( fic: opposition opposition )

[poetryslamming]

Title: Opposition Opposition
Length: 1741 words
Rating: Parental physical abuse, LGBTQ+ issues.
Summary: All she meets is opposition, opposition.
__________

“And then my car drives into your Barbie, Eva!”

“Alexa, don’t...”

“Now your Barbie has to go to the hospital. Gabi, your doll’s the doctor!”

“Alexa, that’s not...”

“Alexa, don’t ruin the fun for the other girls. Come on, we need to head home.”

“I’m not a girl, Dad, I’m a racecar driver!”

“Sure you are, Schatz.”

*

One of the older regulars down at Sapfo, short-haired and flat-chested like a man, but they didn’t respond to neither male nor female pronouns, got Alexa her first binder. It’s a gift, they’d said and instructed her in how to use it safely. Because we stick up for each other down here, right? That was the greatness, the beauty and the inherent safety of the bar that was more of a club that was more of a casual hang-out, everyone helped each other - the trips to Altstadt, the protest marches, the cookie baking and the cookie sales, they were just perks. What you returned for in the end was the solidarity. The community feeling.

Eventually, though, her dad found the binder at the bottom of her drawer.

It started out as a talk.

“First you keep going to that place, even though we’ve told you not to, you’re only fourteen, you’ve got no business down there.” He had poured coffee. They sat in the living room, on the couch, like completely normal people, sipping jet-black liquid from thin porcelain cups. Alexa didn’t look at him. Naturally, her mom wasn’t home. The binder lay on the table in a mess of white, microfibre fabric. It looked so inconspicuous. Innocent. She’d washed it just a couple of days ago.

“I’m not drinking or anything,” she protested.

“And now you’re actively hurting yourself, Alexa, what are you thinking? Do you know what this could do to your chest?” He put his cup down on its saucer, the clinking of porcelain sounding like something fatal in the silence. Blades colliding or maybe gunshots. Sounds that killed.

Of course she did! Of course she knew! She sat with her hands in her lap, fingers flexing and curling into fists again and again while he kept on his tirade like she hadn’t been shown what to do, as if she weren’t educated, as if her chest weren’t hers to do with what she wanted. He didn’t see that the thing she was trying to rid herself of wasn’t her breasts, it was the clingy feeling of being female in this society where being female meant shit, like she meant shit, like she didn’t matter. But of course, she’d never told him any of this, because she knew already he wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t want to. Her banker father whose entire world was interests and numbers and keeping home while Alexa’s mom was at some new meeting in Luxembourg or attending a conference in Switzerland.

“I only bind a couple of hours at a time and max three times a week,” she told him, pretending he’d know what it meant, hoping stupidly that he’d recognise the responsibility she was taking over herself by limiting her use like this.

“Don’t you know what people will think?”

Ah.

Alexa put her cup down. The clink it made against the saucer was even louder than his, like it should be, because she was trying to scream at the top of her lungs, she was protesting so vehemently in motion that it hurt inside the cavity of her chest and was she even binding right now? No, what a surprise.

“This isn’t about everyone else, it’s about me,” she said.

In the end, he took her binder, swept it off the table like some fucking princess off her feet, and threw it in the trash.

*

“Dad, would I’ve been called Alexander if I’d been a boy?”

“No, we had another name ready, if you turned out to be a boy, Schatz.”

“What was it?”

“You’d have been a wild little Sascha!”

“But isn’t Sascha a girl’s name?”

“It’s both a girl’s and a boy’s name.”

“I like that a lot better than Alexa!”

*

They were going to throw her a birthday party. They’d invited all her friends (the ones from school and their own friends’ kids, but no one from Sapfo, no one from the milieu, not even Maria), so in reality Alexa would be all alone all evening. If it was going to to be like that, she was going to be comfortable, at least and she’d spent all her money on new clothes - a fitted suit from Burberry and a pair of shiny, leather shoes, smooth and brown and soft as butter to slide her feet into.

She bound in front of the mirror with her door wide open, inviting them to look, to see, but they were busy. Her dad was finishing dinner, her mom was finishing the first bottle of wine. Alexa had time to crawl into her trousers, her shirt, her tie, her shoes, before he walked by the open doorway and saw her.

He paused, her dad. And he just looked at her for a long time.

“You’re not going to show up in that,” he concluded. It wasn’t phrased as a question, it simply put a full stop to his thoughts about it. No, it told her. Alexa smiled, tugged at her tie a little and turned towards him, flat expanse of chest open and vulnerable. Ready.

“Yes,” she answered. I am.

“Ilse, watch the potatoes,” he yelled over his shoulder, then marched up to Alexa, entered her room like there was no boundary in place at all and grabbed her hard by the upper arm. She didn’t whimper, she didn’t utter a sound. Her expression hardened.

They looked at each other with stony, cold stares.

“Take it off,” he ordered.

“No.”

Her dad curled his fingers in the fabric of her shirt, tearing at it once, twice, three times, hard, until it actually tore at the seams, her expensive Burberry purchase, and she stood there in a loose-hanging sleeve and half a shirt front. Somehow it was worse than being nude. Somehow it was more humiliating than the feel of her own naked skin.

He let go of the piece of fabric he’d torn off. It fell to the floor quietly, like a bird, landed next to her feet that were hidden away in the butter-soft shoes she’d bought for her own money.

“This is who I am,” she screamed at him, voice breaking and sounding awfully high-pitched to her own ears, but she couldn’t care less.

“Put on a bloody dress, Alexa, please,” he replied in a cool, unaffected voice and she launched at him, hitting him in the head, in the chest, kicking at his shins while she cried and shouted and her mom continued refilling her glass in the kitchen.

He didn’t hold her, but he did hold her down.

*

“Where’s Mom?”

“She’s still at work. She won’t be home until after you’ve gone to bed.”

“Mom’s always working. I never get to see her!”

“She earns all the money we need to get the things you like, Alexa. Your dolls and your dresses.”

“And my new cars and my cap!”

“Those, too.”

“Even so, I still want to be just like you when I grow up, Dad...”

*

The walls were bare. The moving vans had taken a wrong turn in Hesse and were delayed, so right now the family only had what they’d been carrying with them in the car. Alexa had her suitcase and her iPod, a poetry collection by Charles Bukowski lying next to her outstretched legs. She was sitting with her back to the end wall in the empty room that would become hers soon. Her iPod was lying in her lap and she was listening to Rammstein, mostly so she wouldn’t have to hear her mother shouting on the phone next door. She’d left her suitcase by the doorway, square in the middle like a wall or a fortress.

Do not enter, it said.

After a half hour in complete silence, save Till Lindemann growling his way through the Pussy song on repeat, her dad came to a halt in the doorway, looking down at her. Her aesthetically holed jeans, her oversized sweatshirt, her new helix ear piercing in her right ear that had hurt like hell, but she hadn’t complained. She hadn’t said a word. She’d just done it.

She hadn’t even asked them first.

He looked tired, but who the fuck was she to care. It wasn’t one of her binding days today, so the sweatshirt helped to still create the illusion of a relatively flat chest underneath. She’d cried silent, angry tears as she’d parted with Sapfo, with the others, with Maria. They’d sent her off with cookies and promised they wouldn’t forget, they’d write, but Alexa knew she’d be off their minds within the first month. No, she’d be the one to remember. Always to remember.

“We’re ordering Chinese. It’ll be here in half an hour, so you better get ready to eat, Alexa.”

“Mmh,” she replied, uncaring, turning up the volume of Ich Tu Dir Weh.

A long moment passed in which he just stood there, behind the physical borderline of her suitcase and looked at her, at her downcast eyes, her sour expression, the emptiness of her features. It hadn’t been her choice that they moved to Luxembourg, officially because her mom had gotten a new job here, but Alexa had heard them talk late at night - about how the milieu was damaging her, how they didn’t recognise her anymore, how they had to intervene for the sake of her impressionability. Now. So it didn’t suffer permanent damage.

They were trying to make her succumb, her mom and her dad, but she never would. She wasn’t their daughter anymore, she was her own person.

They’d betrayed her.

He had.

Alexa flexed her fingers, the iPod’s edges digging into her palm at the movement. “Fine, whatever,” she said finally. Her dad didn’t respond, simply turned around and returned to the kitchen.

Where he belonged. Out of her way.

*

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, Schatz.”