Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
JUDE GRANGER, 2005 ONE MONTH BEFORE
A girl can be everything, and yet when the end of the day comes, she will still be nothing.
Jude was a regal name, something elegant, something that screamed that she was from a family that never bowed down to others. It was what her parents had wanted — a masculine name that indicated an heir to their throne of money, something that told all their silly little friends that they were the best, with the perfect child, their perfect son with a perfect name. Their first child, a boy — nine months of pregnancy waiting for a healthy male heir to pop out from down under there.
So it can be only imagined to how much of a surprise it was when, after nine months of hopelessly and anxiously waiting, out popped a wailing little girl, already squealing and so very clearly not the son that either wanted.
Sometimes Jude likes to imagine the look on her father's face when he had found out that she was a girl — she can only imagine it to be one of shock. There was no way he would have ever come into the birthing suite they had rented with her mother. Jude was sure without a doubt that he had been chomping down on a cigar with the rest of his friends, laughing away with a bottle of scotch while his wife was in the undeniably painful process of labor for fifteen hours. It never caused Jude more joy than to know that at some point in her life, she had caused her father utmost grievance — it made her day, even.
They, her parents, had named her Jude despite all plans shoving towards the fact that she was not one. For the first few years, maybe they even tried to ignore it — Jude had slightly hazy memories of warm sunlights as he father tossed a foam football at her, and fire trucks and police car models zooming around the living room, and hockey games on television, baseball scores in the news, but all Jude wanted to do was play with the pretty barbies her aunt Lottie had bought for her. Dress them up, comb their hair, deface them in an attempt to use her mother's makeup on them — Jude didn't want the footballs or the games or the toy cars, she wanted to make something pretty, make something lasting.
