R + C

Coming Home

Shifting his sky blue 93 Geo Prism into gear, Roland McQueen screeched the tires just a bit before backing off the gas to compensate for the slick roads that plagued the end of his journey home, thanks to the downpour that had just passed through. He had left this place nearly four years ago, his perfect SAT score garnering a full scholarship to MIT, which gave him a free ticket out of this backwards town.

He had been back only once, the previous Christmas, when he had reintroduced himself to his parents after three and a half years of self-discovery. It had not gone so well. Their reaction had shaken the confidence he had built living out on his own. He could only hope that the months had given them time to accept things.

I'm just being honest; is that so wrong? Roland pondered discontentedly. As the car pulled into the driveway, he depressed the clutch, shifted into neutral, lifted the handbrake, and turned the ignition off. He sat still for a few seconds, trying to calm the crushing anxiety that had only grown with each of the 1,200 miles driven over the last 21 hours. He had hit rush hour in Atlanta, which frayed the few nerves he had left. He knew he had to be running on fumes at this point, but inexplicably, he was wired.

Not bothering to unload his things just yet, he did make sure to grab his cell phone off the car charger before finally getting out of the car and moving toward the front door. Pulling out his keyring, he unlocked it and walked in.

"Mom, Dad, anybody home?" Roland queried. A cabinet door slammed in the kitchen.

"Roxanne, is that you?" Ugh. The dreaded deadname. And things were going so well up until then.

"I told you over Christmas, Mom. My name is Roland."

"That's not the name I gave you, though, dear." Maple syrup was not as sweet as his mother's voice at that moment.

"Where's Dad?" Roland should not have expected a better outcome with his father, and he knew it even as he asked the question. That did not squelch the hope he still felt.

"Outside in his shop, where do you think? Do you remember how you used to play with..." his mother started, only to be cut off.

"Yes, I vividly remember trying to play with Dad's tools. You told me they weren't meant for little girls," he retorted, unsure if she realized that she underscored his nature while trying to reminisce about a time when she found life more controllable.

"Right, well, he's out there, if you want to go say 'hi'."

Roland shook his head slowly from side to side, unsure if his mother was in denial or if she genuinely had a screw loose now.

The door to the shed was partially open when he reached it, so he knocked twice out of courtesy and walked on inside. The space was not particularly large; about a third of the room was occupied by a workbench with a huge red tool chest on one side and an even larger wooden shelving unit on the other. This had been his setup for two decades.

Turning his head from the toaster oven with which he was piddling, Dad brightened a shade. "Well, hey there, Roxy. I didn't realize you would be getting home today."

Roland gritted his teeth. "If you're going to use a nickname, Dad, it needs to be Rollie, okay?"

His father sighed theatrically. "Come on, Roxy, college is over. It's time to put all that behind you..."

Dad continued to talk after that, but Roland heard none of it. Instead, a high-pitched whistle reverberated through his skull as he saw white.

I should never have come home. I wasn't cut out for Alabama.

Biting his tongue so hard he could taste blood as he counted down, slowly and silently, from ten to zero, Roland got himself under control enough to not walk into the back wall of the house as he stormed away from his father and into his old room, slamming the door behind him before burying his face into the pillows on the bed. As he lay there, the muscles in his neck steadily tensed up to the point that his head was shaking back and forth like a rattle, and he let out every decibel he could possibly muster into the cushions below.

That done, his entire body went limp, as the fight left him. Roland then rolled tiredly onto his back letting his head loll over toward the outside wall, where his closet was positioned. The closet full of dresses worn once to placate mother's need to feel like she was bringing her little girl along. Shifting his eyes, he saw the jewelry, hardly touched, in two jewelry boxes on the dresser. Then the trunk in the corner with virtually brand-new Barbie dolls.

His eyes stopped on the chest of drawers. He immediately sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and walked over to gather the picture frame from the day at the water park when he was 18 and still known as Roxanne. It had been set up as a double date with him and his best friend, Christine, going out with these twin brothers, but they had gotten sick at the last moment, and Roland was blessed with what really felt like a date with Christine. They had brushed lips in the food court and shared a wonderfully awkward laugh afterward. Christine's cheeks were strawberry red for about ten minutes.

The memory was a welcome reprieve from the demons of his childhood.

I wonder where she is now? She had gone to Auburn, just a few miles down the road from their parents. They had talked a couple times during the first several months, but Roland had quickly started growing away from all his hometown things as he embraced his reality.

Just then, a car door slammed one house over. Roland thanked his lucky stars when he saw who it was through the window. She still had blonde silk running down to her waist, with a pair of sparkling sapphires set on either side of her nose. Her body remained toned like the long-distance runner she was in high school.

Before he could stop himself, his legs were moving. As he walked into the living room, his mother piped up. "And just where do you think you're going, young lady?" Like nails on a chalkboard.

"Away," he replied, unwilling to waste any more time teaching his parents that his own opinion of his life rates higher than their opinion of his life, and quickly stepped out the door.

"Hey Chris!" Roland called as he closed the door to his parents' house. Christine, who had just inserted her key in the lock, turned her head, and immediately turned the rest of her body to run toward him.

"Roxy?! OH MY GOD!!!" she exclaimed as they wrapped their arms around each other. It did not hurt quite so bad since he had never told her about anything.

"Well, actually, it's Roland now, if you don't mind," he replied softly into her ear, with a not-so-small helping of fear in his voice.

Christine pulled back just enough to see his face and started beaming. "That's... that's amazing!"

"You mean... it doesn't freak you out?"

"Well, actually, I kind of have a confession, too. But let's go inside first."

Once in, they walked wordlessly back to her room, just in case they might be disturbed. They sat down on her bed and turned to look at one another.

Christine started with a question about the very event he'd remembered earlier: "Do you remember that day we went to the water park, when you were leaning forward, and I turned, and our lips touched?"

"Of course I do," Roland replied.

"Really? Well, it got me pretty confused, because I'd never felt anything even remotely like that with any of the boys I'd dated before, and I wondered if I might be gay.

"But then I got to college and experimented a little and didn't have anything like that kind of reaction when I kissed other girls. And then I met a couple of guys who were more than the boys we went to high school with, and they were amazing, so I knew I wasn't gay," Christine reasoned.

Before Roland could process the thought progression to understand what Christine might be hinting at, the weight of his drive from Boston to Alabama slammed full force into him, and his head started swimming with exhaustion.

"I think... I... need... sleep," he managed to force out as his eyes started to glaze over. His brain was not quite clicking on all cylinders, and his body started to move like he was going to get up. "Gotta... go... home," he muttered dreamily.

Christine put her hand on his chest and gently pushed him down on the bed. "Shhh. You'll sleep here. We'll talk in the morning."

A satisfied look plastered itself on Roland's face. "Talk... morn..." With that, his body went slack as he succumbed to slumber.

A single tear slid down Christine's face. "It was real," she said to herself. The spark she had first acknowledged on that fateful summer day had finally caught ablaze and was threatening to turn into a wildfire.

Smiling a smile that seemingly held a secret, she said, "Okay then, let it burn..."

With that, she pulled the sheets over Roland's figure and kissed him lightly on the forehead. It would wait until morning.