Retrace

Chapter 2 : Here We Go Again

'I guess there's gotta be a break in the monotony but Jesus, when it rains, how it pours'

—OK GO, Here We Go Again

*

Just then, her alarm went off. Nostalgia surged with the adrenaline it kicked through her veins. When she scrambled out of bed to charge across the room and turn it off—heels stump-stump-stumping on chilly terrazzo—she spared a fond glance for it, the innocuous white box of a radio clock that had been with her since childhood. Its red numbers glared back at her.

I have to get a shower, she thought firmly. I have to make this look normal. If she was sixteen, she was still riding the bus to school. Her heart sank at the thought of all the people she would soon have to interact with, all the interactions she'd have to fake til she made. But with a quick grind of her teeth, the girl forced her determination front and center.

I have to maintain for now.

Darting back to her notebook, she scribbled, 'This will be a true test of so many things. My endurance. My crapspackle memory. My patience. But more than anything I have to remember that no matter how tempting it'll be to upset the status quo, I can't kickstart my own personal Pompeii until I've thought, really thought about what it will affect.'

Her future. Her unborn child.

There was more to it than that, but it would have to wait for now.

*

Showering proved unsettling, but not because there was less body to clean. Her hair was shorter. Much shorter. When she'd gone to bed the night before, it had been in a braid like usual, and had it been let down, it would have impudently flossed the crack of her butt. But when she was sixteen, her hair was only to her shoulders.

She resolved to blow dry and straighten it, but found she hadn't purchased her first straightener yet.

A headache threatened. She needed to put on her glasses—oh. She blinked down at the little green-and-white case. Of course. In high school, she could afford to wear contact lenses. She had the patience for them, and it didn't matter if she lost one.

Putting them in after so many years without was a trip, but she managed.  

Glaring at herself in the mirror, the girl leaned forward and inspected her nose—not yet beginning to resemble a potato like it would, thanks to her mother's side of the family—her teeth, whiter than she'd seen them in ages, and her skin, so much clearer. She snorted at herself, remembering how she'd angsted over the one red pimple there on her cheekbone.

I only know that I know nothing. Not only did acne continue in adulthood, especially with poor diet, but it was pervasive, distracting, and it scarred like nobody's business.

She wouldn't miss that.

Nor would she miss the belly she'd grown used to lugging around like a tumorous inner tube. Standing up straight, she tightened her abs—swimming muscles! I still have swimming muscles, mein Gott—and admired the body that was still a size 7-8.

Then she hugged herself. I had no idea what fat was. I took this for granted.

"Kaylee?"

Her mother's voice through the bathroom door shocked her worse than her alarm had.

"Yeah?" she called, her voice higher in pitch than it had been in years, and more tremulous than she would have liked. Maybe it wasn't just the sudden sound or her mother's voice, but the name itself. She'd never liked it. She'd been working to find her own identity away from it, and all the baggage it possessed, since her existential crisis two years ago—thirteen years from now.

She realized she'd been hiding from it, carefully thinking of herself not as Kaylee but as Dean, the protagonist of her erstwhile fiction and embodiment of the true, non-binary self she'd discovered so recently.

It wouldn't be possible to present that way. Her mother never let her dress as anything other than feminine, constantly pushing her to wear pink lipstick despite her pale coloring, and purchase only 'girly' clothes.

It would be doubly difficult now to keep her 'self' separate from all of that.

"Did you fall in?"

"I'm doing my hair!" she retorted. Shot herself a fourth-wall break of a glance in the mirror. Come on, she told herself sternly. For once in your life, be mature. You were just regretting acting like a child when she visited last week—fifteen years from now. You can be better than this.

"I'll be out in a minute," she added, softer.

But her mother had left.

When the girl—I've got to refer to myself as something, she thought with a tinge of despair—left the bathroom, she could hear her mother bustling in the kitchen. She remembered how long it had taken her mother to reclaim herself after the divorce, and swallowed down a lump that rose. From the other side of things, she found she was proud of her mother then: in the kitchen at six-ish in the morning, instead of in bed.

What can I allow myself? She pondered as she flung open her closet, frowning at the brightly colored choices. What of my identity can I wear, what of it can I carry, and what must I lock away? By now, she knew her limitations, and knew that anything she carried close to her chest would begin to leak out in time. She could keep secrets of a factual nature, but being duplicitous for any extended period of time was difficult. She would become complacent. She would slip.

But I know I'm not 'the girl.' I know I was assigned female at birth and am non-binary, genderfluid. She stated it as fact because it was a fact, despite not having known it at the time she was reliving. Memories proved that lack of knowledge did not constitute a reality. She had always wavered between.

I'm Dean, she thought firmly, sliding shirt after girl shirt aside, hanger by hanger. I am my own protagonist and I know who the eff I am. It would be hard in the coming days to hold on to that. Better to establish a baseline now. Better to make sure she had ground to stand on before attempting to fly.

Because she was running out of time, she settled on an outfit she'd missed in recent years: tight, light denim with zippers running up the legs, and a feminine-cut tee with an abstract floral graphic. It fit her very well. She spared a glance in the mirror before she grabbed her bag.

It had become so difficult to bolster her self-confidence after she had Rhys. Before, even. After she'd graduated from college, she and Bruce had moved north to live with his parents, and the hilly terrain made the biking she was used to nigh impossible. She grew fat. Fatter than she'd been in her entire life. And though she'd managed to shed some of the weight, it all piled right back on during pregnancy.

Then, after he was born and life became a series of sleepless nights, it stayed.

Shaking her head to clear it, Dean grabbed her bag and headed toward the front of the house. "I'm going!" she called to her mother.

"Have a good day, sweetie! I love you!"

"Love you too!" She let the volume carry the words through yet another lump in her throat.

Then she flung the door open, stepped through, and closed it. The bus was rounding the corner.

Her heart was pounding.

Maintain, maintain, she chanted to herself. Back right, headphones on. Ignore the creeps in the seat behind you.

She mounted the steps and said a cheerful hello to the bus driver, the older redhead she still thought of fondly sometimes. When the woman returned the greeting, her smile grew.

Then she turned toward a sea of faces she hadn't seen in over a decade, and it faded from her face.