woMan Up (frerard)

Prologue

I remember the day it all started. It was back in fifth grade with all the boys on the playground at school. We were over in the corner of the basketball court where we had found a slug. Of course that's when one of the boys poured a ring of salt around it and everyone cheered and laughed. Except for me, of course, I screamed and cried. That's the first day my dad ever called me a pussy, because I didn't want to watch some poor, innocent slug die.

And then one day in high school, I think I was only fifteen or sixteen, I had gone into my parent's room to look for a jacket that must've gotten mixed up in my dad's clothes instead of mine. As I was in there I had glanced over at my mother's vanity and I could feel someone telling me to go to it. So I sat down and picked up a tube of red lipstick, slowly and carefully putting it onto my lips. It didn't look very nice, it was my first time putting on makeup. The edges were wavy from my shaky hand and a bit had gotten on my teeth. But when I looked in the mirror I saw someone so much more beautiful staring back at me and i remember i started crying.

My father found out and of course I never heard the end of it. So when I was seventeen I got my first tattoo, my dad by my side because I needed a parent due to my age. It was terrifying but I forced myself not to cry, I couldn't cry in front of him. I remember him patting me on the back and telling me I was finally becoming a real man. I think that's what hurt the most.

And then...well, then there's mother died. She had gotten into a car accident and died in the hospital after we said our goodbyes. I remember that day vividly, it was only a week after I got my first tattoo. I remember watching my mother die, I watched her smile and tell me she loved me before she closed her eyes and took her last breath. When we left the hospital ten minutes later my father called me a little bitch for crying. 'I thought that tattoo would have toughened you up into a real man' he had said.

And then came the day when I eventually had to go through her stuff to clean up her room. My hand wrapped around the small glass bottle of nail polish. Flirtatious Red. I chuckled softly at the name. This was my mom's favorite, I would always watch her paint her nails with this color and when I was little she would even sometimes paint my nails too. I opened it up, carefully painting my left pinky finger. I smiled at the sight of it and even dared to paint the rest of my nails too, which caused for me to get a hell of a beating.

Something was wrong with me, I knew that ever since I was younger. I used to wear my mom's pearls and heels and walk around the house. I used to love pink. There was always something wrong with me and my dad knew it. He would push me away from any of the girl things and stick me in front of some monster trucks and a pile of mud. He always said I acted like a girl and that it was awful. It even got to the point where even when I showed any interest in a girls thing he would hit me. It got to the point where I was terrified of him and I knew what I had to do.

I had to man up.