Perhaps in whatever years Genie was turning into Genevieve, I was supposed to have been turning into someone called Cassandra. Worse, perhaps I had already turned into Cassandra; perhaps it was Cassandra who made her white colleagues feel so comfortable that they whispered to her while waiting for the coffee to brew or the microwave to ding, “Genevieve—she’s a lot, isn’t she?” Cassandra whom the director trusted to fix Genevieve’s missteps on behalf of the U.S. government. Perhaps I’d been Cassandra for some time now, walking around using some bolder girl’s name.
