Details, Details...

Having purchased the beginnings of a proper wardrobe, Victoria was now free to move on to other things; namely, all of the little details that were a necessary part of being a girl. One of those details was ear piercing, something that Victoria was reluctant to do. Not because she was afraid of the pain (actually, the thought of her flesh being pierced by metallic points appealed quite well to her Gothic sensibilities), but because her mother was compelling her to have it done at Claire's on the grounds that it was free there. It had been many years since she had gone into that particular shop when her sister had been eleven years old. Before she had become a Goth, this was where Zoe had done most of her shopping for jewelery.
Back then, Jon had hated to go in there because it was so...girly. Now Victoria still hated going in there, not because it was girly (that would be a bit hypocritical on her part, at this point), but because it wasn't the right sort of girly.
It was a hive for for preppy, tweenish girls who read Twilight and listened to...whatever damned boy bands happened to be popular at this point. Jon had never cared, and Victoria didn't either.
"I feel your pain," Zoe sympathized. "But if its any consolation, once they poke their holes in your ears, you can fill them with whatever earrings you want."
This actually was some consolation to her. And so she had it done, trying to ignore the fact that the preppy, "cheerleader"-looking girl doing the job was staring at her as if she was a diseased rat because of her Gothic look.
Whatever.
In order to keep the holes in her earlobes open, she was compelled to select some earrings from in the store (which was, of course, how the "free" ear-piercing paid for itself). None of them particularly appealed to her, so she selected a pair of nondescript red studs. One of these would look better in my nose, she mused as she put them on.
While there, she also bought herself several pairs of black leggings (they were black, it didn't matter where they came from) and a small, pewter necklace bearing here name. This last one was on her mother's insistence, but Victoria thought that it was only fair, considering that she had named her. After that, Victoria led them out of there like bats out of hell.
Next up, Victoria was faced with the very real fact that she needed to get some shoes. She had been wearing her sister's old sandals since her transformation, but they were worn, uncomfortable, and not particularly attractive. And so she had gone into a shoe store.
Back when she had still been male, she hadn't particularly enjoyed shoe shopping, but now she was liking it a great deal better. She couldn't rightly say whether this was because of her new and improved personality, or simply because there was a much wider selection of footwear for her to pick from now that she was a girl. In the end, she bought some leather kneehighs, black suede ankleboots, some pumps (with extreme high heels, naturally) and some more sensible flats, as well as a pair of sneakers for when she was working out.
By this time, she, her mother and her sister were weighted down with more than a dozen shopping bags (most of which were hers, but her family had also bought themselves some items), and so they were anxious to leave, but there was one last place Victoria wanted to visit: the bookstore, Barnes and Nobles. This came as something of a surprise to her mother and Zoe, as neither of them had ever been particularly avid readers, and neither had Jon.
But Victoria couldn't help but feel that she was a literate sort of girl. Her romantic, goth impulses needed to be fed, and beyond that...she felt an unstoppable need to understand the significance of what had happened to her, a need which transcended subculture. Perhaps she could find the answers in a story, somwhere?
And so she went in. Within a few minutes, she realized what she had been missing all of these years. Initially, she started off by picking out all of those old novels which had so influenced the Gothic subculture; things like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Gaston LeRoux's Phantom of the Opera, Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and a great, fat tome with a raven on the cover entitled The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. But she rapidly expanded her search, and grabbed modern "urban fantasy" novels from the shelves of the Science Fiction and Fantasy section. She had never heard of most of them anyway, so in this case she gave particular preference to works by female authors, assuming that they would be more likely to resonate with herm now that she was a girl. That in turn led to a realization on her part: she didn't want merely to endulge her gothic imagination- what she really wanted, more than anything else was to understand what it meant to be a woman. And so she added to her collection books like The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique. She even bought herself some picture books for little girls, with titles like "Great Queens of History" and "Fifty Women Who Have Changed the World."
It donned on her that she, really, was less than a day old! Oh, she had all of Jon's memories, it was true, but she was no longer him in any meaningful way. He was gone...and Victoria needed her own link to the past.
And so she spent more than five hundred dollars on books. She and her family left the mall at this point; entirely exasperated. But Victoria was satisfied.