The Prelude to a Difficult Conversation "These?" Cleo asked tentatively, holding up a pair of light purple shorts.
"Maybe," her daddy relented grudgingly. He had never been a fan of clothes shopping. His tactic until now had been to get in and out as quickly as possible, letting Cleo choose whatever she wanted, so long as it was reasonably affordable and practical. This year hadn't been so easy though. He had noticed people noticing Cleo, and it disturbed him. To him, she was still his baby girl but she would be a teenager soon, hormones racing, surrounded other teenagers, not to mention her unfortunate habit of hanging out with her male teachers. He didn't want them, any of them, looking at her like that. Inevitable though he knew it was, he at least hoped he could mitigate it somewhat by how he allowed her to dress. The retailers, however, seemed to have other ideas. They were onto their third shop of the day, and there so far hadn’t been a single pair of shorts that didn't stop perilously high up her thighs. No t-shirt that wasn't cut to suggest a shape that her body didn't possess yet. It seemed like the world had determined she should dress to suggest feminine sexuality from as early an age as possible. The only choice seemed whether she did so in pastel pink or purple.
Cleo took a pair of shorts from the rail, feeling rather mystified. Her father had never been this fussy about her clothing before. She had initially assumed that price was the issue but he had vetoed cheaper choices than these. She had never particularly considered how she looked in clothes, and certainly did not think of herself in the terms that other people seemed to be starting to. And, after all, the clothes themselves had not undergone any kind of radical alteration - the shorts she had worn every summer had been as short. It had just seemed so much more harmless to her father when she had been five or six.
“How about these?” he asked desperately, as they made their way around the shop.
“Those are for boys,” Cleo protested with evident disdain.
“They’re good though. Nice and… practical. Maybe for gardening,” he pushed, hoping if he just got her to get the shorts, he could get her to wear them at other times too, or at least if she got into the habit of wearing them for gardening, she’d wear them around that professor. He thanked the stars that her school uniform was basically a shapeless bag.
“Sure, whatever,” Cleo shrugged. The shorts were ugly, but she didn’t care what she wore to the allotment. She wasn’t sure why her daddy wanted her to suddenly start having specific clothes for it, as she’d always just used any old thing, but it wasn’t like she was going to fight it if it suddenly mattered to him that much.
He tried not to let the word, or rather the word combined with its tone, agitate him, but it was said in that way beloved by a certain group of people…. Horrible teenagers. He’d known, even before she came back for the summer, but between that and the looks he’d seen her getting… It was going to be time for the talk that he’d been dreading her whole life.