My Victoria. Personally, Victoria felt trapped with this name.
On one hand, people imagined royalty and therefore associated her with
a stiff upbringing, proper etiquette, perfectly styled appearances, and
finger sandwiches. Sometimes Victoria debated if her mother had this in
mind for her future, the two of them having tea parties and dressing up
in tennis whites to eat at the country club on Monday mornings when
work grew too mundane. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the
name Victoria to any peer she possibly encountered could drive them to
think she was more spoiled than curdled milk, driving her daddy’s BMW
to Starbucks to order a super-fattening drink while reaching into some
overly large designer purse to pay with mommy’s American Express. The
kids she introduced herself to probably assumed she was eating something
super-fattening anyway by a single glance at the way her T-shirts stretched
snugly around her torso or how her leggings seemed to be pulled thin.
Victoria thought her name probably nailed this Ms. Piggy meets Clueless
perception of herself into her peers’ brains, which explained why she
never went out of her way to introduce herself to people.
Going into sixth grade, Victoria asked her teachers to call her
Vicky to see if she could shake this dark cloud of stereotypes from her
wake. During the summer it seemed like a great escape from the name
that shackled her to everyone else’s perception of how she should be,
but Vicky made people think she had turned goth or suddenly had a
more angry disposition on life. One time she wore navy nail polish after
reading about it in one of her fashion magazine subscriptions that was
piled neatly onto her night table, but once she noticed people looking at
her fingernails she slowly pulled them back towards her palm until she
could feel the smooth navy shellac resting on the inside of her hands.
The name had set up a cage in Victoria’s mind, and no matter
which end she ran to she found herself just as hopelessly trapped as
before.
Her desk was her ideal place to doze off, away from the world.
She would look out on people walking by her neighborhood – a teenage
boy on a skateboard, a high-school couple holding ice cream cones, a
brisk and independent gray-haired lady with a bag of groceries in each
hand, a mom pushing a stroller. Despite their different ethnicities, ages,
or genders, all of them would stare at the house for a second in wonder.
She knew how it looked from the outside. Perfectly lush, square lawn
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