She wore the same jeans and t-shirts and sweatshirts as everyone else. Orange and black. Grey with black and orange. Black and orange. But underneath she wore other things. Garments with ornate beadwork or intricate laces or warm velvet—clothes with texture. She combed the Goodwill for forsaken camisoles, negligees, stoles. She stripped satin lining from men’s suit coats and women’s skirts. She slit seams and rescued faux fur from misguided 80s couture.
She sewed the salvaged pieces of fabric together and wore the resulting work secretly, like the undergarments of a devout Jew or Mormon, as a reminder that this was not her home. San Francisco or Milan would be her holy city. Or next year in New York City, she thought each January 1.
The other students in her 7th grade class noticed what she did not—namely, that she spent all of her class time, when World History introduced her to Genghis Khan’s metal-clad warriors, or gave her a tour of the jasmine-infused, silken courts of one or another maharaja, or asked her to examine the purple Medici palazzos and the time when English demanded that she construct formulaic paragraphs with graceful transitions to form essays commencing with giant sweepers claiming “Throughout human history, people have…” —she spent all this time with her left hand inside her shirt, running fabric or beadwork thin between her fingers.
What she did notice was that small holes appeared on the left side of her handmade garments, a phenomenon about which she could not ask her mother because that would mean explaining, or even showing, the garments to her.
At school they began calling her all sorts of names that might have made her cry, had she been paying attention.
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