Accurate Alterations

Prologue

You're not sure when this started.

Maybe the answer lay in the depths of your fourth grade year as you repeatedly had to remind yourself that you were female. That you were not male and could not join the boys in their playing, where they taunted girls every time they got closer and reprimanded them, saying they could not play soccer because they were girls. Maybe it was a little later, with your friends John Egbert and Terezi Pyrope, where you found yourself staring at John and his masculine features and thinking, That is what I want.

Or it might have been much, much earlier than you thought. It might have been that day in first grade, when the teacher ordered the students to line up in a boy's line and a girl's line, and there had been that moment. That moment that had stayed imprinted in your brain for the rest of your life, the moment you still think back on to this day. That moment you stood in your classroom as your classmates filed in line and for a moment you wondered which line you belonged to. You didn't know which group of students to join, the ones with sharper features or the ones with longer hair. It was only when your teacher told you to get into line did you take that life-altering step in the direction of the boy's line.

But then you spun around and headed to your correct line; The girl's line. The line you were supposed to be in. You were not supposed to be in the boy's line. You were supposed to be in the girl's line. You did not belong in the boy's line.

Or did you?

It is a complex that has haunted you for years, something you still furrow your brows over, and something that still gets you in a high-strung rage every now and then. You don't know who you have to blame your dangerously short temper on, but maybe you could blame it on Dave Strider. Maybe you could, maybe you couldn't. Maybe it was a family thing. But if it was, where was this trait in his older brother Kankri?

But if you could blame Dave Strider, what would you be blaming him for? For existing? For attempting to create a friendship? It was bad enough he seemed to be trying to steal John and Terezi from you. But was Dave Strider really the source of your anger?

Yes and no. That was the best answer you could supply yourself with. There are still moments when you doubt yourself, when you believe once again that you are to blame, but once again you repeat that Dave is to blame, when you know that this is a disgusting, absolute, utter lie. But you guess you have always been a liar.

But back to how you never knew how this started.

You guess what is once again lie, because you know exactly when this happened. Exactly how it started. How you felt when all the other girls were playing with Barbie dolls and fake make-up, and all you could do was stare at the boys playing soccer. All you could do was shrivel your nose up at the skirts you had to wear and how long you had to have your hair. Concerned mothers questioned your father, in which he replied that you were simply going through a tomboy phase, and that you would grow out of it quickly.

You wish it was like that. But back then, yes, even back then, a four-year-old you knew much better.