Summer camp
Miranda had taken the change harder than some of the other girls, before she had been a champion, the peak of what it was to be a guy in high school, he was a football player. Now he was just a girl, an athletic girl, but that just made her feel like she was a lesser version of her former self. Miranda was weaker than Randy was, she didn't have the weight to throw around, couldn't take a hit. She was limited, and every place she went she felt those limits. Much of the last month had therefore been spent in the place that she recognized and felt comfort, the gym, the sole place that she might make up lost ground.
So it was when told in no uncertain terms to pick a summer activity or job, she didn't want to go to Hawaii. She never saw cheerleading as a sport, when compared to football it was nothing more that corigraphed shouting. Yet for someone who physical prowess was essential, the threat of "getting fat" was enough to force her to pick something.
She picked camp counselor, because it got over sooner in the summer which would allow her to just get it over with and go on with her summer. Also it was outdoors, active, it seemed like a fine way to spend 3 weeks, hiking with middle school kids.
She was put in charge of a group of 6 girls, all in 8th grade, just 4 years younger than her and yet they seemed like children to her. She was hoping to get normal kids, but she was horrified to find that the girls in her group were the exact thing she wanted to avoid, she was given the cheerleaders, or at least half cheerleaders and half random girls. She spent the first week resenting them all, doing her duty as was told to her to do, but nothing more, being distant or at least trying to be, they were still middle school girls who needed looking after. She was shocked to find in the second week that some of the girls looked up to her, that they saw her as a role model. Why anyone would want to be her, who had just had her life stolen from her puzzled her, until she saw a group photo of her and the group and saw something, she looked like one of them. To the outside world they had no idea who Randy was, he wasn't ever there, it was only Miranda, who was in every way a different person.
From that point on she gave herself to the group, got to know them, find out about their lives, what its like to be a girl in middle school. She even got to know the cheerleaders and found that they were just people same as she was, and that many of them were in it cheerleading for the same reasons she had entered football, for the team, for the challenge of the stunts, because that skill set was something they were proud of having. Miranda countered with the idea that Volleyball or Track or Soccer also had those things, but the girls just made a face, in the girls eyes those sports were inferior because those weren't nearly as feminine, and they were girls after all. It was the exact thing that gave Randy pride as football player, how masculine it was to be on that field fighting the other team, it fit who he was, he was perfecting the male role by being the biggest and strongest, so now that She was and He wasn't, what did that mean for who she was, now to be masculine looked as ridiculous as a male cheerleader, something he would have made fun of before. She was becoming the female version of a male cheerleader, something she knew was unbecoming of what she should be. She looked that the picture and saw a cheerleader, some one who had her old self seen this picture would have just assumed she was a cheerlead, it was exactly where she fit. She had to come to terms with that, and the girls were there to help with this.
The final week bore one more moment, when the cheer girls invited the other girls to join them in doing routines. It was a micro camp on cheerleading to which Miranda stayed as observer. The girls did flips and cheers and cartwheels and showed the other girls how, when finally Miranda was asked to join in. The horror came when she found that she couldn't do it, it looked simple, but was much harder than it looked. How could she, the great athlete be able to do such things as run and jump, but she couldn't cartwheel, she felt fury at this. This was a thing that had to be beaten.
Two weeks later she was in Hawaii.
