Stepfordized: Part 15

David Grant Women’s Academy had left several lasting impressions on Lihua the longer she attended classes there. On it’s face, it seemed like a well-to-do school for girls from wealthy families whose daddies had way too much money on their hands. An all-female school with an all-female teaching staff with on and off campus housing filled with amenities should have been a dream come true to get into on grades and school activities alone. But then there was another side to it. The teachers were hypersexualized or seemed to be unfit for their positions based on attitude and appearance alone. The 600 pound Nutrition teacher for example was a big red flag. The rest seemed to be more focused on domestic activities and raising babies than anything else, and they definitely looked the part of a stay at home mom or trophy wife whose greatest joy was her kids and her rose garden. But then, if you dug even further than that, you would learn that the pale, 600 pound blonde Nutrition teacher was half-black and used to be a personal trainer while the other teachers were former athletes, lawyers, and businesswomen who just decided to settle down in Pleasantville to raise their kids. It was a weird, almost Simpsons-worthy back and forth of sinister and wholesome that in the end wasn’t really worth the trouble to think about.

There were talks of the town being some training center for housewives and the school was meant to brainwash women into giving up their careers and turning into fat soccer moms, but looking around at the number of professional women in town made that just seem….untrue. The Lihua’s personal opinion that Ansley Park was just kind of old fashioned that way and if one were to put away their biases against women and girly things, they’d realize that most but not all girls in town just enjoyed living the way they did. There was definitely a culture of floral patterned blouses and strollers, but about a third of the women smoked or drank or got into fights too. It was practically a competitive sport to try and get a man to marry and pay for all your expenses, and affairs were whispered about left and right like it was just the fashionable thing to do to sleep around. Very Gatsby, she thought.

Outside of all that though, college just felt like…college. Lihua had homework and clubs to keep up with, tests to take, and even annoying group projects to do, even if they were pink-tinted with femininity. Home Ec and domestic skills courses were pretty common and motherhood classes were required for graduation, but so were Math, Science, and English. Most people insisted that there was some dark, misogynistic conspiracy going on that turned women into slaves to the patriarchy, but Lihua saw exactly the opposite. If anything, it was women that ran things in Stepford and not the other way around. She couldn’t even remember the last time she even saw a picture of a man anywhere. To Lihua, this place was amazing because it was the first and only true matriarchy she’d ever seen. Of course everything was kind of girly; The whole town was built to cater to women!

She walked down the sidewalk path coming from Home Ec. having just completed her afternoon classes and was now free for the day. She thought about Kelsey as she made her way back toward the off-campus housing where she lived just a short walk down the road and across the street into her own little neighborhood. In truth, she’d gotten over her feelings about Kelsey having sex with Todde or Dylan or whatever the guy’s name was while she was gone. She knew Kelsey had been drunk and felt horrible about it, but it still hurt to hear that being gone for one weekend was enough to send her prospective girlfriend into such worry that she drank herself stupid and slept with a guy. Granted, a drunk Kelsey was in no shape to consent, so if anything, it was the guy who had taken advantage, not her. The stress of dealing with it had set her off her workout schedule too. While normally Lihua would be out practicing yoga and throwing roundhouse kicks in the Art quad or in her own backyard, she’d ended up eating her feelings about it for the last few weeks instead. She’d not intended to keep Kelsey at bay for so long and would still respond to her texts, but she had to force herself not to immediately forgive her for doing what she did on principle. Lihua had always been at the mercy of an abusive tiger mom and had grown up to be a try-hard Asian kid in America, which made her all too accepting of abuse and more forgiving than was healthy for her, leading to a string of bad boyfriends and a particularly horrible ex girlfriend. She didn’t think Kelsey was as bad as any of them, but at the time, she was certain that each of those relationships would last forever unless it was she herself who ruined it. So to prevent repeat problems, Lihua had pushed the new girl away, but now that the texts and even public appearances were more sporadic, she figured it was finally time to let it go and try again.

She’d made her way off campus and was heading home to invite her over to talk and hang out when suddenly, a sound rang out, calling her name.

“Hey! Lihua! Hey! Hi!” Came a peppy voice from behind, causing the Chinese girl to turn on her heel and look.

(1)

“Hey! It’s me! Remember? From Yoga?” Said the girl, a curvy woman with a stocky build and a silky black bob cut with a wash of blue on one side.

“Yeah, I definitely know I’ve seen you around. You’re… Charlotte, right? You used to attend my Wednesday class.” Lihua said, nodding.

“Yeah! That’s me! I’m also Kelsey’s friend. We’re not like besties or anything but we’re like..Kinda getting there lately. Sorry I’ve been absent from class and all that, I just have had a ton of stuff to do. You know how it is.” Charlie said with a big, pearly white smile that bordered on suspicious.

“Yeah, totally.” Lihua said, wondering why this girl was talking to her outside of wanting to be recognized outside of class.

“Yeah, I just saw you and was like ‘Oh hey, there’s my yoga teacher! I should say hi!’” Charlie beamed, bouncing a little with excitement.

“And here you are.” Lihua said, nodding with a masked but awkward smile.

“Yep! Here I am!” Charlie chirped, smiling back.
(2)

“Yeah! …Uh, what’s up?” Lihua asked, looking around in slight confusion.

Charlie continued smiling, though softer now. “Oh not much. I was just walking around and saw you so I thought I’d say hi.”

“Yeah..” Lihua replied, her own smile fading into a fake one as she nodded unenthusiastically. “You said that.”

There was a pause.
A long, weird, awkward pause.
Finally, as if snapping out of a trance and suddenly remembering what she wanted to say, Charlie shook her head and her smile shot back up after the space-out had caused it to fall.

“Anyways….” She began, suddenly looking shy. “I was just wondering if you two….You and Kelsey that is….I just wanted to know if you two were still hanging out together or anything….Not to like totatlly jump into your guys’ friendship or whatever, it’s just that like… Since she got with her boyfriend, we haven’t really been talking much. She never really goes out or shows up to drama club or even exercises with me anymore and it just…. I dunno. It kinda feels…Not the best.”

Charlie’s awkward, fumbling statement hit Lihua like bag of live roaches. She knew that Kelsey had slept with Dylan at the party and that alone was enough of a red flag, but she had no idea that they had gotten together officially. It was all she could do to stare blankly and blink at the seemingly slimmer theater nerd without uttering a word.

“Uh… No. Um. We haven’t….Uhh….I haven’t seen her much lately either.” Lihua said quietly, her optimistic mood deflating like a ripped bouncy castle full of kids.

“Ugghhhh, well. That’s a little frustrating, I have to admit, but some girls are like that, you know? They just kind of get into a relationship and BECOME their boyfriend and no one else can really get a word it. I had this one friend like that who went off with some guy and dropped me cold turkey, and then when I called her out on it she got like…SUPER defensive about it and starting screaming at me for ‘talking shit about her boyfriend’. It was stupid.

Still…. A part of me wishes I’d just shut my big mouth and let her do her thing. Maybe then we still could have been friends after they broke up, but I guess that ship’s sailed. It just sucks to see that happening to Kelsey too.

…Well….Thanks for talking to me. I know that was a lilttle weird but I’m like….A little neurospicy, you know? So it’s kinda like a thing where I get awkward and people get all mad at me for it. Anyways, sorry to be Ruby Gloom about it. Have a nice day!” Charlie said, her sad tone giving way to a cheerful chirp at the end.

As Lihua watched the chubby girl saunter off abnormally quickly, she felt her heart sink into her stomach and her hands and feet turn to ice. Today was going to be the day she was going to try to rekindle a romance with a girl that she had hit it off with really well, only to have that notion absolutely torpedoed by some girl she barely knew coming out of the woodwork seemingly to ruin her day. Lihua walked home, slower now than before, dwelling deeply on what she’d just heard, her brain recklessly putting things together in what she knew was probably the worst possible way. Charlie’s statement may have been out of the blue, but there was also no conceivable reason that Lihua could think of that some random girl she barely knew would come out of nowhere to say what she did. She was awkward, sure, but if Charlie really was some kind of neurodivergent, that would explain the impulsive greeting and the weird way she went about handling it.

Lihua’s eyes burned and filled with tears, and shortly after, her stomach growled loud and angry.


The next few days passed in a miserable blur for Lihua. She spent her time either high or sleeping for most of it, refusing to deal with the outside world almost at all. She had previously gone out of her way to stop taking weed gummies a year prior, as doing so was making her lazy and stopped her from being able to focus even when she’d come down, but now she felt the need to have them again since every moment she spent awake and sober meant crying her eyes out. She hadn’t realized at first how much the news of Kelsey’s relationship had affected her until she’d taken the entire week off of classes and stayed at home in the dark either sleeping, crying, or stuffing herself stupid in front of the tv, mindlessly passing time and trying to fill the emotional void in what conveniently happened to be her stomach. She hadn’t even noticed the slowly billowing muffintop that was forming over her athletic wear-turned stretchy depression clothes as she remained glued to the couch, either curled up or sitting criss crossed on a single cushion, stoned out of her mind and buried in some Ansley Park Programming soap opera.

(3)

Several times she had thought to just ignore what Charlie said and just text Kelsey, knowing now that the week she had planned to take off of their budding relationship had turned to three, and now four. Each week without meaningful contact only made it less and less likely that they could ever enjoy being together like they were in their short and largely unromantic time together, which only put more stress on her. More stress meant more weed, more weed, meant more food, and more food meant she would eat herself into a coma on the couch before the tv would wake her up with some roaring Hyundai ad or Darling Sunrise bulletin commercial. For all she knew, Charlie could have actually been some malicious force out specifically to stop them from being together because of her own petty agenda, and she was falling right into her trap, she would think. But notions like that lasted only so long before her worried brain went right back to catastrophizing. Lihua wondered over a depleted bag of Funyuns if this was how Kelsey felt when she’d thought that she was off with a guy on the night of the party.

The thought struck her as odd. It was weirdly convenient that she and Kelsey were having the exact same issue, and it did seem strange that Charlie had seemingly come out of nowhere just to give her bad news and then immediately leave. Even weirder was the fact that she had walked up behind her like she was going hom, but then once she had said what she came to say, turned around and went in the complete opposite direction. Something was weird, and the more she thought about it, the more suspicious the event became.

Suddenly, the tv filled the room with white light and an ad for a new APP podcast came on.

“Ayy all you steppies out there! It’s ya girl Eliza ‘ere with my brand new podcast “London Bridge” with yours truly, talking with YOU lot about the ins ‘n’ outs of life ‘ere in Ansley. Don’t forget to pop on in tomorrow at 3pm for my first on air livestream where we’ll be talking about the the Big C. That’s COMMUNICATION for all you desp’rate ‘housewives sittin on yer bums an waitin’ fer Prince Charming to come sweep you off your feet. And if you think that I’m not talking to you there ‘alfway through yer bonbons and jammy dodgers, you’re DEAD. WRONG. You can listen in tomorrow at 3 and either call or text yer sassy responses and we’ll get to talkin, yeah? See ya there loves!”

The screen cut away to an image of a plump black woman with long braids sitting at an all-white tea table in what looked like a fancy garden. She wore a matching white outfit, but with large sunglasses, a cocky smirk, and a pair of thigh-high black leather goth boots with chunk heels and buckles that rode all the way up the side of her leg. The bright poshness of the scene was further juxtaposed, probably intentionally, by a wildfire raging just above the hedge where she sat, indicating to viewers that this was more than the average Stepford talk show.

(4)

Lihua stared in weed-induced amazement. She’d heard of the London Bridge girl before; some particularly problematic feminist punk who’d somehow made it big on Darling Sunrise and got her own radio show. Apparently now she had a tv podcast, but it seemed a bit serendipitous that she should see it right when she did.

Communication.

The one thing that she had failed to do all week.

Lihua set the bag of chips down and grabbed her phone, pulling up the chat log between her and Kelsey, last updated almost a week earlier. Seeing the timestamp almost made her cry at how much she realized she missed talking to her friend and crush before the realization that she couldn’t call her her girlfriend made the tears begin to flow against her will. Mustering an inebriated burst of courage, Lihua began typing away, writing out her message.

-Hey, do you have a minute? I need to talk to you about something important.

Lihua stared at the message, her heart pounding faster as doubt and anxiety crept in. The message sounded too dire and worrying. She held down the backspace button and watched the letters trickle away one by one.

-Hey, can we talk?

No good. This one sounded ominous too. Lihua deleted the message and felt more tears well up at the feeling of being unable to say what she really wanted.

The commercial’s words rang in her head, the sassy brit’s voice practically reprimanding her, holding her hand and guiding her to say what she really wanted.

(That’s COMMUNICATION for all you desp’rate ‘housewives sittin on yer bums an waitin’ fer Prince Charming to come sweep you off your feet….)

Lihua may not have been waiting for a prince per say, nor was she a desperate housewife…Or did she want to be? Maybe one day. But that wasn’t going to happen if she sat there waiting for someone to come find her.

After googling what a jammy dodger was and getting sidetracked by an ASMR video involving another English woman rating and reviewing various ‘biscuits’ over tea, Lihua closed youtube and typed out her message, making sure to hit send before she could chicken out and delete it.


-I miss you. Can we talk?