Vachon Imagined

The dumb girl—the one who forgot her ballet slippers and suddenly the whole room erupted, casting her as the villain. The one who made an F on her geometry test because, to her, angles and shapes were just that: angles and shapes. There was no intersection of calculation in them; they were simply flat, uninteresting forms while everyone else mystified them, measured them, solved them. She only thought, Okay, I’ll learn it, but it won’t be pretty. And learn it she did not. She had to go about it another way, a way that suited her—not the cement holding unisex chairs and unemboldened dreams.

She had to be the dumb girl, the girl who misfired her weapon in basic training. How, you might ask? I honestly don’t know. I was probably asleep, or at least trying to be.

The dumb girl. The one taught while sitting cross-legged around a carpet stitched with alphabet squares, so inoculating she herself became the square. Don’t go there, stay here. Don’t say that, say this. A teleprompter’s life woven into thick skin and even thicker lies.

It was not the deception of judgment, but the solid black ink framing her diary and letting her dreams soar, that released her from the dos and don’ts, the policies and curtsies. And in that ink, she found herself drifting away with it all—but only after first being the very dumb girl, living an extraordinarily dull and uneventful life.