Sydney knew she was gay, had always known.
And from the youngest age, she had known she was going to burn in hell.
Sometimes, she’d wake up happy. She’d have something to look forward to, something big or little, but after she wiped the sleep from her eyes, she would remember. She’d remember that there was no place in heaven for her.
And it crushed her to the marrow of her bones.
She walked through life with this debilitating secret, with this knowledge that she’d spend all of eternity suffering for it.
And in the midst of that darkness and pain and worry that somehow, impossibly, she’d be found out (be sure your sins will find you out), there was one good, bright thing in her life.
Laurie.
Sydney had been best friends with Laurie since they were in preschool together at the church (a very unofficial affair), since they were gluing pictures of kittens on cardboard, since they bumped shoulders sitting together at the same desk, their heads bowed as they colored in pictures of Barbie. Sydney was homeschooled, and Laurie went to Christian school, but every other moment outside of the times they learned in the day, the two girls were together.
They had been on adventures. They’d laughed and cried. They knew everything about one another (except for that One Thing), and they loved each other with a fierceness that often made Sydney run out of air.
Laurie smelled of candy, always had a quick smile for Sydney.
She was a beautiful thing in a life that was not so beautiful.
Sometimes Sydney wondered if her parents knew her secret. They asked her about boys all the time. Sydney was sixteen. She should be thinking about boys. Her father had informed her that she wasn’t allowed to date until she was eighteen, and—even then—she’d have to have a chaperon. But when he said these things, he spoke them as if they were a checklist of chores Sydney had to complete.
She knew she should show interest in someone, anyone, at school of the opposite gender, just to reassure her parents. Just to get them to stop looking at her so strangely…
But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t even pretend.
Not when Laurie was there, right there in front of her. Laurie, with the bright pink lips, the long fingers tucking errant waves of red behind her shell-shaped ears. Laurie, who wore her scuffed shoes even when the kids mocked her, Laurie who didn’t give a rat’s ass (Laurie’s own words) what anyone else thought about her.
Laurie, who was strong and courageous and bold and beautiful. Laurie, who Sydney wanted to kiss with every fiber of her being.
That night, they’d sung and sung and sung “O Holy Night,” their duet song, until every kid there was sick to death of hearing it. Mrs. Stanford also appeared to be tired of the song and yawned into the back of her hand.
“All right, let’s call it a night,” she said, shooing at the kids, dismissing them.
“Mrs. Stanford?” said Laurie, her eyes twinkling.
Sydney stiffened beside her: When Laurie’s face took on that particular expression, it usually meant trouble.
“Can Sydney and I stay late? We want to practice the duet a little more. I just want to make sure we get it right.”
Mrs. Stanford didn't care about this in the slightest. The church was next door to Sydney’s house, after all, and if Laurie wanted to trudge home through the snow, it wasn’t that far to her house, either. So the rest of the kids shuffled out, and Mrs. Stanford left, too. The two girls were alone in the sanctuary.
And all was silent.
Laurie sat down on the piano seat, pressing her fingers to random keys and chuckling a little to herself as she glanced up at Sydney, one brow raised.
Laurie was playing at the keyboard of the baby grand as if she were a kid of two. Her brow rose higher, and she leaned back on the piano bench, kicking her heels against the bench’s legs.
“If I have to sing ‘O Holy Night’ one more time, I’m gonna explode. God, I fucking hate that song,” she sighed, raising her eyes heavenward.
Sydney blinked at her best friend. In Sydney’s house, swearing was not allowed. But using an expletive in church?
Yeah…that was basically evil.
Laurie cast a glance at Sydney, and Sydney could see the mischief in her friend’s expression as Laurie cocked her head to the side, considering Sydney.
She looked for a moment too long, her lips curling up at the corners, her lashes fluttering against her cheeks as if she were batting her eyes.
“We’ve got the place to ourselves!” Laurie whispered then, standing up. She stood up so hard that the piano bench toppled over onto its side. The slam echoed through every part of the sanctuary, and Sydney and Laurie stared at one another, startled. But suddenly Laurie was laughing, and she darted forward, grabbing both of Sydney’s hands in her own.
“Don’t your parents keep some wine in here or something?” she asked, practically breathless, and she was dragging Sydney back behind the podium and through the little door into the sacristy.
“No—why would they?” Sydney’s mouth was dry.
“I just thought the adults got to drink wine when they took the Lord’s Supper. Not grape juice like the rest of us.” Laurie seemed disappointed, and let go of Sydney’s hands.
The back of the sacristy was not lit up like the sanctuary. They were, effectively, in the dark. Even though the light from the sanctuary flooded the floor, it didn’t quite reach them where they stood.
Sydney made to go turn on the lights, but Laurie reached up, curled her fingers over Sydney’s wrist.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
Sydney and Laurie stood there, with hardly any space between them. Sydney was highly aware of everything: of how Laurie’s hair smelled of strawberry shampoo, of the sound of the static from Laurie’s boots on the carpeting. They were both making static, it seemed, because Sydney’s hair was standing up…or maybe that was because she was so damn nervous.
She was going to explode. She was going to explode from longing, from want, from daydreams that were never going to happen. That were, in fact, impossible.
Sydney loved Laurie, loved her with a pure passion. It might have been evil, and she might have been hell-bound. But in that moment, Sydney wondered. She wondered if she dared to reach across the space, dared to curl her fingers behind Laurie’s head, her fingertips grazing Laurie’s soft hair. She wondered if she dared to find Laurie’s mouth in the dark.
But she didn’t need to dare.
Because it was Laurie who reached for her. Laurie whose fingers wrapped around her wrists with profound gentleness. It was hard to see the depths of Laurie’s eyes in the near darkness, but her mouth was parted, her lips wet, her breath coming fast, faster, her chest rising and falling in the stillness.
They didn’t say a word.
They only kissed.
Laurie tasted like bubblegum—she’d been chewing it throughout most of practice. Her lips were sweet, her tongue sweeter, and as Sydney wrapped her arms around Laurie’s waist, a rush of adrenaline so potent raced through her that she could hardly breathe. Every one of her senses turned up to the highest possible setting. Laurie’s pulse was fluttering fast beneath her skin, but once she’d committed to the idea of kissing her…Laurie went all the way. She kissed Sydney hard, desperately, clinging to Sydney as if she were in danger of slipping into an abyss from which there was no coming back.
For her part, Sydney accepted the kiss and tried to reciprocate as best as she could, but for the first few seconds, all she could really do was stand there in deep shock. What she’d wanted for so long was actually happening, and she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe this was real, and by the time her brain and body caught up with reality, Laurie was taking a step back, wearing a stricken look on her face.
Laurie had misinterpreted Sydney’s stiffness. “You don’t… You don’t want to?” she asked, and her voice caught in her throat. Strong, assured Laurie wasn’t sure now.
Sydney bli
nked, curled her arms tighter around Laurie’s waist. “Yes. Yes,” she repeated, breathless. “I’ve wanted this… I’ve wanted you. But how…? Why…?” She couldn’t think of the right words, so she simply stared at her best friend as if truly seeing her for the first time.
Laurie stared back, breath coming in hard, fast pants.
“You wanted to, right?” Laurie asked. Still, she was so un-Laurie-like. So unsure.
Sydney nodded, then nodded harder, emphatically. “Yes… Yes.” Her voice came out broken, but she didn’t care. She wrapped her arms tighter around Laurie, and she drew her best friend close.
But Laurie wasn't just her best friend anymore.
Now, with this kiss, she had become something else. Something brand new, and wonderful.
They kissed, and Sydney felt her hands traveling down Laurie’s arms. Laurie was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but Sydney got to the hem, and she lifted her fingers up to brush against Laurie’s belly. Her skin felt so good against the palms of Sydney’s hands, and her whole body did a little shudder of delight. She just wanted to feel Laurie, just wanted to touch and taste Laurie. She just wanted, in that moment, all of the things she hadn’t allowed herself to want, or felt so ashamed for wanting that she was sickened by it.
Now she wasn’t sickened by anything. She allowed herself to feel, allowed herself to touch and taste. Yes, Laurie tasted like bubblegum and something else, something that was indescribable, it was so lovely. Laurie tasted like hope, like a beauty that Sydney had never known.
Laurie and Sydney were so wrapped up in one another, wound so tightly together, that they were practically a knot. And they weren’t thinking. They weren’t considering the fact that, perhaps, the sacristy was not the safest place for an elongated first kiss. That they should leave, should find someplace with a lock and key, some place that would be safe.
They weren’t safe.
But they didn’t realize it.
Until it was too late.
The light flicked on.
Horror. Abject horror.
There, in the doorway, stood Sydney’s parents, staring at the scene with open mouths.
In that moment of discovery, there was no sound. Outside, the snow fell upon the ground, was driven into drifts by the relentless winter wind. Inside, it was so still and quiet, you could hear the thunder of your heartbeat if you listened carefully. And Sydney heard it, heard her heart pound so hard against her bones, it felt like they might be ground to dust.
And that might, perhaps, be all right. Because if Sydney died right there and then, it would mean that whatever terrible thing awaited her would never, ever happen. She would be spared the horror of what followed this moment. This moment that had been so beautiful that Sydney would never forget it.
But it had devolved into something so terrible that Sydney might not survive it.
There was no mistaking what Sydney’s parents had walked into. Laurie’s shirt was drawn over her waist; Sydney’s hands were on her stomach; their mouths were swollen and bruised from their feverish kissing; their hair was tousled. They both stood, panting, still holding one another, because their arms were a soft place.
And they knew that what came next would not be soft at all.
It would be hard and terrible.
And there was no stopping it.
“Mom, Dad…” Sydney began, but that was all she was able to get out. For Laurie and Sydney drew apart quickly as Sydney’s parents moved toward them. There was incandescent fury on her parents’ faces, a white-hot anger that scared Sydney so deeply that she couldn’t speak.
That was the last time Sydney would ever see Laurie.
And this was what Laurie looked like: scared beyond reason.
“It’s not,” Laurie was saying, over and over again. “It’s not what it looks like.”
But everyone knew it was exactly what it looked like.
Neither of Sydney’s parents spoke. They didn’t have to say anything. Her father turned and pointed at the door they’d come in through, and Laurie ran past them, grabbed her purse and coat and went out into the cold, swallowed by the storm.
Then Sydney’s father stepped forward and shut the door. The slam was loud, louder than the piano bench's fall had been.
Sydney’s parents looked at her.
Outside, the snow fell.
Inside, Sydney stood before her parents, the parents who had raised her, who had loved her, she supposed.
Some love is conditional. Sydney had thought her parents’ love was not.
She was wrong.
“She’ll have to go,” her mother said to her father. The voice was bright and cheery and very out of place, but when Sydney glanced at her mother, not understanding, there was a gleam of fury in her eyes, fury that belied the pasted-on smile.
“Go?” Sydney asked. “Mom, Dad, please listen. Please?”
“You’re right,” her father said to her mother, talking over her.
They didn’t touch her. They could have grabbed her wrists, dragged her across the driveway to the rectory, but they didn’t. They only pointed, as if reaching out and touching Sydney might infect them. Her mother told her, tersely, to pack.
“Pack for what?” Sydney asked her, but her mother didn’t say.
Sydney didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to quiet the invading sense of foreboding, the deep pit of despair that was swallowing her up in giant gulps.
She packed changes of clothes. She packed some books. She didn’t know that she’d never return to her bedroom, so she didn’t pack anything else, anything that held true meaning. She didn’t know, so she lost everything, as she dragged her suitcase down into the living room, where her mother had just gotten off the phone with…someone.
“They’re ready for you,” was all her mother would tell her.
O holy night…
The night was cold, frozen, as she dragged her suitcase into her parents’ car. As she shut the door and watched her house get smaller out of the back window. As the darkness consumed them, the snowflakes driving themselves into the windshield like a horde of angry locusts.
…the stars are brightly shining…
There were no stars that night. It was something she would remember long after, like she remembered that it was snowing, lightly at the beginning of the night, until it came down harder and harder, soft white becoming ice that encased everything in an impenetrable shell.
They drove so many hours that they eventually drove out of the snowstorm. But when Sydney looked up through the window, at the sky, there were gray clouds layered over the dome of the world, and there was no light that could break through something so dark.
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth.
They’d left the highway about forty-five minutes earlier. Sydney curled up in the back, wrapping her arms tightly around herself in the hopes that it would numb the pain. She’d tried so many times to speak to her parents. Tried to tell them that she was this way, had always been this way, and she wished, so much, that she wasn’t, but there was no denying what she was. Who she loved. There was no denying anymore, no matter what. She tried to tell them that she loved them. She begged them to understand.
But there was only silence from the front seat.
They pulled into a long driveway. Sydney saw a sign at the end of it, but it was difficult to make out the words with the blowing winds gusting snow over it. She saw the word “House,” and there was a Bible verse beneath the name, but that was all she could see.
Her father left the car running. It was her mother who left, who walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell in the middle of the night. It was her mother who greeted the man at the door with a tight embrace. They stood that way for a long moment, as if the man were whispering something into her ear. And then her mother turned, came down the steps, took Sydney’s suitcase out of the trunk. Opened Sydney’s door.
“Get out,” her mother told her.
There was no love in her voice.
Long lay the world…
“Please,” Sydney said, over and over again, her stomach turning inside of her. She said “please” with a hoarse voice—she’d also spent a good portion of the car ride weeping—but her mother didn’t listen. Her mother simply pointed up to the porch. To the shadow man who stood there.
“Get out,” her mother repeated.
So Sydney did.
It was the hardest thing, perhaps, that Sydney had ever had to do, folding her long legs out of the back of the car, rising to stand on the icy driveway. She was exhausted, spent, and her mother was telling her to get out, and she didn’t know what was happening. It was the not knowing that was killing her. It was the hardness of her parents that was destroying her. There was no kindness coming from either of them.
And then, somehow, it got worse.
…in sin and error pining…
“Welcome, Sydney!” the man’s voice boomed.
There were only dark clouds overhead and no stars. It was impossible to make out the man’s face.
Sydney said nothing.
“Your parents are bringing you here, Sydney, because of what happened tonight. Do you understand why you’re here?”
Sydney shook her head. She remained silent.
“You’re at the Redeemer House. It’s a place where kids like you go, Sydney, to learn to be better.”
Kids like you.
Sydney lifted her chin. She didn’t look at her mother. She stood next to her suitcase in the snow and shivered from the cold, but she stood as bravely as she could, even as she felt the chill move through her.
“Come on in, Sydney,” said the man, gesturing toward the door.
The last time Sydney saw her mother, her mother couldn’t look at her. The last time Sydney saw her father, it was the back of his head as he drove her to the Redeemer House.
The Longing Page 7
