“What is this?” I asked, not touching it.
He folded his hands together and placed them under his chin, fingertips up in a peak. “I think it’s time we face reality and accept your problem isn’t going to go away overnight.”
They say your life flashes before your eyes in the moment before you die, but mine flashed right then. Rolling my eyes at Mom when she suggested it would be fun to get manicures together. Sulking in my room on Christmas morning because my parents had bought me the hot toys from the girl aisles instead of the monster trucks and nerf guns I’d wanted. The day my dad told me I couldn’t try out for hockey because women should never be competitive with boys.
With a weary sigh, I lifted my eyes to my dad’s tired face. I wondered if mine matched and then I wondered how it was possible to feel so damned tired before you’d even finished high school.
“It seems like the problem is yours, not mine,” I said, trying so hard to keep the defeat from my voice. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere.”
He didn’t try to stop me as I rose from the chair, didn’t call after me as I made my way to my bedroom. Without thinking, I’d started wadding up T-shirts and jeans and stuffed them into my duffle bag. I was ready to leave—not to Nature’s Promise, never, ever—even if it meant I was left with no place to really go. But first, with some degree of hope in my broken heart, I’d gone to my mom to beg.
That night was the only night I ever heard my parents fight. He had yelled a few times, but she never argued, never got cross back at him. That night I heard her, not yelling exactly, but loud enough that her voice made its way up the stairs into my room. My dad, for once, was the more silent of the two.
I couldn’t hear every word and I don’t know how she got him to drop it, but I do know no one ever talked about Nature’s Promise in my house again. It was like a fog that settled into every crack and corner of our home, especially all the air that filled the space between my dad and I, but we just pretended it wasn’t there.
Chapter Five
Hannah
After the mall, all I really wanted to do was snuggle down under my quilt and think about snow, but I was home for less than an hour when I got a text. Not just any text: the text. Lennox wanted me to come over to her house. I texted back asking her when and she responded: Tonight? Whenever you feel like coming over? I texted her to give me a half hour and then melted down into a blur of self-doubt.
The idea was a perfect blend of exciting and terrifying. We’d only ever hung out in the woods and now she was inviting me to her house? With any of my other friends, that would be so much more chill than going out because I could literally just wander out to my car in some pajamas bottoms, but because I liked this girl, it introduced so many new issues. We’d be alone. We’d be alone in the presence of a bed. I needed to find an outfit that was sexy and appealing, but not obvious about it. Nothing that suggested I wanted to actually use her bed the first time I went over there.
Time was passing and no outfits were appealing to me at all. I had just bought the most adorable mustard yellow A-line skirt with buttons down the front but showing up in a skirt to hang out in her room would make it look like I was throwing myself at her. I tried on a pair of jeans and a fuzzy sweater. I was a shapeless eskimo. I changed out of the sweater into a stripy, off the shoulder top and proceeded to stare into my mirror so long that I forgot I was even a person looking in the mirror and started to fixate on the smudges I needed to apply Windex to. To keep myself from getting lost in the Mirror Land, I checked my phone. It had been over twenty minutes since I’d agreed to arrive in a half hour. It was time to enlist help.
LENNOX ASKED ME TO COME OVER!!! I texted Marley. I released the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding as the three dots immediately popped up on my message screen. DOPE!!! She texted back. I stared down at the screen, waiting for advice until I realized I hadn’t asked for it. Tell me what to wear. I’ve tried on three outfits and they all send the wrong message. My lip was raw where I’d been biting into it.
When Marley’s answer finally came through, I could hear the scorn. Sometimes knowing someone so well that their voice was almost as familiar to you as your own had a downside and in this case, the downside was knowing that she was beyond annoyed by my wishy washiness.
WEAR WHAT YOU HAVE ON AND STOP OVERTHINKING IT. YOU ARE GOING TO HANG OUT AT HER HOUSE, NOT ON A DATE.
Telling me to stop overthinking things was about as helpful as telling the sun to stop being so damn hot, but that didn’t make her wrong. With a final glance in the mirror and a small tug at the hem of my striped shirt, I picked up my keys and headed out.
Lennox’s bedroom was nothing like I had imagined and, as I was beginning to admit to myself, ever since we’d agreed that I would come to her house and hang out, I had spent a lot of time imaging that particular space. In my mind, I saw something a bit more masculine and maybe pictures of old Corvettes or something. I knew that was crazy because she told me she hated to drive, so it didn’t make sense that she would love cars, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Something about Lennox brought the old greaser image to mind and I pictured her at the very least having a thing for muscle cars. She had swagger like James Dean or one of those other smoldering movie stars that were before even my mom’s time.
Instead of classic cars decorations and a chrome shine, her room was painted a dark, nighttime blue with all the baseboards and edge work done in gold. She had string lights around her closet in a shockingly Pinterest-esque style, and there was a missing door so that I could see how neatly all her sweaters and jackets were arranged. Mine, if hung up at all, were usually dangling by one side of the shoulders and the hangers were never facing in one uniform direction. I pulled out a desk chair and sat down.
“Wow, look at you,” I said. “So neat.”
With what I was beginning to think of as her classic Lennox head dunk, she looked down and smirked. “Yep. My parents are neat freaks and I guess it rubbed off on me.”
“So, hey. This is probably really weird since we just started hanging out, but I wanted to know if you wanted to join me on a little project over the rest of break,” I propositioned, my hair falling into my face as I leaned on my elbow.
Like a puppy, Lennox tilted her head to the side before answering. “What kind of project?”
I paused. How could I explain to this girl that I just met, this girl I was admittedly starting to have a pretty major crush on, that my life had been too easy and I wanted to try to shake things up by willing things to happen to me? And, more importantly, how could I do it without sounding like an idiot or a jackass?
“Well,” I started. “I’ve been kind of privileged.” I used the “P” word, hoping that it would at least somewhat smarten up my whole plot. “My parents are divorced, but my mom is really cool and supportive. I’ve been out as gay since seventh grade and no one has hassled me. I have friends. I kind of feel like nothing has ever happened to me.”
Lennox’s eyes met mine and I shit you not, it was like something from a movie. I couldn’t break eye contact with her because I was distracted by the intensity of the ocean water shade of her eyes. They were like pictures of the Carribean they were so sharply pigmented. I literally got so distracted that I didn’t hear what she said in response. “Huh?” I asked. Good job on that sounding smart thing, I thought.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lennox said as she leaned back on her elbows. “Going through shit isn’t the only way to gain life experience and if it is, you’d rather yours be dull.”
I wanted to argue with her. To point out that her dad was a professor, her mom ran a blog, but mostly stayed at home, and she lived on one of the ritzy streets in town. I wanted to tell her she didn’t exactly seem like a poster child for traumatic life events. Instead I moved from my chair and stretched out next to her on her comforter, propping myself up on one elbow so that I was almost hovering above her. I kind of couldn’t stop l
ooking at her again, which could’ve gotten pretty awkward, but for some reason, it didn’t.
“Yeah?” I finally asked. “Did something happen in Columbus?”
For half a second I thought she wouldn’t answer, or that she’d get defensive at my questioning. Instead, she plopped the rest of the way down onto her pillow, her eyes like magnets to the ceiling above.
“There was this pretty bad period, maybe a couple weeks, right before we left,” she started. “It’s actually the biggest reason why my dad took the job at Marshall. He wasn’t desperate for a gig or anything. It’s because he didn’t —"
She broke off. I thought about reaching over and smoothing down the spikier pieces of her undercut or just putting a hand on the back of her neck. Something compelled me to comfort her and something else, something much more insistent and bright, warned me that that would be a horrible idea.
“My parents were starting to get scared of how bad my depression was becoming. I wasn’t eating and at home I wouldn’t talk to anyone. And it’s because of these kids,” she paused again, but this one didn’t last nearly as long and with her usually strong voice breaking just a little, she continued. “They started joking all the time that I must be trans. That because I dress like this and have my hair like this, I must think I’m a boy, you know, all that shit. And to be honest, it wasn’t that hard to tune them out at first. What difference does it really make what some ignorant assholes say?” She rolled back onto her elbow and manipulated her body so we were facing each other, our knees touching in the middle. “It was when they started asking . . . what I have. That’s when it started being too much. Every day in history, these two boys. Twins that I grew up with. They’d ask if I’d transitioned, if I had a dick. Then they started not letting it go when class was over. They’d follow me into the halls and ask if I wanted to compare dick size. I couldn’t get them to stop following me and it was getting worse; they’d grab my arm and try to make me go with them to, I guess, compare.”
Her eyes started to tear up and she used the end of her sleeve to wipe them dry. I waited before I said anything because her breathing was still coming in jagged little gasps and I knew from my own life that when you get like that, where you’re trying so hard not to cry, the least little thing someone says just opens it all back up and then you get going so hard you could just float away on tears like in Alice in Wonderland.
“Did you tell a teacher or anything?” I asked.
She nodded. “They told me just to ignore them. That they were just curious and didn’t mean to be rude. They didn’t get it. They thought it was no big deal.”
Her quilted bedspread was made of a spectrum of purples and blues and I started to pick at the strings that formed between squares. Curling them between my fingers and rolling them into knots. I didn’t know what to say. As though my hand was possessed, I reached out and grasped hers, squeezing her fingers tightly between mine. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“The way they looked at me when they grabbed my arm . . ." she trailed off and got that look again, that dead eye, staring at nothing look. “I knew it was a big deal.”
A big deal. That felt like such an understatement. If some boy grabbed me and tried to pull me off somewhere, I’d be so scared. I imagined the thoughts that must have gone through Lennox’ head. I imagined if that had happened to me, how angry Marley and Jake would’ve been on my behalf. How they would’ve been ready to kick their asses, especially Marley. Then I thought about Mom and the fire that would burn behind her eyes if something like that happened to me. How lawyers and press would’ve been called if the school didn’t react just the right way.
“God,” I said, “What did your parents do?”
Lennox’s face went whiter than usual and her eyes rolled straight down in that way that was quickly becoming a tell for when I’d put my foot in my mouth. She was quiet for so long I thought maybe she wasn’t going to answer at all, but finally she spoke.
“My mom didn’t say anything. She never says anything about anything controversial or upsetting. She just looks at my dad and lets him take the lead,” she swallowed loudly before she went on and I could tell she was struggling to continue. “My dad was mad. At me. He said I brought this kind of stuff on myself by being so confusing and that if I would just act like a girl, people would pay less attention to me.”
I knew it was insensitive, but I just stared at her waiting for a sign that this horrible story was a joke. The boys I could understand—they made me sick and angry, but that was the world we lived in. There were bigots who didn’t like what they didn’t get. But her parents? I couldn’t even wrap my head around that. How could your parents let something like that happen to you and not only not want to destroy the person who hurt you, but actually blame you for their behavior?
“Well, at least you don’t have to worry about that here,” I said, smiling widely and hoping to change the subject. “I’m gay and no one in Huntington has ever bothered me. I even read an article the other day that while we lead in opioids, obesity, racism, and depression, we are also the most LGBT friendly place in the state.” I smiled at her and nodded in what I hoped was an encouraging manner but ended up feeling more like a desperate urging. Towards what, I wasn’t quite sure.
Lennox sat up suddenly, her hand pulling away from mine. It was her turn to shake her head, equally desperately, but somehow not as reassuring. “I’m not gay,” she said. “That’s the whole point.”
She scooted away from me then and for half a second it crossed my mind to tell her that it wasn’t catching, she didn’t need to run away from me like she was going to breathe it in. There was something in her desperation that told me not to, to tread lightly, because there was more there than what she was saying. It was like she was trying to convince herself.
“Okay,” I said with a shrug of one shoulder. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” I asked before closing my eyes to try to block out my own stupidity. Here we were, sharing this story of what was probably one of the low points of Lennox’s life and I was brushing it off as not a big deal. I opened my eyes and looked at her, halfway hoping she would reassure me that whatever misunderstanding had passed between us wouldn’t implode the friendship we were creating.
“It matters,” she said, and for maybe the first time she made eye contact with me when she turned serious. She kept my gaze as she continued: “It wouldn’t matter to you and I’m guessing from your reaction it wouldn’t matter to your parents, but it matters to me and it matters to mine. I don’t care that you’re gay, but for me, it matters. I don’t want to be gay. I won’t be.”
It hit me then and all the misunderstanding was gone: she was spooked. She was fighting who she was, and she was doing it because of an experience she had back home that had been bad enough that she wouldn’t risk ever facing it again. Here I was, out and proud, living my truth, complaining to her that everything about me had been accepted while she was telling me that she had made a choice to hide who she was because of these boys from her old school.
“Lennox . . . you get to decide what makes you comfortable, but you are who you are. It’s not a choice.”
Just as suddenly as the steely eyed girl had appeared, she disappeared and when Lennox responded, she was back to her gazing-at-the-ceiling self. Time seemed to go on as I waited for her response, but it eventually came: “It is for me.”
When I got home that night, my mom was sitting in the kitchen, perched one of the stools that lined our kitchen island. I loved the way she sat; even in chairs, she almost always sat criss-cross applesauce. There was something so innocent about it and that was a big metaphor for who my mom was as a person; you could always count on her to find joy in the silliest, most trivial things.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked as I hefted my purse onto the counter.
Mom looked at it as if it were a hefty bag full of rotten fruit instead of a perfectly nice rose gold, satin tote. She lifted it from the counter and as I rolled my eyes, she placed
it gently on the floor before wiping the counter down with one of the millions of Clorox wipes she kept all over the house. Germs. She thought my purse was germy.
“I’m just thinking about making some dinner,” she responded. “I didn’t really think the whole meal thing through, so I’m kind of thinking takeout, but we’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
We really had; honestly, we probably could have just eaten leftovers from any one of the Chinese food cartons that had taken residence in the back of our fridge, but Mom never wrote dates on them and I never remembered to clean out the fridge, which was one of my only three chores. As the fridge got fuller towards the end of the week. The containers kind of bled together and it became a gamble of “Is this one deliciously reheatable or growing mold?”
“Can I ask you a question?” I looked up at her as I leaned over the counter, hair splaying across the tile in a way I knew would drive her a bit batty. I guess she saw something in my eyes that made her decide not to address the matter because she let it go.
“You just did,” she replied with a half-smile and I returned the half-hearted grin. “Go ahead, hon. You can ask me anything.”
I paused, not quite sure what I wanted to ask, only that there was something questioning deep inside me. Lennox’s story didn’t relate to me somehow; it wasn’t the harassment part I couldn’t relate to. It was the choice part. Could she really believe that it was a choice to be gay, something you could just turn off like it wasn’t part of you?
I remember when I knew for sure that I was a lesbian; it was the minute I learned what the word meant. That’s how natural it had been for me: no decision to make. I was nine years old and my mom and I were watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Mom off-handedly mentioned her wife, Portia. My lexicon didn’t really include a woman who had a wife so I asked how that could happen. She explained that when two women were in love, they were lesbians and as soon as she explained that word, I just knew.
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