Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

47 - Kerpow!

Our first instinct was defiance.

Well, OK, technically our first instinct was to send Brie to snag a couple slices of birthday cake that we had seen in the kitchen and bring them back to our office. Just because we were livid didn't mean we were going to pass up red velvet from Porto's.

But once we had finished eating, and licked the last of the delicious cream cheese off of our plastic forks: Defiance!

"You know what? Fuck 'em!" Tammy said brazenly. "I'm fucking going!" She punctuated her sentence by throwing her paper plate into the trash.

"You fucking should go!" I heartily concurred. "And you should go wearing the girliest fucking gown you can fucking find!"

"Shit, yeah!" Tammy agreed, moving on to a new epithet. "So should you!"

"Holy shit! That's genius!"

"Matching gowns! Like the one that princess wears."

"Which princess?"

"You know. What's-her-face?"

"Snow White? Cinderella? Ariel? Jasmine?"

"No! She's the, you know..." Tammy growled in it's-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue frustration. "The one that reads."

"Oh, you mean Belle." One thing about having daughters, you know your Disney princesses.

"Yes! Thank you! We both show up in a bright fucking yellow Belle gown!" And we were back to fuck. The best curse word of them all.

"Evelyn's head will fucking explode! Lawyer brains all over the fucking wall!"

"That will be a motherfucking statement!

For a few intoxicating minutes, we giddily entertained the idea. We liked it for the subversiveness, but it also appealed to our sense of personal history. Oddly, this would not have been our first flamboyant protest; that happened in our final week of high school at the Senior Awards Banquet, when we learned that all of the boys were required to wear ties. Tom and I hated ties on principle, believing them them to be the clothing of corporate oppression, slowly strangling us to death in the name of conformity.

(OK, sure, we were a little full of ourselves. So what?)

We decided to do something about it. And when Tom and I showed up to the banquet hall we were wearing headbands with flashing lights and T-shirts with the word KERPOW! printed against a jagged cartoon background. I accessorized with dark plastic goggles, bumblebee antennae and plaid pants, while Tom had iridescent sunglasses, a cape, and mismatching sneakers.

We looked ridiculous, but... we were also wearing ties. Tom's was an electric orange, mine a sparkling purple. And since we had followed their odious rules, they had no basis to complain, did they?

We walked in with an imperious air, practically daring the administration to do something about us. As a cause, it was rather trivial and as an act of civil disobedience it was decidedly low-risk. We knew that the worst-case scenario was that they would make us leave or at least turn off the annoying flashing lights on our headbands. But pretty much nothing happened. The teachers shook their heads at our antics. Vice Principal Hudac just sighed and said, "You two." I wasn't sure how he meant that. You two, the delightful iconoclasts or You two, the pains in my ass. Probably some combination of both.

The reactions of our classmates ranged from amusement to indifference. The strongest reaction we got came from Dungeon Master Eric, who conspicuously sat as far away from us from as possible, as if his association with our ludicrous ensembles would somehow ruin his hard-won reputation for irrelevance.