Porcelain

Chapter 23

Dally didn't know what to think, as he did a lot of the time now. It had started out as any other fight that he would have with the gang, or with any other Greaser to kick off some stress, but it didn't really feel like it ended that way.

She was starting to look more like a girl, her hair was growing longer, her face a little more rounded and her body less skeletal, but she still dressed and moved like a guy. He wasn't sure how he felt about the tension there, or how he was really supposed to feel about it.

He used to hate her, then she was his friend, he supposed. No, he was. Babydoll was his friend. Babydoll was a cocky asshole, with an unknown past and a personality that filled the room, even if it didn't make the room any brighter. Estelle, on the other hand, was different. Even though it was her true self, it felt like this was her forced personality. Fake, in a way, trying too hard to be what she thought a girl should be.

Why did he suddenly care about the girl, the one who had dragged him away from everything he knew, but was still somehow following him?

Never mind that, that wasn't the problem right now. She looked enough like a girl now that he, or more accurately, his body, reacted like that. Actually, if she wasn't still dressed like a Greaser boy, she'd actually be pretty hot. If she wore some of those tight jeans Sylvia always wore or a low cut top...

Well, she still didn't have much going for her there, but at the rate she was going it wasn't going to be like that forever.

He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. He really didn't need to be thinking about the person he literally lived with like that. She might go on her spiel of how she wasn't afraid to love him or whatever, but she'd learn. It didn't matter what she had done, or that she'd been to jail too. In Dally's mind, at the end of the day, Estelle was just another naïve little girl who didn't realize what she'd gotten herself into.

But at least it was something to think about. Something other than the mind numbing monotony living out in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas. Something other than.. nope. Anything but that. He couldn't think about it.

He was torn out of his thoughts with a loud crashing noise, the sound of breaking glass crashing to the floor.

_____
Estelle stared in the mirror at herself in horror. She had never, not once in her entire seventeen years of life, been truly happy with her body. There had been times when she hadn't been upset with her body, and that was about as good as it got.

She had been content with her body for a while, she liked her androgynous build, lean and tall with muscle in her arms, legs, and core. She didn't have any features that specifically defined her as a girl or a boy, and she liked it that way.

But now, her face was filling out. She never had a sharp cutting jawline, but her face was now rounded out with a feminine softness. Her once angular and lean frame was now softened with fat rounding out her hips and breasts. She looked... Like a girl. It wasn't her.

When did this even happen? It had been just a few weeks since That Week, and she'd even lost weight then.

She wanted to scream. The face in the mirror wasn't hers. Hers. She didn't feel like a girl, but she wasn't a boy either! But then why was a girl staring back at her? And her name. Babydoll was always her. It fit. Her big blue eyes always made her face cute, but babydolls weren't really girls or boys. They were just dolls. Toys. Fake.

She sighed. Fake. That's what she was, and now that her apparent "real" self was staring back at her, she couldn't handle the truth. It all felt like a cruel metaphor. But the name Estelle, it was so girly. So feminine. So wrong, for the person she wanted so badly to be.

In a fit of frustration, she slammed both of her hands into the mirror, shattering it. She heard the glass shatter into millions of pieces, falling to the ground. As they fell, light reflected around the room.

Time seemed irrelevant as she stood there. Nothing mattered, because in that moment to her there was nothing. Who was she? She'd always wondered, but she'd never had an answer.

_____

Dally got up and went into the house and looked around each room he walked in, gradually making his way to the back of the house, to the main bathroom.

He was met with the sight of Estelle sitting on the floor staring into nothingness, with shattered bits of mirror surrounding her on the floor.

He paused. Looking around, it looked like she had gone in with the intention of showering or something, but had gotten sidetracked, presumably by her reflection.

It made sense, she had lived so long as a boy, and now she looked like a girl. It would be disturbing.

"Uh, hey," he said, trying to catch her attention. "You okay?"

She didn't respond. She didn't appear to have heard him at all.

He walked over to her, careful not to step in the broken glass, and shook her shoulder. He tried to be gentle, but that just wasn't a word in Dally Winston's vocabulary.

"Hey. What's wrong?" He asked, doing his best to sound genuine and not irritated.

She snapped back to attention, blinking her head and turning to face him after looking around, getting her bearings.

She forced a smile. "I'm okay. I lashed out and broke the mirror, I'll clean it up."

Dally sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Well, first of all, your hands are cut and they're bleeding, it looks like you might have glass stuck in them too. So take care of that first."

She looked down, only then realizing that she was bleeding.

Dally sighed again. "Have you never been in a fight before? Come here, you dumbass, let's get you cleaned up."