Telling lies

I was taught to tell white lies, to tell people whatever it would take to get them to leave us alone. We told people in Philadelphia that we were from New York, and when we were in New York we told people we were from Philadelphia. The concern was that people would wonder why I wasn't in school, or start to ask questions about my mother. By making up these stories, people would be less likely to get suspicious.
If we were "just visiting," it made more sense that I was out of school for a few days or weeks and that my mother wasn't with us.
I was dressed as a boy for a while to get people off of our tracks. My father shaved off most of my hair and I became a little boy with a crew cut (I was given a boy's name to use). He got some boyish clothes for me, and I was told that I had to do this since my mother was hot on my trail and this way I'd be safer. I hated it, it was frightening to me. Another loss of identity, pretending to be someone I was not. Some lady yelled at me when I went into the girls bathroom once. I was too scared to go to the men's room so I continued going to women's public bathrooms, and I burst into tears and yelled "I'm a girl, I really am!! Leave me alone!" It only lasted a few weeks. I wonder if my father actually saw how much it was hurting me?
It was awful. Even worse than having my hair dyed red. That was also freaky. I was terrified of the dye, and screamed when my father attempted to dye my hair in a bathtub somewhere in Brooklyn. I was afraid of the dye getting into my eyes, but even more afraid of what it was doing to my heart and soul to constantly pretend to be someone other than me. I was just never good enough the way I was born.