The Greatest Lie Part 14

God, I mused, if only I had transitioned during high school: I could have been Homecoming Queen. But my prefrontal lobe reminded me this was fantasy: these people were the same idiots that I had detested, and who in turn had ridiculed and persecuted me. So I avoided their flirtatious looks and went straight to the principal's office.

It was the same nightmarish scene that I had remembered from my school days: the anteroom was filled by a gaggle of miscreants gathered on battered folding chairs. They sat sprawled across their seats, sullenly awaiting their punishments from a smaller tribe of indifferent, somnambulant bureaucrats slouching behind a stained Formica barrier. I took a number from a dispenser that looked straight out of a busy delicatessen and watched and waited as the presumptively guilty ahead of me went off to their fates of detention, suspension, or expulsion.

The burgeoning number of young sinners overwhelmed the number of available slothful bureaucrats, so I was treated to a dreadful hour as all the wastrels and miscreants in the anteroom tried to hit on me. Worse yet, the woman acting as gatekeeper that day was Fabiola, an obese and almost cretinous sycophant of my high-school enemy and rapist, Miguel. By the time Fabiola called my name the number of the newly condemned had grown considerably, and I had become their cynosure and the butt of their ribald remarks.

She checked my paperwork against a yellowed, tattered computer printout and announced with a tone of annoyance, "I got no Alexandra Rivers from last year's class. Are you sure you graduated from here?"

"Of course you don't have an Alexandra Rivers! I changed my name. Look for Alex Rios."

"You mean I should be looking for a boy's name?" she replied in a tone of hurt incomprehension.

"Look at the court order. That's the name you should be looking for, and you should do what the order says. I don't need to argue with you about this. Just do what the judge said in the order," I said, as my face burned with embarrassment.