Timeline: takes place in the first season. If any anachronisms exist, consider it AU. ;)

"Ophelia"

Rupert is surprised by girls these days.

There's their language: in his youth, only the boys used those bawdy words. Rupert has noticed that no girls put their heads together and giggle when "fuck" or "pussy" rings out in the hallways. Like tube passengers, nothing shatters that facade of cool ennui.

He wonders how many other behaviors his "Scoobies" censor from him.

Buffy and Cordelia speak of violence quite often, and casually. The kind of violence men commit against women. "You got so drunk, you decided to sleep it off in a bedroom upstairs?!" Rupert hears Cordelia shriek. His office door is closed, but the entryway to the checkout desk is open. "Like, 'please rape me'!" The shrill voice drips Valley Girl exaggeration.

Buffy giggles and admits her fault.

Is this new? Rupert finds himself wondering. Was this girl-culture always there, absent from his boys' preparatory school?

"If you want to understand them," Jenny suggests, "maybe you should do some research." The subtle tease was not lost on Rupert.

So he does. He reads Seventeen, the pages splashed with scrawny girls baring shoulders and thighs. Concerns, alien as The Thing that Ate Manhattan, blossom in his mind. Does Buffy wear those tops that show her bra straps show because she likes them, or because boys like them? Does Willow wear overalls and sneakers because she's a moral girl, or a self-conscious one? He watches them pull combs and lipsticks out of their bookbags and worries: do they hate themselves?

Rupert researches further. Children who cut or burn themselves as punishment for being too tall, too short, too dark, too fair . . . a mental disease wherein girls desire the bodies of concentration camp refugees. . . . Rupert had known that boys obsess over the measurement of their body parts, but had thought -- wished -- that girls were secure in the benefit of their womanly curves.

"But they're good kids," Rupert tells Jenny at the end of the week he spent reading Reviving Ophelia. "I thought The Feminine Mystique was radical. . . . Do you know they -- ah -- well, they do things that w-we hadn't heard of at that age? Things people our age didn't do until -- well, ah -- usually a-after they were quite a bit older."

Jenny nods but doesn't comment; it is too early in their relationship to be talking about that.

"She just isn't at all what I was expecting." Confusion crinkles his brows, widens his eyes; he casts a plea across the candlelit table.

Jenny nods sympathetically, changes the subject. She has no answers, either.

end

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