“Last call everyone. You no have to go home, but you cannot stay!”

The bartender, Jakob Adamovich, bellowed. He was the sole worker, except for his wife and mother who worked in the back of house to deliver the best cheeseburger with a pretzel crust to ever grace the planet. I was able to try it once, three weeks prior when they had an extra one after someone mouthed off to the six-foot-three Jake who threw him out with absolutely no effort. Jake allowed me to sit at a table at the back of the bar so I could study as it was difficult to do homework by the dashboard light.

I had been living in my car for four weeks.

Six hundred and seventy-two hours, but who’s counting, eh? November 23rd was the date the world as I knew it came crashing down. My parents invited my sister, Justine, and her family—consisting of her husband, Bryan, and their eight-year-old twin boys, Barry and Bryce. Everyone was to dress up—something I never understood because every year dad submerged his tie in gravy. Mom would drop something into her dress, be it stuffing, cranberry sauce or mashed potatoes and whatever it was would be sitting there, in plain view, on her chest. I thought bibs or barber capes would have been a good idea but that would throw the whole Norman Rockwell theme out the proverbial windows. Would you like to know what else rips that old-timey 1950s façade? Try wearing a skirt for the first time in public.

Well, not exactly in public as I was still in the privacy of my home; oh, but to hear the wailing and the gashing of teeth from my parents and brother-in-law a passerby would assume the turkey caught fire and was consuming the house. No, just my world. A blue dress with red blooms was the special course of the day: “deAmico flambe” served piping hot and sans a la mode.
Mouths were agape for a very long four seconds but then Dad stood up from his chair and started yelling out “God damn”-this and “Jesus Christ”-that…one could imagine would be sitting on the couch pondering if he should ask my dad about stones thrown from a house of glass. Speaking of glasses, my sister dropped her glass of wine, her husband looked like I had shattered a few thousand mirrors and mom stepped from the kitchen and lifted her glasses up from the chain dangling around her neck.

“Justin, why are you in a dress?” Mom asked.
Dad gulped at the air.
“Is that one of my old dresses?” Justine asked.
“I bought it last week.”
“You went to a store and tried it on? They let you do that?” Dad exclaimed as he stood up.
Bryan appeared to want to say something but held off any comments for the time being.
“Yes, I did. I even got matching shoes.” I pointed to my feet. The shoes were flats, but the lady at the store said they matched the dress’ accents.
All eyes looked down on me. Not on my shoes, just on me.
“Take it off and change,” mom said from the kitchen. “Is that wine on my carpet!?”
“Yes, sorry, mom. I was surprised by Justin.”
“You should go change, Justin, “Bryce called out as he ran past mom and into the kitchen.
“Why?” I asked in the most innocent way possible, but…
“You have a pair of slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie. Go put them on.”

I had buried those items of clothing deep in the ground of my mind and in real life, they were all part of the compost heap. I wasn’t sure if polyester was good to add to add to mix but hey, I thought they were all waste that needed to be taken out of my life. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had spent a good amount a small wardrobe. Enough to annoy my parents for the next seven days.
Dinner was eaten in silence, at least in silence towards me. Everyone else ate and talked amongst themselves with only Bryce acknowledging my presence at the table and passing a limited number of items to me. I wanted to make a snort or sigh to show my displeasure that no one wanted to hear the “who” part. The one where I would tell them I never felt like a son or brother. They could have seen the real me so much earlier if they had allowed me to follow what my mind and heart.

No, no, Justin had to go into sports that he did not want to play. Justin was not allowed to own dolls or anything remotely colored pink. Grandma had sent me a Cabbage Patch Kid one year. It was a baby girl with the pinkest and frilliest onesie that could have been placed on a doll. My mom gave it to Justine, as ‘obviously’ Grandma had made a mistake. I did not fight back tears as my older sister took the baby doll and placed it with her CD player and other “older” things for a teenager. She traded the doll the following week to someone at school for concert tickets.

As a child I always had two thoughts: That I would shed this Justin persona and be the true self I imagined or die without trying. I had weekly sessions of l'appel du vide, of various ways to end my life but each time I would turn my back to said void. Tragically, my dad agreed with that dark specter of thought and gave me the ultimatum to either ditch the dresses or I was out of the house. The irresistible force paradox occurred as neither of us would give-in over next twenty-four hours, so Dad did the unthinkable: he called the police to have me removed.

I carried very little with me: some clothes, notebook, school textbooks and a few notebooks. I did not bring any pictures, and it was probably a good thing I didn’t as I would have probably smashed one over their heads, Bryce and Barry excluded. Four officers escorted me out the front door. There was not weeping by or for anyone as I walked past the threshold and never looked back.

In The Bleak of the Arriving Winter

I loaded my backpack and walked out of the bar. There was snow on the ground with nothing new falling but there was a sharp coldness to the air that immediately attacked any exposed member of your body. In my case, my face and one hand—if I didn’t have it jammed in the right-hand pocket of my coat. The night was quiet, almost too tranquil, with my boots loudly clomping through the silence. My car was parked in a parking lot where you paid by the week…at least I did, as the company that had control over the lot never asked anything about me. The thought that my luck would run out one day did go through my mind every other week.
I was able to take showers at a gym--my parents had a membership for any location in the city. They had forgotten about the membership so why not use it? The gym was closed, being Christmas Eve—the only twenty-four period it was ever closed. It would have been great to walk in, take a shower, do some a laissez-faire exercise, and maybe catch a few winks on a couch near the smoothie bar as I sometimes did before my morning classes.

My car was still there when I arrived at the lot. I took a walk around it to see if there was any sign of tampering, tire issues or the theft of the license plate. Not seeing anything wrong I unlocked the car, at my backpack in the backseat and then closed the door and locked it. I had some MacGyver inspired rod and curtains to cover the windows that I could deploy and re-open with the push and pull of a cord in the front passenger seat. I pulled the cord and blocked the windows.

The car was a 1976 Dodge Dart sedan. The front sear barely reclined, and it ate tires due to improper alignment. There was a huge chunk of the exhaust pipe missing between the front of the car to the muffler and it went through more oil than gas. I suppose I could have chocked it up, added a set of stairs and call it a mobile home. It wasn’t much, but it’s what I had.
I had inherited the stubborn streak from my mother and even on the nights that I laid freezing on the backseat with two blankets and a pillow did never I think to jump to the front, drive home, and grovel to return like a prodigal daughter, because as soon they noticed I had not abandoned my life and returned to the shackles of the patriarchy, the cycle would begin anew. Tempers would flare and Mom would scream about where her precious “Justin” went, and she just wanted him back.

“Justin’s dead,” I whispered as I tossed about trying to get a modicum of heat underneath the blanket, but to no avail. It was just too cold. I pondered driving over to a shelter, but it was run by the church and a parley with them meant I would be placed with the men for the night and identify myself as something I wasn’t. There was a slight thought in my mind to just break in and simply hang out in the foyer with my blankets.
It would be like urban camping.

Instead, I fought the bite of the cold on my joints, gathered my blankets into the front seat so they would be in front of the vents. I turned the engine over and cranked the heater up to eleven. I felt old man winter’s breath as the vents piped out only cold air for a few minutes. Soon, everything would be to so toasty, and I rubbed my hands slightly in front of the still cold vents. The windows were frosted over, and I intended to leave it that way with all the heart firing onto my blankets. If I set one of them on fire, that could have helped.

I draped one of the blankets around me and could feel a little warmth and it felt soothing. I could warm the car up like a sauna, fall asleep in my cotton and polyester cocoon and in the morning I would go to the Waffle House to read. Going to there at night was just as bad as the shelters, except instead of dealing with men and women drunk on power, you had to deal with thugs who were just drunk.

“Hey!” a voice yelled as someone rapped their knuckles against the driver’s side door. It wasn’t the police as their party lights would strobe though the makeshift blinds. I could have pretended the car was empty if the engine wasn’t on.
“Open up, Justin, I know you’re in there!”
“Justin isn’t here,” I calmly replied. “So go away.”
“Your parents and sister sent me to find you. They’ve been worried”
“Bryce?” I asked.
“Yeah, open the door and let’s talk.”

There was a smidgin of faith in me that maybe he was telling the truth. Did my family really want me back? Was my gender no longer a stupid wedge that divided our family? I opened the blinds, ready to see Bryce through the frosty glazed windows with a quasi-smile and chattering teeth due to the cold but, no one was there.
I had heard his voice.
I felt the knocking on the door.
“Bryce?” I asked as I looked around saw nothing around the car.

I threw the blinds up once again and wrapped the blanket around me ever so tighter. It was very warm in the car, almost uncomfortably which I thought it would be impossible on a night like that. It was then I smelled smoke and like an idiot I started throwing things around, trying to find the source and maybe at the same time feeding a baby fire just the right of oxygen it needed to engulf the car. I fumbled with the blankets in the front and pulled them away from the heaters to reveal orange flames dancing in my eyes!
“Help!”
I bolted from the car, or at least I tried as the blanket I carried entwined around my legs, and I fell to the ground. I scampered away from the flaming wreck of what was left of my life and collapsed in the snow. The flames danced in a blue hue with red blooms.
 

“Hey, you alright?”
I blinked a few times and looked above the shadow that loomed over me.
A man with short blond hair walked closer and leaned down. “Did you slip and fall?”
“I guess so, but…no, I was in my car.”
“Where is your car?”
“I, I don’t know,” I asked as I looked around me. Nothing looked familiar to me. What happened to me?
“Do you feel like standing?”
“I think I can”, I replied as he helped me stand. He then brushed the snow off my coat and backpack before handing it to me.
“I’m Mike.”
“Juliette.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so…but I don’t recognize this street. I don’t know how I got here.”

Mike nodded as he looked down the street. I thought maybe he was getting ready to signal some buddies to come and throw me into a non-descript white van.
“Yeah, it’s kind of like “ye olde neighborhood” of times gone by. I know where we are, let’s get you back to civilization. Can I carry your backpack for you?”
“Thanks but, I prefer carrying it myself.”
“As you wish,” Mike replied as he took the lead to guide me. “I used to live around here. Had a lot of laughs and used to go sledding down this road with a sled tied to the back of a Volkswagen bug.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Absolutely,” Mike replied with a grin.

“Okay,” I commented as I once again looked around and saw houses lit up with lights and ornaments. I stopped and glanced at a house across the street. It looked like my old house the way dad loved to put on enough lights to make a fan out of our electric meter.
I bit my lip and shook my head. No, those days were gone. I could only live vicariously through the memories in my head. Why did they have to throw me out? Why not embrace me as another daughter? I wanted to throw a few rocks at the house as a substitute of my memories.

Mike stopped walking and turned back to me.
“Thinking about the past?”
“No,” I replied as I tried—and failed—to nonchalantly wipe the tears from my eyes.
“It’s okay I have those thoughts too.”
“What thoughts?” I asked as I hoisted my backpack and continued following Mike.
“Mikal Jakob Adamovich; the fist, the ‘Adam’ of the Adamovich family to be accepted to go to college and to make something of himself. I was to climb the mountain and claim what my father and grandfather could not and, as he said, make something of myself. But all I wanted was to be just a girl.”
“You could do all of that as a girl.”
“Nemaye. My father wanted nothing to do with that. Zaboroneno! Forbidden!”
“I can understand that” I replied as we rounded the corner which revealed a street I was familiar with, with the bar I called my home away from away from home.
“I made the choice to transition before the ink on my college application to dry and when he found out about it, it came to blows. Heavy blows. I ran away from home that day and never looked back. I wish I had…maybe I could have talked about to him once he saw how stunning I looked in a Stella McCartney.”
I nodded as we stopped in front of the bar. Mike investigated the dark interior.
“I never got to speak with him. Maybe he would have been proud of seeing his daughter, Mikala, making something of herself.”
“Sometimes families don’t want to listen.”
“Sometimes…sometimes,” he whispered as he turned back to me. “Juliette deAmico, we can help each other tonight.”
“Help! My car!” I took off down the block but then stopped and looked back.
“I need you to remember a number for me: 5093253637”
“Okay.”
“Tell them Huggy Bear will always miss them.”
“I don’t understand,” I replied as I started coughing.
“Give them that number, have them call them.” Mike replied as his body turned into a translucent mist as my cough got louder causing me to drop my backpack and collapse into the snowbank.

“You’re awake,” a nurse said as she shined a light into each of my eyes.
I could feel something in my nose: an oxygen line.
I looked around the room. It had curtains for walls on three sides. Judging by sounds of beeping and the footsteps I assumed I was at an ER.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Juliette deAmico,” I replied, my voice still raspy.
“We called your parents, based on the name and number you told the EMT’s.”
I closed my eyes and wanted to shake my head but fought back.
“Do you know what happened?” She asked as a man in a white coat three back the curtains and looked at me.
“It appears we have been given a gift this morning.”
“What happened to me?”
“Miss deAmico, can you tell me today’s date?”
“December 25th, 2018.”
“Can you tell me who the president is?”
“Trump?” I asked.
“Tragically, yes,” the doctor replied as he checked off something on a clipboard. “Miss deAmico, you were found in a car with the engine running.”
“I was trying to stay warm,” I replied, feeling almost guilty.
“How are her oxygen levels?” He asked the nurse as she placed a sensor on my finger to read my heartrate.
“Levels are good. Heartrate is good.”
“But I wasn’t in my car. It caught fire and I…I woke up in the snow when this guy appeared--”
A man and two women stepped into the room. I recognized them the bar the night before. Their eyes were like saucers until they saw me; then they looked annoyed and then looked at the doctor.
“I was told my daughter was here!”
“She’s not your daughter?”
“No, she is friendly person at my business. See her every day, but she is not my daughter.
“Mikala said she wished you could see her and not Mike.”
“Mikala?” the older woman pushed her way forward. “How do you know?”
“Mikala found me in the snow and walked me back to my car and stated how there was fight and you never saw her again. She said to tell you ‘Huggie Bear will always miss you.”
The three looked back and forth amongst each other and then to me.
“I always wanted to apologize to her…I…did not mean the things I said,” Mr. Adamovich said as wept. His wife and mother stood in a group hug for what seemed as an eternity, and I loved seeing them together like that. I imagined Mikala standing with them, embracing them.
“Our Mikala died so many years ago…after I tossed her out and then…”
“Vanished in the night,” his wife finished.
“Never got to tell her. But she sent message from the beyond.”
The doctor and nurse stood dumbfounded for a moment, as did I.
“Juliette, if you had gotten out of the car, then you would have been able to vent the carbon monoxide from the vehicle. You were found unconscious in your car,” the doctor said and then looked at Adamovich family.
“Nemaye! No!" Mr. Adamovich shouted. “No, my daughter came down to speak to her. This girl is now a part of our family!”
“Sir, I—” I started to protest but the three then rushed around my bedside.
The older woman shoved the doctor out of the way and looked at me with eyes that looked like they were going to melt. “Obnimayushchiy medved, idi domoy.”
“Yes, you come home. I take responsibility for this girl!” Mr. Adamovich bellowed.
“You don’t really know me,” I replied.
“But you knew the real Mikala, and that is all we need for this Christmas morning,” Mr Adamovich whispered.