Hi, I'm James Miller. Yes, I'm a girl. Yes, I look like a boy. No, I'm not a tomboy. But mom wants it that way. I've been homeschooled all my life, except half a year in freshman year when I was bullied like crazy. My parents are the type of parents who controls their kids' life and will not let them do what they like. Nevertheless, I love my mom and dad, I do. My parents had been unable to have a child for years since they married and eventually they managed. They wanted a boy more than anything and were so strung up with that idea that they almost had me aborted when they found out it was a girl. Then later, a few months after I was born, they put me up for adoption. Not only because I wasn't a boy but because I was one ugly child! Which is the reason nobody wanted me when I was up for adoption. So eventually they settled with the idea, on one condition...
They treated me like a boy, dressed me like a boy and basically made me be a boy. Only because that was all they wanted and considering my father was a wealthy businessman who owned more than 100 companies worldwide, they wanted a boy to carry on after he retired. But obviously girls are never good enough for jobs like these, their only purpose in life is to clean, cook, basically to stay at home. Note the sarcasm. So here I was, constantly being mocked for being a girl/boy, I don't even know myself. For 17 years I've been acting like a boy and I was so used to it that I stopped telling people I was a girl, I even almost convinced myself that I was a boy.
I really wanted to start school now that I was almost 18. I couldn't stand being at home for any longer. Father told me that it was fine when I asked him, but my mother however, had completely different ideas. She yelled at me until I could barely stand and I ended up in the corner of my room, shivering with tears. My room was - to say the least - trashed. I had so much anger boiled up inside me something had to be done so I stormed up the stairs, into my room and proceded to throw ornaments around my room. Football and soccer trophies lay on the floor, most of them broken and shattered, a bookcase was sprawled across the floor also, fallen books littered the place, their spines broken and in some cases, pages missing and torn. I stared at the picture frame which had a crack right on a girl's face. It resembled a spider web the way the small whole had cracks erupting from it this way and that. The sight of it made my blood boil even more. Why her? She was the best thing that ever happened to me. But then she left. She stopped coming to school suddenly when we were in fifth grade. Then she even stopped coming to my house. Then one day she just disappeared. Like she was wiped off the face of the earth. And in some ways she was, but no one had the sense to tell me, her best friend, that she had had leukemia since first grade, so I ended up just guessing myself. A stab in the dark which happend to be the correct one.
I met her in kindergarden when I didn't have a clue about the boy/girl thing. I just saw myself as a boyish girl and I was happy with it. At the time we were all friends, kids didn't judge each other, they thought the same as me; I was just a boyish girl. But that changed as soon as I turned 13 when I started developing more. I got breasts - quite large ones in fact which were inherited from mother who was infuriated - curves and my hair started to grow quicker into thick dark waves. But it only managed to reach shoulder length before mother cut it all off so I resembled a boy again. She banned me from buying or wearing any type of make up or girly clothing. Just jeans, shorts and plain tops with sneakers. I hated it until I got accustomed to it. But I kept making the same mistake. Whenever someone asked I would still tell them I was a girl, no matter how many times mother and father told me not to, not even teachers. That made people hate me. They thought I was some kind of weird freak who didn't know my own sexuality. Everyone always gave me strange or disgusted glances. Some even had the audacity to ask if I was a lesbian! When I was 13! Eventually my parents took me out of school after I'd come home crying almost every night.
So now, back to present, I was begging my parents to let me go to school for the second time. I was getting sick of the sight of my own home. "James! You should have had enough experience to know that no one will fall for it! They will see right through you like every single other time! They will hate you! You will wish you were actually a boy, that way everyone - including you - will be happy!" She shouted and those words stung. But I was used to things like this. Crying wasn't natural anymore. I just sent her an icy glare and balled my hands into fists. It used to make me feel upset and worthless but now all I ever felt around the woman was anger. And pure hatred. Even though that was exactly what I was feeling at this moment in time, I knew that deep inside I still loved her. I know it sounds absurd and I keep willing myself not to but I can't. This beast standing before me is the woman who made the decision to keep me even though I wasn't the perfect child. She still raised me in the right way and never layed a finger on me. She wasn't that cruel.
