Growing up I was a tomboy. I was the girl who loved outer space; the Rose Center’s planetarium was the highlight of my family’s trips to New York, and I was known to wear the same astronaut T-shirt for days in a row. Reading Tamora Pierce’s Alanna: The First Adventure, I dreamed of running away to become a knight. I even played Macbeth in our school’s production of the Shakespearean tragedy and was ecstatic to learn that when they divided up the role—the communist appeal of fifth-grade theater—I got to be in the part where Macduff lops off Macbeth’s head.
