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(Excerpt from Prologue)
 

Ten years ago Jade Norway, then fifteen years old, sat at the kitchen table with her father on a little farm just south of Washington, D.C. near Hughesville, Maryland. She fidgeted in the chair, rolled her thumbs in boredom and disgust. “Daddy, I don’t know what I want to do when I get older. And, no, I don’t have a boyfriend.” Back then, she wasn’t exactly “slender” as she would be described several years later, but “skinny” was the best adjective to describe her body in her early teens.

 This little get-together was her father’s idea. He had raised her after his wife died when the girl was five. He had done the best he could, but he knew his parenting tools were weak and blamed himself for how she was turning out. Oh, she was sweet and smart, and a good daughter. She did chores around the house, cooked for them both, and did the laundry. But she didn’t do the “girl things” like pajama parties, telephone chats with other girls about boys, never had played much with dolls. What? No mall trips to hang out either. Instead, she wore jeans and shirts almost all the time, had wanted a b-b-gun when she was six years old, then a .22 caliber rifle when she turned ten. She played basketball with the boys down at the end of the street and made a pretty good percentage of her shots. She wanted to go out for wrestling in high school, but her father got very irritated with that idea and she backed off the little dream.

 If he had really tried to understand his daughter, and had taken a good look at what she did, he would have seen the feminine side he desired. She had a stuffed little bear in her room, often picked flowers and set them in a pot on her dresser, decorated her room in light blue and pink. She had posters of guys on her walls, mostly rock stars and television stars. Rock stars because she was attracted to young men, which was perfectly normal, yet her dad didn’t seem to see such characteristics in his daughter. 

 But her preferred music was not rock of any kind. She loved classical music and had the radio in her room constantly on WGMS-FM or WBJC-FM in Baltimore. The latter played some opera and Jade had been trying to learn to appreciate that.

 In his constant quest to feminize her character, her father had suggested she take dancing lessons. She wanted martial arts classes. She wanted to learn to hunt and fish, both due to interest in those activities but also hoping she could spend some time together with her father and become closer. But she gave up fishing and hunting after the first trip, saying that she didn’t want to kill things. That had pleased him only because he assumed that most girls didn’t hunt and fish. That was, in his mind, more “girl like.” Not wanting to shoot animals or hook a fish. 

He was, actually, a very unenlightened man, which was too bad for Jade. He should have had a son. 

 On one hand, he had been disappointed when the doctor had announced congratulations, “You have a daughter.” Yes. He had wanted a son to hunt and fish with, but he cherished Jade and the disappointment in the gender soon evaporated. Were he able to turn back time, he would still want his daughter. He may not have understood her, but loved her with all his heart.

 Part of the problem of his relationship and expectations with Jade was that he thought of her as a “tomboy” and supposed that was a sexist term nowadays. He was just barely enlightened enough to know that today’s young women played hard, worked hard in many of the earlier so-called jobs for men only. They didn’t always wear dresses; he had seen them at the mall in jeans and suits as well as the “hot” fashions. But he had envisioned his daughter as looking feminine in dress, and working a more traditional job―she had said she would be a police officer or some other high risk profession. He wanted to hear her say she would like to be a paralegal or a nurse or a lawyer, as well as a mom to his future grandchildren.

 Jade knew what he wanted from her. He had made it clear how he felt, directly and indirectly, but finally she told him she was sorry he was disappointed and that she loved him but could not fit into an image of his making. 

 After this latest session, they hugged and he went off to his job as a security guard at a Waldorf metal works company and she went to school. 

 What, she wondered, would he do if she became a cheerleader? 

 Well, she had never been asked to even try out. She was not very popular, too serious acting and a bit cold around people. She was quite pretty, and very smart. Boys chased her to no avail, not to be friends but to introduce her to the carnal side of life. Boys will be boys. 

Other girls sensed she was a potential threat to their own popularity and few spoke on breaks between the classes or asked her to sit with them at lunch. They knew that Jade was a heartbeat away from becoming popular and sought out by the good-looking boys at school. Maybe that thought had not germinated at the conscious level, but they certainly sensed that Jade was a potential rival. 

 Well, actually there were two people who followed her around like puppy dogs: a boy named Gregory and a girl named Jenny. After high school, the three still maintained some contact and would occasionally go shopping together and had lunches and went to the movies. That was the extent of her social life, but she liked those two and was happy for the times together.

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