Cassandra is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Rachel K. Zall.
Transcript:
Cassandra sometimes thinks about her childhood if she had known she was a girl earlier than age nineteen, despite being openly queer, bisexual, actively crossdressing, and with her own pair of falsies she’d picked up at a convention. She remembers her father rising her from sleep at five in the morning, hurrying out to the truck, and driving to the lake to get poles in the water before sunrise. She sat on the blue foam seat beside her dad’s in the rented motorboat, and felt the bow rise as the boat cut through the water’s surface, saturating the air. Soon, her father would stop and set down the anchor, choose a lure, and toss it through the water’s surface. He showed her how to throw a line, pull it taut, left, then right, and then to reel it in slowly, waiting for a hit, and then to jerk it quick. She hadn’t really wanted to even be there. She preferred fishing from the docks, where the boat didn’t continually face the wind, where she could set up music and dangle her toes in the water. Out here on the lake, she couldn’t tell what her father was trying to teach her. It was as if she had pulled him from his bed early and made him wait in a line with her at a convention center, puling him into multiple panels, the dealer’s room, and the art exhibits without ever telling him about the experience he should expect at a con. And what he would find interesting about it.
Cassandra remembered when her birthday parties grew smaller as she grew older. It eventually occurred to her that her parties weren’t going to get any larger as her friend group shrank and the kids formed cliques and Cassandra became one of the weird kids whose parties were only for her two friends, one of whom typically couldn’t make it, always being busy that day. Her mother commissioned cakes for her, and as the cakes got fancier, fewer people were there to appreciate them.
Cassandra distinctly recalled a seventh grade birthday when her friends stopped bringing presents and only brought themselves, which was enough, she had supposed. But the fact was she loved what birthdays had been and was disappointed at what they were becoming until her first year of living alone at community college, when she stopped having birthdays. Her own became a bit of trivia – yes, truly, today was her birthday. Would you look at that. It’s been a whole ass year. Whatever has become of the time.
It wasn’t unheard of to raise trans kids in the 90s and 2000s. But, Cassandra thinks, it would have been hard mode for her parents. If they had decided to honor her gender at all. If her father had understood that his fishing lessons were not going to reach her and her mother would have wondered how such a child could have been so happy while strange. They would have read no books about trans parentage or visited any online site about it. Cassandra had been the first to try and educate them. And then to flee when the education did not take. When the shouting replaced it. And the continuous questions about why everything had to be so difficult with her. She was such a lovely child who seemed so happy and yet so bored. She will not tell them of her first sexual experience, far too young, with another boy, also far too young, where she got to be the girl, for the first time, and loved it. Loved it so very much. And never got to be that way again for years, after many experiences and online forums and other rough times and ground her into someone without many friends, in a queer circle where she just wasn’t queer enough, but at least not in the middle of a lake with her father, learning to be someone she was not.
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