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“Snow day! Snow day!”
The cheers blare from Robbie’s speaker, waking him from his nap in the fuzzy orange chair.
“Why can’t they let me rest?” Robbie grumbles. He shivers and sneezes.
“Oh. It’s so cold!” he says to himself, puffs of his breath visible in the air. Now that he’s awake, he thinks, he might as well get something warmer to wear. He stumbles out of his chair and over to his clothes-dispensing piano. With the pull of a lever, the tray pops out with his winter outfit on top. There is only one problem: Robbie’s scarf is missing from the set.
Robbie recalls that last week, he had been wearing his scarf when it was caught in his ice machine (not a regular ice machine, but a cannon that shot freeze rays with the intention of turning Sportacus into a Sporta-ice cube). Sportacus had been flipping and running too fast for Robbie to get good aim with the machine. Robbie, of course, had become frustrated, so he mashed the freeze button repeatedly. The cannon began to spin out of control, so Robbie freaked out ALSO started to spin out of control, resulting in both ends of his scarf getting caught in one of the machine’s wheels. The machine started to roll down the street, dragging Robbie by the ends of his scarf. Sportacus freed Robbie, but the machine and the scarf crashed into the wall and caught fire. An ice machine on fire: how ironic.
So was the tale of Robbie’s missing scarf. But, he has more pressing matters to attend to than his lack of a scarf: the noisy children.
In a twirl of magic, he is wearing his winter outfit. He seizes the handles on his periscope viewer and looks inside. The kids are by the mayor’s house, looking like colored marshmallows in their puffy coats.
“I know; we can split up into teams and have a snowman-building contest,” suggests the geeky kid (Puddle? Pizza? What was his name again?).
“Great idea, Pixel,” says the pink girl. “But how will we decide the teams?"
“Boys versus girls?” the sticky child suggests.
The kids look at each other, and realize: “But that’s three against two!” the bossy girl (Trippy?) says. “That’s not fair.”
Robbie leans away from the viewer, scowling. “Boys versus girls?” he says. It reminds him of gym class.
Robbie thinks back to his school days. He hated gym class because, besides being a weak and unathletic child, he was often the last to be picked for a team. He also hated gym class because of how the other kids picked on him when they split up into boys versus girls.
Robbie didn’t understand why he had to choose boy or girl when he didn’t feel like he was either. When he didn’t join either team, one of the boys said:
“I guess Robbie is too girly to be on the boys team!”
Some of the boys laughed. Little Robbie didn’t get what was so wrong with liking girly things.
“Ew, we don’t want him on our team!” said one of the girls.
“That’s enough,” said the gym teacher. “Robbie, go join the other boys.”
Robbie hated being reminded that everyone saw him as a boy. He hated that the other kids made fun of him for not liking the Gender Game. And he really, really hated sports!
“NO!” he shouted.
He was sent to the principal’s office.
Present Robbie shakes his head as if the movement will somehow shake the memory from his brain. “I have to stop the snowman contest!” he says to himself.
He snaps his fingers and…poof! He disappears. He reappears outside on the path leading to Mayor Meanswell’s house. The kids are (loudly) discussing going to Bessie’s house to ask her to join the girls’ team when Stingy sees Robbie stomping over.
“Look! It’s Robbie Rotten!”
“Oh, that guy!” Ziggy says, his little eyebrows bent with anger.
“What do you want, Robbie?” Trixie asks, crossing her arms. Robbie raises his hands in mock surrender.
“No disguise this time, see? I’m here to talk.”
“About what?” Pixel asks, one eyebrow raised.
“I want you kids to know that you don’t have to be a boy or a girl.”
The kids look at each other, puzzled.
“How? I thought everyone was either a boy or a girl,” Stephanie says.
“Not me,” says Robbie. The kids look at him, expecting a joke or a trick. But as far as they can tell, Robbie is being serious.
“You’re not a boy?” Stingy asks.
“No, I’m not,” said Robbie. “Your gender is whatever you feel like it is, not what you look like or what kinds of things you like most. For example, I am a master of disguise. I like to wear disguises that look like men’s clothes, and also disguises that look like women’s clothes. Really, it’s all just clothes. No matter what, I’m still me. I call myself non-binary because I don’t feel like I’m a man or a woman. Understand?”
The kids still look confused, but now they look deep in thought.
“Well, I like lots of boyish things, but I’m still a girl,” Trixie says. The other kids nod.
“What about bathrooms?” Pixel asks.
“Allow me to explain," says Robbie, "Nobody stands outside of the bathroom to guard it, right? They don’t check your appearance to tell you which bathroom you should use.”
Several “no’s” are mumbled from the group of children.
“You use the bathroom you were told to use since you were really little. Some people, though, figure out that the gender they were told they have doesn’t fit with who they really are. Most people raised as boys are boys, and most people raised as girls are girls. But it isn’t that way for everyone.”
“Um, Robbie?” asks Stingy.
“Yes, Stringy,” Robbie says.
“It’s Stingy. I wonder…is it possible to be a boy and a girl?”
“There’s no rule against it,” says Robbie. Stingy gasps excitedly.
“Then, if I’m a girl, too, that means I can be both the prince and the princess of Lazytown!”
“Stingy, are you just saying that because you’re greedy, or do you really want to change your gender?” Stephanie asks.
Stingy looks at the ground. “I…think I’ve always wanted to be a girl, too. I just thought, until now, that I could only ever be a boy.”
“Then what team does Stingy join? The girls’ team or the boys’ team?” Ziggy asks.
“Neither. We can’t have equal teams with an odd number of people anyway,” Pixel says, “Unless…” He looks at Robbie.
“No!” Robbie refuses. “I won’t play with you brats!”
“Oh yeah?” says Trixie, grinning, “Not even if I do…THIS?”
Trixie launches a snowball at Robbie. The snowball hits him in the chest.
“You little--” Robbie growls. He quickly packs his own snowball and throws it at Trixie in retaliation. Trixie dodges.
“Snowball fight!” Ziggy shouts, throwing a snowball at Stingy. The snowball hits Stingy’s hat.
“Hey! That’s my nice new hat!”
Soon, all of the kids and Robbie are engaged in a snowball free-for-all. Robbie, to his own surprise, is having fun. The action starts to die down after a while, when everyone begins to get tired. And then Sportacus shows up.
“Hi everyone!” Sportacus says cheerfully, jogging over. Robbie throws a snowball at him, and the snowball hits Sportacus right in the crystal. Sportacus slips on the icy path beneath him and flops into the snow.
“I did it! I defeated Sportaflop!” Robbie cheers.
Sportacus sits up. “You got me,” he says with a shrug.
“Sportacus!” the children cry. Robbie snorts.
“Sportacus, what’s that stuff you’re holding?” Ziggy asks.
“Oh, these?” Sportacus says, standing up and moving closer to the group of kids. “Well, I saw all of you having so much fun playing in the snow, so I worried you might get cold. I decided to knit a pair of mittens for each of you.”
“Wow! Thanks Sportacus!” Stephanie says as the blue hero hands her a pair of pink mittens. Sportacus hands a pair of mittens to each kid, each pair in the favorite color of the receiving child.
Robbie decides to leave, thinking that he’s been outshined by Sportacus once again. He begins to trudge away.
“Wait, Robbie, I have a gift for you, too!”
“Don’t make fun of me, Sportadork.”
“No, really!”
Sportacus reaches into his backpack and retrieves a hand knitted scarf made with glittery purple yarn. “I’m sorry about what happened to your scarf the other day,” Sportacus says. He approaches Robbie with the scarf in his hands. Robbie is too surprised to jump away when Sportacus ties the scarf around his neck for him.
“T-thank you,” Robbie stammers.
“Be careful not to get that one tangled, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Robbie says, walking away. With his back turned to Sportacus and the kids, no one can see his blush.
It’s a nice scarf, he admits.