Dreadnought

Her voice is soft and kind. "Danny, do you feel safe at home?"
No.
There it is. I don`t feel safe at home. I open my mouth to say something, and as I do I realize that like my mother, I can`t give it its name. Not out loud. Not even to Valkyria. Because if I admit it, if I call it what it is, then I can`t hide from it anymore either. It becomes real in a way I am not ready for. Might never be ready for. There will be no illusions of safety, no peaceful times alone in my room
There will only be times when he`s not hurting me.

"Where are we going?"
"The mall. You need some new clothes." With a start, I realize she`s bribing me, and worse, this isn`t the first time. It`s a ritual with us. But now something in me has changed, made it seem wrong all of a sudden. I open my mouth to say something, and then stop. The sunlight catches her cheek, and for the first time I see the whole person. Maybe it`s because your mother is always Mom to you, or maybe it`s because I was in denial, but finally it hits me: Mom is just as much his captive as I am. She`s not just the queiter parent, the more reasonable one. She`s the trustee trapped between the warden and the other prisoner.
Immediately upon the heels of this understanding is another: I must not say this out loud. To say it out loud is to name it, and to name it is to give it irresistible power. That power will mean it can no longer be ignored. The polite fictions and convenient blind spots won`t work anymore. Something will have to change. And I know, with a certainty that fills me with dread, this is something she will not do. If I say the name of this thing he`s done to her, she will fight me. She will joing him, because she`ll have to. Because she`ll have to destroy me or else admit I was right...
And then.
Dot.
Dot.
Dot.

Fifteen years trapped. Seven of those, aware of my prison and screaming inside.
The shelter of boyhood ended, and they called me a young man. For no reason at all, they looked at the things that felt right to me, and they took them. Even down to the way I carry my books and cross my legs. They took it. They took everything. Puberty came, and my body turned on me, too. Watching every part of myself I liked rot away one day at a time, the horrified impostor staring back at me. Watching the other girls, the ones they let be girls, head in the other direction. Every day, torn away further from myself, chained down tighter. Suffocated Strangled.
They`ll make a man of me. Show me how be a man. Teach me to man up by beating me down.
They never ask if I want to be a man.
And now I`m finally free. I`m finally myself, inside and out.
So they spit on me. They`re embarrassed by me. They hate me.
For a mistake that they made.
They want me to cooperate in my own destruction. They want me to tell them its not true. They want me to help them believe the lie.
Never again.

"But... I do have superpowers," I say. "And I kinda want to help people."
"And that`s normal! It totally is, and good for you! But did you see how Carapace was still wearing his armor? He lives here. This is his home. But he`s still walking around ready to slug it out with a platoon of tanks. The whole whitecape thing isn`t a real great way to spend a life. The normal thing to do with powers is to use them to get a job. You`ve seen aerial couriers downtown, right?"
"Of course." Every major city has a few people who can fly who make their living zipping time-sensitive materials from one need of the city to the other. Once you get ten feet in the air, there`s no such thing as a traffic jam. Until now, I`d never really stopped to think about why they`d be doing that instead of fighting crime. It seems normal; they`re just able to fly around town, right? It`s like being really good with a bike, but a little cooler, is all.
"Right. Courier work is real popular with anybody who has a mobility power. High pay, short hours, and dead easy work that lets you spend most of your week doing whatever you want to do without worrying about money. A lot of fire departments will pay more than you`d think for people whose powers would help them with search-and-rescue work. Hell, one in a hundred of those guys doesn`t even need to breathe. They don`t do much to draw attention to themselves, but they`re there. That`s what a normal person who wants to help people with their power does: they join a government, or a nonprofit, or even just a company that`s not evil."

Mom takes me to the discount shoe store downtown, one of those places with the neon-orange carpet and the salespeople who are a little too friendly to feel safe around. The door gives an electric chime as we enter the shop, which summons them like sharks to bloody water.
"Hi there! Is there anything I can help you with today!" says a man in a neon-tangerine polo shirt. He`s got a huge friendly smile that goes only as far as his eyelids.
"Where are the girls`sneakers?" asks Mom.
"Aisle three! Do you need help looking for something!"
"That`s okay," I say quickly. The trick with these guys is not to make eye contact. Like restless ghosts, they want to drag you down to Hell with them.

The dirty little secret about growing up as a boy is if you`re not any good at it, they will torture you daily until you have the good graces to kill yourself. The posturing and the dominance games are almost inescapable. It`s hard to walk from one end of school to the other without getting shoulder-checked in the halls. Locker rooms are a forgotten circle of Hell. God forbid anyone ever catch you sketching flowers in class, or reading a book that`s "for girls." Maybe for people who really /are/ boys, that stuff works. Maybe it fits for them.
But I don`t get to fit. Not anywhere.