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The Morning After Christmas
Maybe all the right answers will come to us one day.
The haze of last night streams through my brain like a knock-knock-knock on a door. But my eyes blearily open to the daylight peeking through the slats of the blinds in the hotel room I checked into yesterday.
In flashes, the memories come back: the way I screamed at my parents after they picked the fight with me that made me storm out, the crunch of snow as my brother and his wife ran after me in the below-zero temperatures, the slam of my car door right before I peeled away from the street where I’d grown up. I could imagine the neighbors hearing the ruckus and staring out from behind their curtains as the Robinsons made another scene for the holiday season.
Me? I was Bae Robinson — formerly Bailey Robinson, the ex-captain of the Rutherford Ramblers cheer squad, the once-upon-a-time golden girl who had made her parents proud by being a debate team champion and prom queen in her high school years.
But all that had gone down the tubes when I decided maybe I didn’t want to be a girl anymore. Hell, I didn’t even want to be a boy either. That made things harder. My parents didn’t know what to do with someone who seemingly couldn’t decide what they wanted — needed — to be.
