Fool Me Once

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At eleven-years-old, Zoe is fed up with being played a fool by her fraternal twin Zack. Not only did Zack force her to share a womb, but he's aways arranged for her to be blamed for his lifelong efforts to become a girl like her. An unusual story, told from a sister's perspective, with an unusual twist. After all, this is a DeWinter tale. Thanks to Princess Chelsea and Geoff for enthusiasm and editing.

Fool me Once
By
Dawn DeWinter

“My Life” by Zoá« Enderson —

For as long as I can remember I’ve been blamed for Zack’s gender confusion. It goes back to the womb, one that we shared as fraternal twins. I swear little brother planned it that way — that he’d always be able to hide behind his sister’s skirts. My metaforic skirts, of course, as I didn’t immediately take to wearing skirts; I was pretty much a practicing nudist in the womb.

I swear that Zack hid behind me during the first ultrasound. He was able to do this for half an hour (like a squirrel hiding behind a tree), shifting about as needed to hide his willy from the prying eyes of my mom and her guynecrologist. People claim that no one can remember anything from their time in the womb, but I vividly recall my mom’s reaction that day. She blamed me! She kept accusing me of being a camera hog.

Yet I realize now that Zack was in charge that day, like he’s always been. I think he was trying to hide his wee thingee in the hope that he could fool people into believing he was a girl. Well, it didn’t work — after a lot of cursing and swearing (mostly at me) over the course of an hour, Zack finally made one false move during the second ultrasound, and was pronouned a male.

He could hide behind me for almost ninety minutes because I was — I am proud to say — the larger fetus. This fact, as well as my exit first from the womb, confirms that I was conceived first. So mom’s womb should have been mine alone! I was there first! By all rights Zack should have found himself another womb to inhabit. He had no right, no right at all, to barge into my life when I was still a defenseless blob of plasma.

For a long time I couldn’t figure out why Zack insisted on sharing my life practically from ception. After all, he’s a paid a “heavy” price for giving me a head start, a price that started off as a kilo’s difference in our birth weights, and has progressed to 22 pounds and 3 inches now.

Zack’s so puny that he’s still shorter than every girl in his class. But that serves him right, doesn’t it? After all, no one invited him to crash the prenatal party. So why was he willing to go through life as the runt of the litter? Because he needed a handy scapegoat, and I’ve been literally close at hand during his entire scheming, conniving life.

Well, I’ve had enough: tomorrow on our eleventh birthday, I’m going to make everyone admit the truth about Zack — that’s he’s been turning into a girl, thru no fault of mine.

I’ve been accused of trying to turn Zack into a girl almost from the moment that he finally made an appearance in the birthing room. I’ll get to that legation in a moment, but first let me record here the strange circumstances of his birth.

As I was already lying on a blanket, I got a good, close-up view of the entire process — or so I recollect. Zack was a breech birth — feet first — and an obstretchian doctor would probably have done a scissorian on mom except that Zack was so puny that the midwife said she’d have no problem pulling him quickly through the birth channel.

And yet, as tiny as he was, he got stuck just as his thighs came into full view. He was suffocating and might have died if the midwife hadn’t been a bodybuilder like the Terminator in her spare time. She was finally able to pull Zack’s private parts into full sight, and from then he slid out as easily as a greased, anal thermometer.

That shouldn’t have been the case, his shoulders and head being wider than his pelvis, but I think I know what happened that day: Zack didn’t want anyone to see his penis because then they’d know he was a boy. He finally relaxed enough to be born when he realized that the gig was up (he was born with a tiny hard-on, to my utter disgust).

I admit I didn’t get any blame for Zack’s tardy birth. After all, no one then realized that he was holding on for dear life to his mother’s inners because he didn’t want his body to betray his innate femninity. Even me, I didn’t figure it out until this week that he was ashamed even than of having a willy.

But blame was soon to come. After washing Zack, the midwife temporarily put him on my blanket — already I felt crowded! — in order to collect both of us for simoltain … for showing us at the same time to our mom. You wouldn’t believe what happened when the midwife looked away for a second, leaving Zack and me alone together for the first time outside mom’s womb.

It took but an instant, but Zack’s penis somehow found its way into my mouth — and this despite the fact that the midwife swore she lay us head to head. If she’s right, then one of us must have made a superhuman, highly probable effort to reverse position — and it sure wasn’t me. I find the idea of oral sex disgusting. Maybe it’s because I associalize it with incest.

Zack violated me that day, didn’t he?

Why did he do it? Well, the midwife concluded that I was trying to turn Zack into a girl by biting off his ball sack. I was less than half-an-hour old and was already being accused of being — the midwife actually used these words — of being “a castrating bitch”. She said it lightly, as tho it was a joke, but I could see that my mother half-believed her. Frowning, her forehead all crunched up, my mom sighed something about “sibling rivalry starting early” in her family.

Zack had set me up. I know now that he wanted me to bite his balls off so that our folks would have to raise him as a girl. But he was still pretty clueless; he didn’t know I didn’t have any teeth yet. There was no way I was going to gum him into a sex change. Even so, the myth had been born, as Zack surely intended, that I was so anxious to have an identical twin that I set out from hour one to transform him into her.

I also got blamed for switching our blankets. Whenever we were on display, either in a double stroller or a crib, our parents wrapped me in a pink blanket, Zack, in a blue one. They were fairly traditional that way: they wanted people to react to us in the priest-scribed way. Me they were supposed to find pretty, my pudgy little fingers “delicate” and “dextrose”, perfect for sewing, ironing or assembling small machines.

Zack’s blue blanket, on the other hand, was supposed to alert people to the fact that he was “handsome”, rather than pretty, and that his pudgy little fingers were “strong” enough for making a fist, wielding a bat or holding onto a job. The compliments went wry, however, if I ended up in the blue blanket and Zack, in the pink.

And this happened far too often for my liking (and sighkological development) because Zack used his “strong” fingers to switch our blankets when no one was looking. It was the same with our bonnets, altho he wasn’t able to re-tie their bows. Despite being less than a year old, he knew how to make me look like the culprit. Repeatedly I was admonished — by parents, kindling and strangers alike — to stop messing with my little brother’s gender identity.

Yet what about mine? By the age of nine months, I was convinced (thanks to Zack’s slide of hand) that most folks thought I looked more like a boy than he did. It’s no wonder that I’ve never given much attention to my appearance. With Zack around, if I tried too hard to show off my femninity, there was always a risk that people would think that I was the Enderson boy whom the whole neighborhood was talking about: the one who thought he was a girl.

Thanks to Zack, I now need orthodental work. My folks blame me for sucking my thumb for years, that is when they are not blaming me for embarassing them by refusing to leave home when I was two (or was it three?) without trailing my security blanket behind me. It wasn’t my fault that Zack, who had the same “bad” habits, would sneak up from behind to switch blankets — as always, his blue for my pink.

Eventually — I recollect that it was a dark and stormy night — my mother got fed up with the remarks she was hearing at the mall. I recall that I was wearing my first skirt; it was pink and the blanket trailing behind it was, thanks to Zack, blue.

A member of mom’s bridge club actually congratulated me for having the guts to appear in public “looking like a girl”, and mom for having the “wisdom and maturity” to allow it.

Well that did it! My mom gave Zack and me an ultimatum: either we gave up our security blankets or we’d have to dress identically from then on, as tho we were identical twins. As we clung tightly to our “blankies”, we dressed exactly alike from then on.

Naturally, mom looked for our clothes in the boys’ department (even our undies), for dad went balls-istic whenever our threads made Zack look at all girlish. (For some reason, it was all right if I looked boyish! No wonder I have no friends!)

Of course, Zack found a way to sneak girls’ wear — usually a nightie or panties but sometimes a flowery tee or shorts that barely covered our bottoms — into the shopping cart. As Mom rarely thought of checking the bottom of the cart for Zack’s additions, she’d learn for the first time that she was buying a halter top for both of us kids when the cashier absent-mindedly lifted them from the cart.

Mom realized that most of the salesclerks at her favorite discount store — being temps, teens and tongue-tied recent immigrants — wouldn’t give a second thought to her purchases unless she got flustered or tried to take something back. So she generally let everything go through (even the flowery bikini bathing suits, since we could at age five both get by with wearing only the bottom half).

Frugal and practical, she made us wear everything that came home from the store, but neither mom nor dad would let us leave our house or backyard dressed like girls. So, if I wanted to look feminine, I had to “persuade” Zack to stay home with me and dress in the pink tee and shorts that he’d chosen for purchase.

If mom or dad was watching, Zack would always make a big fuss, demanding a toy from me, just so they’d conclude that I was trying to femnize my brother. That way our parents wouldn’t suspect that Zack was determined to become a girl.

Just to bug me, Zack would tell me that he’d secretly changed into pink panties, leaving me the only one wearing tighty whiteys. At seven he became the first of us to wear a bra, after he stole a quadruple-A from the Santanas’ clothesline. Do you have any idea of how humiliateing that was for a girl — to see her twin brother in a bra before she even owned one herself?

I was, naturally given my bad luck, caught when I tried to steal a bra like my brother’s from the Santana’s clothesline. (I suspect that Zack ratted on me so that he could continue to look more femnine than me, his very own sister!) The Santanas, assuming that I had pinched both bras, told my parents that I should pay for them out of my allowance; my folks redily agreed, which ment, in effect, that I was the one who paid for my brother’s first bra.

My dad said that Maria, the victimized Santana, should claim two of my possessions, so that I’d learn what it was like to lose something that I cherished. The little bitch took my two skirts. From then on Zack was allowed to wear a skirt around the house or in our backyard whenever he “put it on to remind me” never to steal again.

Thanks to Maria, a truly vengeful minx, the Santanas asked our parents to let Zack wear a skirt when we kids came around to play so that “I wouldn’t soon forget the golden rule”. To rub this message into my mind like salt into a wound, the Santanas (to our parents’ amusement) even gave an especially frilly skirt to Zack for his eighth birthday.

As for my present, the Santanas forgave the remainder of the money I owed for the two bras. They forgave, but my parents wouldn’t do the same: I had to pay every last penny for Maria’s overpriced strips of white cotton. My money went towards buying gray cargo pants that I was to wear whenever Zack wore one of his three skirts so I’d remember that “stealing is wrong”.

Eventually mom took pity on me for not owning a single skirt, but dad refused to let her buy me one — even after I said that it was all right with me if Zack got the exact same skirt (which would be the brat’s fourth) so that we could look like identical twins.

But mom wore dad down, and they compromised on a blue dress for both me and Zack (so that I’d still associate skirts with misbehaving). At Zack’s insistence — my how he whined that day! — neither of us could wear the dress outside the house, not even in our backyard. Dad was pleased to see that Zack was anxious to protect his masculine image.

The very next day, however, Zack secretly invited Maria over to see us two kids in our new dresses. We were even wearing lipstick at the time, tho mine had been deliberately smeared by Zack to make it seem that I had put it on as a joke, like boys sometimes do. His was immaculate, and his eye lashes (unlike mine) even had a touch of maskara, which was the norm for us ever since Zack caught me two months ago with a “borrowed” tube of mom’s lipstick.

He had struck a tough deal that day: in exchange for not squealing on me, I not only had to teach him how to make up his face like a “fashion model” (as tho I knew how to do that at eight and a half!) but also to agree that he’d always be the one who wore the most (and most feminine) makeup.

I felt I had no choice but to accept Zack’s terms, for the lipstick would make me a three-time thief in my parents’ eyes; naturally I feared being sent upstate — either to a boot camp for “bad kids” or to live with my fearsome Aunt Maud.

And so it came to pass that I looked like a clown and Zack like a vamp when Maria got to see both of us for the first time in a dress. The vixen actually said that Zack had the better-looking legs. Then, while my mom was doing the laundry down in the basement, Maria conspired with Zack to blame me for inviting Maria over to the house so that she could “catch” Zack in a dress.

Mom was in no mood for childishness after finding two bras and more girls’ panties than boys’ undies in the wash, even tho the latter were supposed to be everyday wear for both us kids. The first time this had happened, Zack had successfully blamed me, saying that I used my size advantage to force him into panties the moment mom’s back was turned.

This was an outright lie since Zack was always the one who suggested we change into panties and put on a bra; naturally, as the only girl, I readily agreed. Too readily perhaps, for he contrived on several occasions to allow mom to see me already changed into panties, with Zack, still in his Y-fronts and holding the same panties as mine with his fingertips extensioned as far away from his body as possible, as tho he was trying to ward off a suck-a-boys, which I’m told is a female demon. Mom bought the act.

Whenever she found too many panties (or even worse, the bras) in the wash, mom withdrew one of my privileges. After a while, Zack actually had to bribe me to wear female underclothes, like he was the genuine girl and I was the crossdressing boy.

I became ever more confused about my own gender identity as a result of Zack’s insinuations and mom’s punishments. It also didn’t help that we both dressed like boys when we went to school or the mall.

Almost everyone, including my classmates, treated me like a boy (I was, after all, still built like a skinny, hipless boy at age nine). The exceptions — my relatives and teachers — called me a “tomboy”. I was going through a phase, they held, that would likely end as soon the extragen kicked in. Soon enough I was looking forward to my first blossoming as a woman, yet also fearful that my parents would still insist on my dressing the same as Zack, in which case I’d look like a dike or worse.

I’ve sort of got ahead of myself. I forgot to write down how my mom reacted to finding Zack and me wearing a dress in front of Maria. When she heard from the conspirators that I’d been responsible for “outing” Zack, I not only was told to change out of my dress into boys’ jeans, sneakers and a hockey jersey (that dad had bought for us both in order to “butch” Zack up) but she actually gave my dress to Maria to wear for the rest of the day and then to take home with her.

From then on the dress was like the skirts — Zack could wear it around the house when ever he could persuade either our mom or dad (one was enough) that I “needed to be taught a lesson”.

Since Zack looked really weird wearing a dress with his sneakers, dad even agreed to let mom buy blue patent-leather, strapped shoes with two-inch heels for Zack to wear with his blue dress. When Zack complained of blisters on his feet, he and I got some girls’ socks to wear. You knew they were for girls because they were knee-highs and had several different stripes, some of them purple or lavender, others baby blue or pink.

I felt a lot more femnine when we got to wear them, even tho Zack, wearing either a skirt or dress, alone could show his off. Whenever he dressed like that, I was of course forced to wear boys’ jeans. They didn’t reveal much.

As Zack had longer, more luxuriant hair than me (he’d mess with mine with nail scissors when I was sleeping so that mom would have no choice but to order a trim to improve its appearance), he looked very femnine when he wore his dress, a lot more femnine than I did in my 501 Levis. But neither dad nor mom would comment negatively on his appearance, unless Zack had forgotten to wash his hands or brush his hair for dinner.

Me, they were constantly ragging on, saying that I wasn’t trying hard enough to look like the girl I was. My nails were a special bone of tension, for I was always nibbling on them. (You would too if you were a nine-year-old girl who everyone thought to be either a boy or a wannabe boy.) So my mom started covering all twenty of my nails with a vile-tasting clear polish; to preserve the myth of the identical twins, and because Zack’s nails were so long and tapered that they were in danger of breaking, she polished his too.

While she bought several different colors for both of us, I was told that I couldn’t wear anything but the clear enamel until my nails had grown as long as Zack’s, which he made sure never happened (he was a whiz with nail scissors).

However, less anyone think that he actually enjoyed wearing nail polish, Zack grandly refused to wear a noticeable color unless he was going to be wearing a skirt or dress (thanks to hand-me-downs from Maria, he soon had four of the latter). Then he “consented” to a bright hue to remind me that it was almost as wrong to be a nail-biter as it was to be a longgeray thief. He pretended that he hated looking like a girl.

For our tenth birthdays, I — and therefor Zack — finally got some jewelry to wear. As I was judged to be too careless about hygene for pierced ears, I got clip-ons while Zack got the real deal. Since we both still were expected to dress identically, both of us received ruby “studs” and some big hoops.

As my faxsimiles of his studs kept falling off and getting lost, in less than six weeks Zack alone had any earrings to wear. Mom and dad said it served me right. They did promise, however, to get my ears pierced as a Christmas present if I could prove for six months that I could regularly clean behind my ears.

I envied Zack his earrings (which he claimed he had no choice but to wear full-time in order to keep the holes from closing), as well as his ruby pendant. True, we’d received identical pendants on our tenth birthdays, but mine never looked like Zack’s did when he wore the low-cut dress that he’d herited from Maria. That became his favorite outfit — and I think mom’s as well — for Sunday dinners.

Two weeks ago I decided on a showdown with my mom. If that didn’t work, I was going to try my father. Leastwise, that was the threat I implied to mom. Why, I asked, do you let Zack wear a dress or a skirt when I can’t? And why is he allowed to wear them not only here, but also at Maria Santana’s as well as the houses of her five “best” girlfriends?

Why do I have to go around looking like a boy? It’s that your idea or Zack’s? Why doesn’t it bother you that Zack goes around looking like a drag queen, while your daughter is forced to dress like a beau dike? I’m an eleven-year-old girl; don’t you think it high time for me to stop dressing like my male twin?

Mom didn’t have a sensible answer to any of my questions. How could she? For some reason, she’s been trying to change Zack into a girl and me into a …. Well, I don’t know exactly what she’s been planning for me. Sometimes, she seems to be conspiring to turn me into a boy — maybe to take Zack’s place — but most of the time I seem to be an after thought, expected to dress or to act in the way most likely to ease Zack’s femnization (or to get dad to buy into it).

When mom kept babbling something about “fate” and “destiny”, I knew that I had to confront dad. As a dude, it surely bugged him that his son was turning into a raving sissy and that his daughter looked like a wimpy boy.

Yet dad seemed even more stumped by my question than mom had been. He hemed and hawed, stutered and stamered, blushed and blubered. Gosh, guys are inarty but cutelate, aren’t they? Anyway, he couldn’t give me a good reason why it was Zack who’s been wearing the skirts and dresses, when it should be me, Zoá« Enderson.

Tomorrow’s our eleventh birthday party. Time for the showdown. I am planning the biggest tantrum of my life — of anyone’s life — if mom and dad don’t make use of the event to announce an end to dressing Zack and me like identical twins. They’d better also give me a dress and Zack some cargo pants (like I’ve been demanding for him) or ELSE!

Signed in blood-red polish,
Zoá«

“Now that you’ve read his “Zoe's Life Story” (for that’s what he calls it), do you understand now why Zack won’t be leaving here any time soon?” Dr. Schmookler, the hospital’s senior psychiatrist, asked. “I know that Zack’s only eleven-years-old, but he is, as you’ve read, seriously confused about his personal identity. Not only does he think he’s always been a maltreated girl named Zoá«, but he’s transposed his own identity onto his fraternal twin and sister, Chelsea.”

“Are you saying,” Zack’s father asked, “that Zack not only believes that he’s a girl named Zoá« but that he also believes that his sister Chelsea is actually Zack, a conniving crossdresser?”

“Precisely,” replied Dr. Schmookler. “So desperate has Zack always been to be a girl named Zoá« that he’s treated every concession you’ve made to his transgenderism as an insult, calculated to make him feel less like a girl than his ‘brother’. That’s Chelsea, though he calls her Zack.”

“Did we do the wrong thing,” Zack’s mother now asked, “when we first began to realize that Zack wanted to dress like his sister, maybe even wanted to become a girl himself? We hoped that he’d settle for wearing unisex clothes if Chelsea also did (and did she ever raise a stink about that!) and we hoped that he’d accept her moving onto a training bra, skirts and dresses if we told him that he could in theory do the same, if he behaved a bit better.”

Zack’s father added: “We thought it a great stroke of luck that the Santanas caught Zack stealing lingerie from their clothesline. That gave us the excuse we needed to dress him differently from Chelsea.”

“And his lack of lack of personal hygiene,” chimed in Zack’s mother, “made it possible for us to justify treating Chelsea differently when it came to earrings and nail polish. We also considered the Santanas the best possible sort of neighbors when they allowed us to pass off three of Chelsea’s new dresses as rethreads from Maria.”

“Yes,” mused Zack’s father, “even Maria helped. Smart beyond her years, she never once contradicted Zack’s claims to be the “real girl” in the Enderson family, even as she did her best to help Chelsea develop into a normal tween girl.”

Mrs. Enderson added: “It was Maria who first alerted me to Zack’s mental deterioration. I do wish Doug and I had acted sooner, before — you know — Zack cut off his sister’s ponytail and tried to tear out her earrings at their birthday dinner. I just know that she feels badly about her cursing, given Zack’s present condition.”

“Don’t fret, Mrs. Enderson,” said Dr. Schmookler, ending his extended silence. “I know a psychoanalyst who can help Chelsea deal with her feelings of guilt. It won’t take long — just a decade or two of weekly sessions, I can assure you. Zack is a tougher case. It will take some time for him even to agree to put clothes on, since he believes nudity Zoá«’s best proof of her biological femininity.”

“What about the flies?” asked Zack’s dad. “When will he stop saying that he’s so gentle and ladylike that he won’t kill the ones landing on his head?”

“If Zack turns out to be a vegan Jain, that will be the least of our problems,” replied Dr. Schmookler, who then added, “Anyway I swat them when Zack’s distracted, which is most of the time.”

“So what is the best possible outcome for Zack at this point?” asked his dad.

Dr. Schmookler was slow to reply. “I found it of great interest when you told me that it was Zack who hid his sexual organ during the first ultrasound and that it was Zack who was reluctant to be born with a penis in flagrante. I do find it difficult to believe, as do you, that Chelsea tried to castrate Zack on the birthing table. That was merely wishful thinking on Zack’s part. Anyway, given the deep-set memories that Zack has of being a girl from the moment of conception, there is no possibility of his emerging from this identity crisis as a normal, heterosexual male.”

“You mean?” the Endersons asked simultaneously.

“Yes, I mean that the best possible outcome is that Zack — and you — fully accept his transsexuality and that he comes to appreciate that Zoá« is Zack and Zack is Zoá«, and that Zoá«-Zack has always been a girl inside and a boy outside, and finally that ‘Z’ has always had a sister, a fraternal twin, named Chelsea.”

“Do you think that outcome at all likely?” asked Zoá«’s dad.

“Which will we end up — with one or with two healthy daughters?” asked the mother of Chelsea and Zoá«.

“With patience, luck and much love, I think it can be two,” said Dr. Schmookler, as he gripped the trembling hands of the parents of the two Enderson girls.

THE END

 © All rights reserved by the author (2010)

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Comments

My Apologies, Dawn

I errd and I admit it. I found the idea of fratenal twins Zoe and Chelsea to be sweet as the parents learn the truth.

    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine
    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine

Sweet Stanman

Thanks for the reminder, Stanman, that I inadvertently promised some graphics (I was thinking of a story I'm writing now). I've made the correction. Once you saved a story by telling me that the second half of it appeared in bold face.

Thanks as well for calling the story "sweet". I hadn't thought of it that way until now.

If I were an artist, I'd love to draw a pic of Zack hiding behind his sister in the womb during the ultrasound. If anyone can do such a thing (tastefully), I promise to add it to the heading where the story is pitched to readers (with due credit, natch).

Hugs,
Dawn

Dawn DeWinter

Hmmm confusing ...

... but a typical deWinter tale (or even tail). Now lets get this clear ... Zack is Zoe, or is that Chelsea? No, no, wait a minute Chelsea is Zack and Zoe is a girl who pretends to be a boy called ... err Zack? Glad I got that cleared up for me and everyone else and especially Mr & Mrs Enderson who really don't seem to have got themselves sorted out at all.

Hehee, I loved it and particularly the little scene in the womb with a view with Zack (or Chelsea, or Zoe) eyeing those scissors dubiously.

Glad it all got clarified in the end or I would remain confused.

Robi

Exactly!

Love the line about a decade of weekly sessions.

Great work, Dawn!

Hugs
Carla Ann

You go girl :D

This is AWESOME meow :D
I just realized this is a comedy when I saw the line, "It won’t take long – just a decade or two of weekly sessions" And ROFGed in my chair xD Only a decade? xDDDDDDDDDDDDD

I know who I am, I am me, and I like me ^^
Bisexual, transsexual, gamer girl, princess, furry that writes horror stories and proud ^^

I know who I am, I am me, and I like me ^^
Transgender, Gamer, Little, Princess, Therian and proud :D

Brilliant!

I kept thinking, "these parents are seriously bent," 'till the last section.

It's a bit reminiscent of the plot of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a pioneering horror film from 1920, in which most of the movie was from the point of the mad protagonist, then the point of view switched and the madness was revealed.

The More...

The more I think about it, the cleverer this story seems!

As I was reading, I was sympathizing with the narrator, and laughing at her misspellings, but mostly getting upset at the level of injustice she was receiving from her parents. I'm glad I kept reading to the end!

Clever, and profound, and a little bit spooky.

___________________
If a picture is worth 1000 words, this is at least part of my story.