No one plays with just one doll. At minimum, you’ve got a blonde and a brunette. Maybe a school of scratched, iridescent merfolk loaned from a cousin; a weary Ken doll to malign if you’re lucky. They come in flocks: velvet-skinned Groovy Girls with kinked acrylic hair, Madeline dolls sporting matching uniforms and gently sloping stomachs, and Galatean, plastinated Barbies. Despite their compositional differences, dolls seem to prefer the company of others. It’s lonely, I think, to be inanimate and lovely. 

I feel a kindredness with them, knowing we’ve both been produced to be consumed.  Even the loveliest doll is inevitably shorn with safety scissors and their face blunted with crayon. Likewise, girls grow to women, and we’re all blunted and shorn in our own secret, multifarious ways. When existing in a femme body, you can rest assured that the same forces which sculpt dolls will continue to prod at you: patriarchy and consumerism and objectification, pinching your cheeks pink and tugging your lips into a grin. 

This ripe-soft sympathy for dolls was impressed upon me by long childhood afternoons spent play-acting Greek tragedies starring heroine after heroine. My soft-bodied Achilles mourned her rigid plastic Patroclus, vowing to get revenge on the most solemn looking Barbie (Hector, obviously). Crouched on the butterscotch wood of my closet floor–the irony of which is not lost on me–I relished the privacy which allowed me to examine my blooming adoration for the women with which I populated my imagined worlds. I felt safe among their ranks, clutching my muses around their hollow wasp-waists. 

The one member I was prohibited from admitting to my coterie was a Monster High doll. These were strange phantasms of femininity; over-jointed, like the legs of insects, with skin in pastel tones (cotton candy blue and bruise purple and the subdued, minty green I associate with dusty prescription pills and office waiting rooms). Despite being monsters, they were indisputably beautiful. Though Frankie N. Stein sported slapdash stitches across her corpse-green cheek, she tossed her monochrome hair like a pony, undeterred by even the suggestion of ugliness. Their feet rotted away inside their 6 inch platform heels, and cerulean gills fluttered strangely against their lace-collared shirts. 

Several years later, buoyant with calimocho in an Italian restaurant in South Kensington, I gathered the courage to ask my mom why I’d never been granted one of the ghoulish figures. 

You always had enough to play with, she said, which was true. Growing up in a fold of sisters meant there was no shortage of hand-me-down plush actors to enlist, each of whom came hauling their own trunk of costumes. She paused to sip her chardonnay. Its buttery-gold burn let slip another truth, tenderer and more intimate: I was always cautious about giving you girls Barbies. I didn’t want you to feel like that was a body type you had to conform to. I tried to be selective about your dolls, my mother confided, between forkfuls of the salad she’d ordered to offset her lobster ravioli. 

This made sense to me. The Groovy Girls and Madeline dolls had resembled me as a child, had the softness of a body which did not yet know its final shape. Subversive as they seemed, the Monster High student body had conformed to the waifish beauty standard of the 2010s. 

And, she admitted, upon my prompting, They were creepy. I couldn’t imagine why a little girl would want to play with zombies and vampires. 

She’d hit on exactly what fascinated me about them. Their spectral clique was both irrevocably feminine and undeniably other, and it was this otherness which disturbed my mother and delighted me. They were exactly what I wanted to be: unsettling to those who could not see me the way I wanted them to, as plastic and inaccessible as a doll. Flat-chested, full-skirted, every aspect of yielding, corporeal sensuality wiped away. 

In the absence of this designed grotesque, I waterboarded my Barbies in the sun-stained creek in the backyard until their platinum locks blushed copper with silt. I invented dark secrets for them to hide from each other; auspicious ancestry or hidden power, a secret to harbor the same way I harbored my unknowable self. 

I knew that despite all appearances, I was kin to the Monster High coven. There was something off about me. I craved a beribboned radiance, but a spectre lurked beneath my surface, kelpielike and wanting. It reared its head when it came time for my synthetic-haired heroines to embark on epic quests, their chewed hands finding each others’ in search of a comfort I couldn’t name but which made me blush. 

It’s worth mentioning that I was raised a small-town New England Catholic in the 2000s, a denomination in which the homophobia promoted outright at other services was instead firmly implied. I got the sense that even though my parents weren’t purposefully ignorant, it was ontologically more convenient not to be gay, as my mom’s liberal politics could only do so much to save me from damnation. I felt immensely guilty that I couldn't suck it up and develop a crush on one of the boys in my grade, all sweaty-sweet from soccer practice with their perpetually-damp hair spiked up in the middle. I knew that if word got out about the dark core beneath my lacquer of adornment, I would be gradually Hester Prynned to the edge of town, not invited to sleepovers and danced snidely around in every conversation. 

Which would suck, obviously. But the threat of exclusion was manageable. I had three siblings, and was used to amusing myself when we got tired of each other. I could retreat to the mythology section of the public library and hide until everyone forgot all about my transgressions, or maybe until I went to college.

No, the worst part I knew with leaden certainty, in the way it dawns on you that you’re about to puke: when people found out about me, I wouldn’t be beautiful anymore. My true self would overshadow all the radiance I had collected, strip the paint from my nails and rip the ruffles from my skirts, sending them squirming like inchworms towards one more deserving. Worse still, I would be held at arm's-length from everything I adored–perfume, pegasi, pillow fights, pink–for fear that my eeriness would erode and pervert them too. I felt wretched, like who I was was a rot in my ribs that could at any moment stain and eat holes into everything I held tight to my chest. It all seemed so unfair, especially when I knew Frankie N. Stein was shambling around with borrowed limbs and still having legendary slumber parties with all her laughing, lovely friends. 

My dolls did not mind shouldering the weight of some latent internalized homophobia. They were already princesses of vast domains, murderous herbalists, and ageless gods. A suburban, sapphic coming-of-age story is fairly uninteresting when you have fought in the Trojan War several times. 

Besides, they were already well-aware of a truth I had yet to learn: while dolls appear pliant, they have iron wills. Barbies will not fit their boneless rubber feet into disembodied Bratz shoes, and Draculaura’s fishnet knee-highs won’t go over Laguna Blue’s knees on account of (duh) the transparent blue fins ribbing her calves. They do not change their shape. You can put a Malibu Barbie in a crocheted dress and have her act out your pioneer fantasies, but at the end of the day, she has spray-tan orange skin and a side part unsuited for puritanical plaits. 

So what’s the point, if dolls are made to enact the whims of others but are uncompromising in their own identities? If they must play the role of heroine, murdereress, and high priestess with whatever simpering smile has been painted on their faces?

The point is that dolls cannot change their shape anymore than I can change mine. Just as I loved Draculaura for her pink plastic irises and pointed ears–found her more beautiful because of them–so too is my queerness, my Frankensteinian womanhood. 

What are dolls for? Who am I for? The eight year old within me, probably, devouring fantasy novels full of princesses whose sweating hands never touched and making her Barbies kiss in secret under the cover of pine straw and mica-flecked boulders. The one wishing she was more like Clawdeen Wolf and Abbey Bominable, with a monstrosity inseparable from their beauty. What those melty-faced girls had was like a loose tooth I couldn't stop worrying: the ability to exist comfortably as someone strange, someone other--someone queer--and to trust that I would be found by those alike enough to love me. 

All my life I have wanted to be told, “The way you feel about other girls is beautiful.” That loving women could be jeweled, glittering, fine; not a blemish festering beneath my ribs. That it is like Draculaura’s fangs or Laguna’s fins. That I am not beautiful in spite of my queerness, but because of it. 

An updated version of the Monster High dolls was released during my senior year of college. Draculaura looks more like me now. They gave her wide hips and A-cups, traded her chunky Y2K highlights for a bubblegum and black split-dye. Her friends look like mine too: Frankie uses they/them pronouns and a mobility aid, and Venus McFlytrap has ditched her silk press for fuchsia and lime green twists.

As it goes with old friends in suburbia, Draculaura and I reunited in Target on a rainy spring afternoon. Her heavy-lashed eyes sparkled up at me under the fluorescent lights, and ivory fangs cut the anemic bloom of her lips. I found myself viscerally and unexpectedly relieved at the sight of her taffy-colored face, shocked by our similarity after so many years apart.

It didn’t take long to catch up. She was in her 13th year of high school, still wobbling to algebra on heart-buckle heels. I was finishing a B. A. in English, wearing berry-colored lip gloss to the library and stealing glances at goth girls over a dog-eared copy of Gideon the Ninth. 

I lingered for a moment, eyes catching on her filmy black knee socks, her frilly peignoir. I wanted to incorporate her, to eat her, to look in the mirror and see a part of her smiling back. I felt about her the way that I had so many girls: unable to tell where my love for her stopped and my desire to resemble her began. 

The tagline of the new generation of dolls coaxed me from her packaging like an outstretched hand: At Monster High, everyone belongs!