to know that and Megan feels exactly the same. We had a long talk last night and shared things we haven’t talked about in forever. And it breaks my heart that we don’t tell you exactly how we feel and let you know how loved you are. I know we’re all still recovering from growing up with mom and dad and how unavailable they can be and how tough it was in the Olympic years and how stupid I feel…like I was to never say all of this to you, when you and Meg are the most amazing sisters anyone could ever wish to have!”
She wasn’t dying, was she? This all seemed extreme for the sister that I knew, but then a lot of things changed, and apparently those changes weren’t restricted to my little corner of the world. I appreciated the sentiment she shared, but it didn’t feel earned. Her emotions flowed for a sibling that I wasn’t, and, frankly, she never existed. Before I could even allude to this, she dropped a snippet of her life together with Beatrice. The weirdest thing was that it felt vaguely familiar. It was that long trip in her uncomfortable car that I had to adapt to. All the same singing occurred. All the same aches followed. She touched upon that summer when we went around to so many different colleges. It was a precious memory.
The recollection had the tone and tint of female siblings, but it wasn’t all girl stuff. She appreciated me as a person, and her account of the things I said and did as Bea wasn’t massively divergent from my memories. Lisha likely would’ve taught me about all the necessary birds and the bees when it came to caring for myself instead of the truncated session with Norah, but those narrow moments didn’t define Beatrice and Lisha.
We had the same sort of fun together. We appreciated one another, and I didn’t have to invent or learn an entire life. Somehow, Beatrice‘s life was my life with just a few minimal tweaks and twists. More than anything else, that prospect utterly melted my brain. With just relatively minor alterations, Taylor and Beatrice were basically the same person. I knew my roommates expressed similar reactions, but this was something else entirely.
Holy fucking shit, I was a girl… and my brain didn’t even need to be warped or rewritten. Not that I was quite ready to abandon the prospect of doing the impossible with being Beatrice without losing myself in pink light.
But the notion that we were practically the same in remarkably extensive ways blew my comprehension. At the same time, this version of Lisha obviously wouldn’t have poured out her soul and her tears for a little brother. But what if she would’ve? What if this was building to this moment no matter whether I was Taylor or Beatrice? I had no idea what to do with that thought. The idea of a cryptic chasm separating me from my girl self and the full extent of every girl I knew actually being like the faith leap in that old Indiana Jones movie brought out a few tears of my own, even though it made no sense for them to be flowing right then.
Not only did I cry a little, but I managed to burst with rivers of tears to challenge what Rosalie had going last evening. My sister. Myself. My heart. Everything I thought I was just an observer of lived brightly and intimately within. None of this would’ve made sense to Lisha to fully unfurl, but I wrapped myself in her emotional explanation and shared my tears. A couple of random girls in the SUB glanced at me, but with warmth and curious concern. I expected that everyone had seen a lot of struggles and tears in the last day.
The rest of the phone conversation included more laughter than I was expecting, along with the realization that I had very little time until my class. Lisha let me go with a bouquet of the kindest words I could ever imagine her saying. They were words intended for Beatrice… But they were also for me. And I accepted them into my heart.
Recovering from all that in the bathroom was another tussling of emotions as I automatically went to the ladies' room even though the other one was marked similarly to the dormitory. The air felt special, even though nothing about it had changed. I made my way up the steps and past Humanities. The mood was rather like the first week when classes started, with so many people in unusual clothes wondering about their footsteps, their path ahead, and whether they should be walking at all, with wide eyes but also an invisible weight of exhaustion.
I took the stairs up to the third floor with careful but rhythmic steps. It didn’t stop my everything from announcing itself, but that personal metronome had come to feel familiar. My hips. My arms. My legs. My breasts. My polite fissure within that never really separated my being. I am and shall be me.