“If you’re not sure, then it hasn’t happened yet. You’re still in flux.”
In flux—that’s how I felt. She had helped me understand what I was feeling, as I knew she would.
She noticed my laptop and I explained that I was going to type up what I’d written in my notebook, but I didn’t mention the possibility of writing a book. That idea was too new to be shared. She told me about her day raising funds for her clinic. She planned to run the New York clinic for a few years, then return to Iran to open one there. I hated the prospect of her leaving.
Sana talked about the teen girls she was going to help at the clinic. Much of what she was saying about the girls sounded familiar to me.
“I feel a kinship with girls, don’t you?” she said.
I hadn’t thought about my job like that. I’d seen my girls as a burden. Sometimes I had resented them, perhaps because I had been in a state of suspended adolescence myself.
“I was burned at thirteen, around the time that puberty set in,” Sana said. “I had always been a tomboy—is that what you call it? My friends and I were starting our periods and growing breasts—you know the awkwardness of that age—and here this horrible thing happened to me at the same time. I’ve always connected the two in my mind: being scarred and becoming a woman, both traumatic processes in their own way. An attack on my sense of self.”
The trauma of becoming a woman—that’s what all those Dear Kitty letters had been about at their core. I had responded to the girls’ fears and tried to soothe them, but I had never felt like a woman myself.
Sana returned to Calliope House for a meeting, but I chose to stay behind. Thanks to our conversation, I decided to read through the Dear Kitty messages that remained in my inbox before deleting them. I ordered a sandwich and soup, and opened one at random:
From: dolcevita95
To: DaisyChain
Subject: **confidential**
Dear Kitty,
I have really small breasts. They aren’t even really breasts. I mean, I have nipples, two pink buds, but there is virtually nothing underneath them. I might as well be a boy. My grandmother is giving me $5,000 when I graduate from high school in June. I want to study art history at Stanwyck College next year, so I plan to take the $5,000 and go to Italy in the summer to look at art. But maybe with the money I could get breast implants instead. What do you think? I know I seem shallow, but even though I’m smart, I think having bigger breasts would make me feel more normal.
Love,
Alexis J. in L.A.
How had I done this job for three whole years? If I’d printed out all my responses, they would have been as thick as a pile of books—books that I had written, but not in my own voice.
I stared at Alexis’s message on my screen, my finger hovering over the delete key, but obliterating her didn’t seem like the right thing to do. I knew how I would have responded to her if I’d still been working for Kitty: “You don’t need breast implants, Alexis! You’re beautiful the way you are!” Kitty insisted that I use that last line as much as possible. I told her it wouldn’t ring true, since she had never seen the girls who were writing, but Kitty had said that was irrelevant. All girls are beautiful, she liked to say, but she only featured the usual models in the magazine.
I decided to respond to Alexis from my personal email account:
From: PlumK
To: dolcevita95
Subject: Re: **confidential**
Dear Alexis J.,