I stood in front of a building at my high school, the same place I signed up for E2 some eighteen years ago.
It was the technology building back at school. I didn’t spend time in most classrooms here; never bothered to learn German or Spanish back then, only had a stray math class here and there. But there was one classroom I spent hours in every day.
Man was a navy reservist, and sometimes I swear he was studying the day’s course material the night before. His name was Greg Aldred, but we just called him Aldred with an optional mister. Aldred’s classroom was lined with these white towers and chunky CRT monitors everywhere, and the few friends I’d had back then would rush our simple little basic programming assignments, slip in a clandestine floppy disk, and play Super Nintendo games under the fluorescent lights overhead, quick on the alt-tab if something came up.
Now why this girl showed up in the class, I’ll never know. She had the makings of Aesthetics with a capital ay, and I remember sitting there, looking at her for brief moments. Over a year, my thoughts distinctly went from “oh man, she’s beautiful and she’s got a great look,” as she was sitting in class in an actual pleated tartan skirt, her hair in a dark blue bob, a black fuzzy sweater on. In retrospect, she was pioneering the late ‘10s trans girl fashion of the day. Eventually, my thoughts moved to “what’s she doing here?” Same as the rest of us, it turns out: half-heartedly working on a networking certificate or programming language skill, and playing secret emulator games. But she did seem more focused than most.
Eventually my thoughts about her turned to jealousy—“why do girls get to look like that, but not me?” And that was my first distinct awakening, sometime in March of that year; I could look like that, maybe. Lots of circumstances in the way though. I’d be excited to get dressed in the morning.
I remember talking with her a few times, the details of what I can’t quite remember, but I also was working really hard on a badly coded tiny little JRPG in C++ which went far and above any of the class requirements. I wasn’t really doing it to impress her, but hey, what if I could be a girl programmer?
Eventually, everyone went their own separate ways. I remember her first name, not her last. I’m sure she dropped that fashion sense, and I picked most of it up where she left it. I never saw her again after that, and wouldn’t recognize her if I did, but in creating ourselves, we borrow bits and pieces from each other.