Chapter Text
Damian wished to get through just one school day without being approached by any of these imbeciles. The girl has never been that lucky before. She has her headphones in listening to Bach when a blonde girl steps in front of her, stopping Damian in her tracks. The girl earns a pompous look of disgust for her intrusion.
The perpetrator wears an ear to ear smile and her hair is like a lion's mane.
“Hello! We’re having a dance on April 14th, everyone’s going.” Damian takes the pink paper in her hands and studies it. The print is beautiful and pictures a silhouette of a prince and princess joining hands and kissing under a disco ball. She looks back up at the blonde and scrunches her eyebrows.
“Why are you asking me?” Dami interrogates. Laughter brought Dami’s attention to boys behind her, some in letterman jackets and others in half fastened button ups.
“Yeah,” The brunette with harsh sideburns speaks through a chuckle, “Why are you asking him-I mean her to come to the dance.” Something tells Damian that wasn’t a mistake. If he says it again the girl would make sure he couldn’t utter a word after; hard to speak with your front teeth knocked out.
“Because-” The blonde is interrupted by another girl with pink hair snatched away by blue barrets.
“Cause you have money and we need pre-bought tickets and donations to even have the dance.”
“If my presence isn’t actually wanted at this dance, I don’t see a reason why I should go.” Dami Raises her nose with the intention of walking far away from these fools when Mr.sideburns opens his trap again.
“It’s not like you’d qualify anyways Wayne.” He moves in front of Damian, eager to be a part of the conversation Dami is trying to end. Damian finds his words to be idiotic.
“Why would I not qualify to attend a dance, that needs my Mothers money to even happen?” Damian raises a thick brow at the boy.
“Because,” *Chuckle*, “Dates are mandatory.” He burst into a full laugh. His noise attracts a crowd and suddenly the 300 hallway is crowded and eyes are all on the conversing teens. They fill each other in on the situation; in no time 40 or so bright eyes are focused solely on Damian. She’s never had stage fright before, but something about the atmosphere made her feel uneasy.
“Wait, Damian’s going to the dance, no way.” A curly haired girl laughs out her sentence and others join her. Damian turns to glare at her specifically and she covers her mouth in a weak attempt to hide her guilty smile.
“I never said I was going.” Damian classily folds the pamphlet in fours before pushing her way past the crowd to get away from the cackling and some gazes of pity.
“So which one of you asked the tranny to the dance?” Laughter echoes throughout the hall. Damian stops her stride completely.
“What did you just call me?” Her words seem to get lost amongst the boys. The brunette girl grabs her arm and leads her away from the boys. She confronts her.
“What did he just call me?” Dami feels like she’s missing a huge part of the joke.
The brunette shakes her head and drags Damian to the bathroom. When they are inside she notices the blonde and pink haired girl following them.
“I demand to know why he called me a ‘tranny’?” Damian stares at her expectantly. The girl sighs and gestures to Damian like that makes it obvious.
“What.” Wayne doesn’t have time for her games. There’s nothing wrong with her appearance.
“It's just…you look.” The girl looks like she’s biting her tongue to avoid saying the wrong thing.
“You look like a boy in a skirt.” The pink haired girl is nonchalant about the statement. Taking out a tube of mascara and brushing her lashes with it.
“At least I don’t look like a lalaloopsy doll,” Damian is never one to let an insult pass, no matter how un christ-like the retort was.
Pinkie scoffs, and tucks her tube into her basic gucci bag.
“Girl, you only have one eyebrow, your nose is the size of mount rushmore, you have enough hair on your arms and legs to make a coat, and compared to the rest of us you look like you never touched a bar of soap in your life.” Damian was stunned. She had never been so insulted in her life. She was itching to take her knife out of her back when a scripture passed through her mind; Matthew 5:39 If anyone slaps you on the cheek, turn to them and give them the other cheek also.
Damian wishes she was wise enough to follow it.
“You obviously don’t want my money, have fun planning a Ball with dollar store balloons and little caesars pizza.” This “tranny” is gonna stand her ground.
The rosette rolled her eyes, “You aren’t the only person here with wealth Wayne, it’s not like this is a public school, we’ll just find another sponsor, one that could find a date that’s actually the opposite sex.”
The blonde leans into her to speak in whats barely a whisper, “What if she tries to bring one of her brothers?” they muffle their laughs with their hands. Dami thought at least the blonde was decent. She was too quick to assume. Damian was fuming and ready to tear their heads off when the brunette came to her defense.
“You two need to shut up, the both of you watched Euphoria once and coined yourselves as Queen Bees because you smoke weed and have sex. Go get some actual personality traits and stop messing with people who have real character.” What she said ended a little cliche but it was ignorable because it got the girls to leave; after they realized they didn’t have anything to say back to her.
“Thank you, I guess” Damian didn’t forget her earlier insult.
“Sorry about that, it's just when we started high school people started taking note of how we changed..” Dami motioned for her to continue.
“Y’know, boobs and hips for the girls, abs and body hair for the boys. And you.” She said the last part softly to try and cushion the blow. Damian was ashamed to admit that it actually hurt.
“Is that why people are calling me a ‘tranny’?”
“Yeah, there were rumors that you were a boy and you didn’t get approved for estrogen treatments or something. It didn’t help that euphoria came out around the time and people started calling you a Jules in progress.” The girl finished and looked at Dami like she felt sorry for her.
“What’s ‘Euphoria’?” It sounded like a club or a drug, but Damian wasn’t gonna voice her theories and risk sounding ignorant. There were many things Damian didn’t know about the people in her age group, especially the girls.
“It’s this show about teenagers making every stupid decison they possibly can, while simultaneously killng their brain cells. I only watched it because of the aesthetic but other people watch it so they gain a personality.” Damian knew what she meant, the girls that were in here looked like they couldn’t solve a long division problem. The Arabian girl decided to move the topic off of that God forsaken ‘Euphoria’ .
“I have half a mind to shut the entire dance down, for unfair seclusion.” It was better to take the legal route than the violent route. Her Mother basically owned Gotham in more ways than one.
“You could but that would just make people hate you,” the girl removed the pink purse from around her neck and grabbed a sticky note and gel pen from it. She starts writing on it. “My name's Victoria, here’s my number if you ever want to talk.” She offers the paper and Damian accepts it.
Victoria starts to walk away before Damian stops her.
“Wait,” she turns and acknowledges Damian.
“What is it?”
“When they said…” Damian struggles to find the words, “it looks like I don’t wash…” Damian cursed herself for being affected by their empty words, she was stronger than this.
The girl is kind enough to fill in the blanks on her own.
“You have a lot of dark spots. Like around your knees and ankles, it’s especially more visible because of your melanin. It’s caused by an excess of dead skin and sometimes it looks like dirt.” Damian nods.
“And how do I-” she’s cut off.
“Exfoliate.” Victoria states, then exits the bathroom. It's reasonable because they are beyond late for class. Damian heard the final bell ring minutes ago. She heads out as well, making a mental note to research ‘exfoliation’. She knew what it meant but didn’t want to risk doing it wrong.