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When Alistair was 12, before he had even settled on Alistair as a name, he’d taken to locking his room. This increased the number of fights he had with his parents, but they’d never managed to get past the lock and had never escalated to taking the door off its hinges or anything drastic like that, so he considered it a win. It wasn’t as though letting them in his room would have resulted in any less fights, anyway.
When he was 14, and had decided his name was Alistair, he cut all his hair off with the kitchen scissors like a 4-year-old and told his parents he was a boy. They agreed to let him get a boys haircut, as long as he’d get it done by a professional in a salon instead of chopping it off with the scissors again, and after a week of twice-daily screaming matches they agreed to give him a twice-yearly clothing budget and let him pick his own clothes from whatever section of the store he wanted. They refused to call him Alistair or use the right pronouns or refer to him as their son. It wasn’t quite a win, but it wasn’t quite a loss either.
As soon as he turned 15 he got a part-time job washing dishes at a local restaurant. He didn’t spend money on drugs and food out like his friends did- instead, he saved it. He traded unwanted birthday and christmas presents, of which he got many, and willingness to do other people’s homework for them for weed. He stayed at friends houses whenever neither he nor they were grounded, and hid in his room except for during meals when he was at home. He figured he could move out when he left for college, and get a part-time job in college, and probably an apartment over summers, and his savings should at least let him pay for testosterone without having to fight with his parents about it. All he had to do was survive til 18.
It only took two weeks after his 16th birthday for another fight with his parents to end in him grounded for a month. It was, Alistair thought, the worst month of his life. As he went to bed on the 13th night of the worst month of his life, he wished to himself that he could wake up somewhere else. Anywhere else, he thought, but preferably somewhere he could transition in peace, without dealing with his awful parents.
