Being Emily Read Free Page B

swim practice. Her house was on the other side of town from mine, all of a mile-and-a-half apart, but she thought it would be silly to have me go home for an hour and then meet her at her place, so she copied her key.
    Her house was nothing like mine. First of all, it was tiny and in the well-to-do part of town that bordered on our one lake, and therefore more expensive than my family’s larger house. Secondly, it was obsessively neat. At our house, Mikey or Dad always left junk around in the living room and kitchen, and Mom complained periodically and instituted weekend cleaning times, but it was never finished and tidy. Claire’s house looked like a furniture showroom. Even the bookcases were designed more as works of art than functional pieces; each shelf held a few books and then some small statue or knickknack or a picture turned at an angle for effect.
    Her mom worked at a flooring and countertop store and helped people pick out expensive tile and granite for their fancy houses. This house had simple wood floors, but the kitchen did boast the yummiest counters I’d ever seen, black stone flecked with reflective bits of other colors. Claire’s mom made a good living and still got money from Claire’s dad, who lived in St. Louis, so Claire rarely wanted for anything. She didn’t have a car, true, but she did have her own TV in her bedroom and a Mac G5 desktop with a blazing-fast Internet connection and a monthly online game subscription to World of Warcraft . She let me have three of her character slots, so I logged on and fired up my level 85 Mage, Amalia .
    Sometimes these online games got tedious for all the monsters a character had to kill to get to a new level, but it was more than made up for by the great gear I could buy and make, and the cool spells I could cast. Claire didn’t have the patience to play magic-users, but they were my favorite. I admit, the fact that they always wore robes figured into that preference.
    When I logged into the game and selected Amalia on the character screen, I could turn her 360 degrees and admire how awesome she looked. She always had beautiful long hair and sometimes I got it styled in one of the game’s barbershops, but then it was flowing free all the way down her back. Her robes hung gracefully around her figure in violet and gray hues with gold tracery. I pushed the button to enter the game as her and got to step into a world fully female.
    While I moved her around the city, I felt what it was like to be in her body. Some of the characters in the city were other players like me, but the computer created all the shopkeepers and city guards. They called me “ m’lady ” and simple as it was, that made me grin.
    I was shopping for a new mage’s robe when I heard the key in the door. “Hi honey, I’m home,” Claire yelled from the entryway. I immediately started sweating while my skin went cold, which didn’t seem fair. My body should have picked one or the other, but instead I ended up a damp popsicle .
    I heard the thomp of her boots coming off. Claire had three pairs of thick, black boots that she rotated through in the winter. Each pair made her at least two inches taller, but when she appeared in her bedroom doorway she was her usual petite self. Today she wore a black crewneck sweater and black jeans with a bunch of silvery bracelets around her right wrist and a silver cross hanging down the front of her sweater. Her entire wardrobe was black. She once told me she started it when other girls teased her about trying to look fashionable in the eighth grade. Not only could she avoid those taunts ever again, but this look let her get away with wearing an ornate cross and no one knew if she was really serious or not.
    She was serious about her own brand of radical Christianity. From time to time she could even come up with a surprisingly contextual Bible quote. The one she liked to give people who hassled her about her all-black, heavy eyeliner look was: “Do not