When she was five years old, she remembers sitting on the couch in the living room in the dark listening to her parents argue while she watched the city’s lights so distant twinkle, off in a world of oranges, yellows, and whites far from hers.

“What they’re doing is wrong, and I don’t want it in my house!” her dad shouted at her mom.

“She’s my sister, and I told her and Suzette they could stay and see the kids!” her mom yelled back. “They love each other; shouldn’t that be enough?”

“That’s not love, Becky, they’re both girls! It’s wrong, is what it is.”

“Would you still love our kids if one was gay, too?”

“No, no, no, they won’t be gay, they could never be so wrong as to love the same sex.”

“But, Jerry, would you still love them as your own children, even if you disagreed with them?”

“No, of course not! Homosexuality is wrong, and by God, if any of my children are gay, they won’t live under my roof anymore! No child of mine will disregard His words so blatantly.”

The lights of the town shimmered and danced, still as unattainable as they were the night before, and yet every evening, they came back for the little girl to watch in wonder.

Locker doors slammed, bells rang, and shouting students and teachers alike flooded the gray hallways with sound, and the girl was left wading through papers abandoned on the floor.

“That’s so gay!” the children said gleefully to each other.

The eleven year old girl could not judge, as she said it too.

At twelve years old, she started to realize that she was different, as she had started to like a girl in her class.

She flinched when she heard the f-word in the halls at school now, and when she heard people saying “that’s so gay”, she got angry.

She wore a tie around her neck one day to school, and she felt pretty, just as if she had worn a nice necklace or a new dress like all the other girls.

“Is that a tie she’s got on?” the girls whispered sneeringly to each other in her hearing range. “She looks like such a lesbian!”

She did not turn around, but when she went home that day, she cried in the darkened living room while the lights shone on in the distance. She was afraid her father would see it, that dreaded word, branded onto her skin.


The older she got, the more bold she became in her decisions.

In the ninth grade, she had a crush on another girl, and the day they began dating she told her mom about her new girlfriend with shaking hands and a pale face.

“That’s so great, honey! I can’t wait to meet her.”

She wore a rainbow tie to homecoming that year, and she told her father nothing at all.

A few months later, the girl found out that her mom had told her father that same day, but he never said anything to the girl.

He did not disown his daughter, but neither did he completely forget all of his past prejudices.

Sometimes, she asked him about his opinions on gay people now, and he told her, “I don’t really care what they want to do anymore. It’s their choice, and no matter how much I don’t like it, I also know that I can’t change their decisions.”

She disagreed, as she knew that attraction was based on hormones, nothing more, yet still she kept her peace out of fear. She had suspicions that he was not being totally honest, anyway.

By the time the girl was sixteen, she and her father still had a great chasm of difference separating them, but as long as they kept a careful amount of space between them, they managed to maintain their tentative truce.

One day in November, she and her parents decided to buy her a car to go to and from school and swim practice, which started after dark.
So every night, she packed her swim bag in the dark living room and drove into the town of lights – the distance from those previously untouchable oranges, yellows, and whites shattered at last – that once seemed too far away to reach, but was now only a short twenty minute drive away.

She also was not afraid to be herself anymore, despite the opposition she knew she would always face at every turn in this giant, terrifying world full of darkness and fear and monsters.