At Reed, I went straight to the financial aid office. Surely parental severance would qualify me for a generous package. But I learned that no matter how on my own I said I was, in the universe of financial aid I still belonged to my parents and their tax bracket until age twenty-four. That was five years away. The Reed staffer offered me loans and said she’d try to get me a better deal for the next year, but there was no way I could carry the debt of even one semester there on my own, much less five.
As my parents had expected, I packed my clothes and books and turned in my dorm key, leaving my roommate with a super-single for the rest of the year. But I mailed them back the one-way plane ticket they had booked for me.
Vivian and my friends took care of me, many with a knowing embrace. People shared their own stories, helped me find a place, hooked me up with extra jobs. I moved into a $150-a-month attic bedroom in a cozily dilapidated, haunted punk house.
“Come home,” my parents pleaded, and then commanded. But I already was. I thought they would come around, but their pain was deep and real, and they transformed it into an instrument of force. Their immovability shook me. My sin was mortal. They needed to be certain of something and they stuck with the thing they’d known longer than they’d known me, the church. All my stockpiling of good behavior had been for nothing; my currency was no good with them, counterfeit from the start. They still wanted the other Andrea, the one I had made up for and with them.
For the first time I understood why queer people changed their names. It was about more than trying to be different or weird, though maybe it was a little bit that, to go by Tiger or Ace or Ponyboy or Dirtbag or whatever, my future girlfriend Flynn adding the F to her name. The name they gave you belongs to someone else, their invention of you; if you turn out not to be that person, you have to name yourself. But I stayed Andrea—I couldn’t let go entirely of the person I’d always been. The tyranny of family love is that you can’t help but love people who think God can’t stand the sight of you.
The next Christmas I braved one last visit home, hoping a year would have taken the edge off. I missed the clear winter light and crisp air that made my eyes water and the smell of snow on wool mittens. I wanted my mom’s Swedish pancakes and cheesy grated potatoes and the salsa my dad made in an old Sunbeam blender with canned stewed tomatoes and extra jalapeños. I wanted to go back to where I came from. In my vision, my parents would have missed me so much and be so relieved to see me that they would relent. How could they sacrifice their daughter? They would love me no matter what. They would reinstate me at Reed. My siblings would rally behind me.
Alissa was president of her sorority and spent half the time on the phone with her new, better sisters; Alex was all basketball and JROTC; Annabel gave me helplessly sympathetic looks. We all put on a play called Just Like It Never Happened, and I didn’t know how to go off-script.
The day after I arrived, my mother invited me into town with her to do errands. Snow was piled along the curbs like a low mountain range and the pale sky promised more. After the grocery store, she pulled into the parking lot of the church.
“I’ll wait here in the car,” I said.
“Come in with me,” she said. “Father Lane would be so happy to see you. Just say hi.”
Nothing pleased my mother more than hauling her brood to church, and I needed points, so I swallowed and followed her inside. Father Lane’s door was open, and he instantly rose to his feet when he saw us. He welcomed me with exceptional warmth and invited me to take a seat. I glanced at my mother but she wouldn’t look at me, merely smiled brightly toward Father Lane and said, “You know what I’m going to do, I’m going to just run over to the butcher and pick up the roast while you two catch up. You wouldn’t want to do that anyway, honey, the meat, right? I’ll be back in two shakes.” And she was out the door.
My mother, despite my vegetarianism, had attempted to put meat on my plate at every meal for the past two years. I looked at the door as it clicked shut behind her. I looked at the priest, whose wide, closed smile hid his teeth. From his frame on the wall, Pope John Paul II looked just past us with a benevolent smirk.
“Is this about what I think it’s about?” I said.
“What?” Father Lane said like a bad actor. “Just wanted to talk about things that are goin’ on in your life and ways that we can help. Any confusion you’re goin’ through.” When he dropped his G’s like that, super casual, you knew it was serious.
I said I was feeling clear about things. I crossed my legs and folded my hands over my knee. “But how are you doing?”
Father Lane sighed and his gaze came to rest upon the bookshelf across the room. “I’ve been thinking. Sometimes,” he said carefully, as if reading the titles aloud from a distance, “sometimes you have to make a sacrifice to be your best self. You have a choice, you know, which road you want to go down.”
“I know,” I said, perhaps too certainly, because he started and sat back.
“How long have we known each other?” he said.
“Since I was five or something.” He’d grown gray since then, and his neck had begun to sag, I now noticed.
“I know who you are, Andrea. You are a child of God. And you deserve to live in the light, not the darkness.” In a conspiratorial tone, as if revealing a treasure map to a child, he told me that there was a place in Colorado that could help me, that could restore me to my best self and help me conquer same-sex attraction—a place that could end my suffering. I pictured euthanasia.
He slid a brochure across the desk toward me: COURAGE MINISTRIES. A plump, soft-faced man and what looked like a bulldagger in a wig and dress held the hands of two small children. A sentence below proclaimed a proven program for how to “come out” of homosexuality.
“That doesn’t really work,” I said.
“Oh, it can. It’s hard,” he said, “to transcend the body.” He looked tired. “But the soul prevails.”
I set my hands on the armrests, ready to push off. “May I ask you something?”
“Please do.”
“Was it worth it? Giving up everything to become a priest?”
Father Lane paused for a moment. “Yes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
I walked out and headed down Main Street. I found our unlocked car and got in.
My mother looked surprised to see me shivering in the passenger seat when she approached, a roast as big as a toddler in her arms. I reached over and popped the trunk for her. She shook her head and deposited it in the backseat.
“How was your talk?” she said warily. “That was quick.”
“Helpful,” I said. “Father Lane looks well.” I turned up the radio, which was playing “The Little Drummer Boy.” “Remember when Alex had to act this out for the Christmas pageant?” I said.
“Do I ever,” she said, and sighed. “You kids were so sweet.” Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum did its resigned descent.
We each kept an eye on the other the rest of the day. I knew she wasn’t done.
I was twenty—they couldn’t involuntarily commit me to something, right? Or could they? I was still listed as a dependent on their tax forms.
The next morning, December 23, my dad got ready for work early and my mom said, with a tight-lipped breeziness, that she’d ride into town with him to “tie up some loose ends.” I knew in my gut that they were headed to the church—and this time, she was taking Dad. They were hatching something. That Bikini Kill line Resist psychic death ran through my mind. I had a narrow window.
My little sister, Annabel, who was fifteen and had gotten her farm license, drove me to the Greyhound station in Lincoln, tearful and worried. “I’m not supposed to go more than thirty miles from the house,” she said. “And I don’t know if the minivan counts as farm equipment.”
“Please, if Mom gives you a hard time, you can blame it on me,” I said. “Tell them I tricked you. Like, I said we were just going out shopping for presents. You don’t deserve to get in troubl
e, and I can’t possibly get any deeper.”
“I wish we were just going shopping,” Annabel said. “Do you have to go? Can’t you just wait it out?”
I began to cry too. “I wish I could. I can’t. I’ve been waiting it out all my life.”
She nodded. “I won’t blame you,” she said.
I hugged her hard until I could form words again. Don’t be silly, I told her, I was already a lost cause to them. “I love you so much. Take care of yourself. Blame me.”
My parents had framed my transgression as a crime against God, but really I had committed a crime against them. I had blasphemed the family. I had wrecked the family’s story, the story my parents had spent their entire adult lives writing. That was the unforgivable part. My mother had seized the chance for a redemption narrative when she sent me to the priest—my chance to play the prodigal!—and I’d blown it for all of them. They held strong. It was simpler—maybe not easier, but simpler—to write me out than to rewrite the whole thing. My sister Alissa got engaged; the Morales stock would soon be replenished. I would be dutifully invited to the wedding, but not to meet the baby born ten months later.
I did not go to that wedding, nor to Nebraska again—I stayed home, which now meant Portland. The next Christmas Eve, a group of us exiled by choice or by force pulled together a party. We called it, for the first time, family dinner. I shouldn’t have been surprised by how many of us there were, but I was. Mountains of food, lights strung around the old piano in the living room, a stack of scratchy old soul records taking their turn on the stereo. I had a new girlfriend of six weeks, Flynn, with long hands and ripped jeans that hung low on her hips like a boy’s, and we couldn’t stop sneaking kisses. Our lust was so potent it would half wake us in the night. We would coo and slip our hands around and re-entwine our limbs and fall back asleep all blissed out. By week three we had said I love you.
Bolstered by this new love, the holiday camaraderie, and the spiked cider, I let the forces of habit and propriety override my better judgment, and during dinner I sneaked to the corner of the kitchen with the cordless and my calling card. I dialed home.
My mother wouldn’t speak to me. “She and Alissa are busy working on the roast for tomorrow,” my dad said. “We sure wish you were here.”
A lump in my throat. His voice was gentler than I’d expected. “Me too,” I said. “Tell everyone I say merry Christmas. Can I talk to Annabel?”
“We’re praying for you, honey. We know you’ll come through this.”
“Come through what?”
“God can change anything,” he said.
“Can I just talk to Annabel?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Good-bye, Dad,” I said, and hung up.
Topher, whom I’d just met, came into the kitchen to grab a new bottle of whiskey and saw my face.
“Uh-oh,” he said. He poured me a double while I wiped my eyes and tried to breathe without shuddering. “To the orphans,” Topher said. We clinked and I tossed back the bitter comfort. I loved him then.
Flynn appeared in the doorway and hurried to my side. “What did you do?” I leaned into her, fists curled against my chest. “Baby,” she said sternly. “You didn’t call your family, did you?”
“I couldn’t help it,” I said.
She shook her head, wrapped me in her long arms, and nuzzled her nose into my hair. My hand slipped inside her scratchy thrift cardigan and found the warm, soft T-shirt below. “Oh, Andy,” she said. “You’re my family, you know.”
My heart sang. “I am?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re mine,” I said, and relief rolled through me like a sob.
“Always,” she said.
Always. The extravagance of that word! I sank into it. Always, always, always. And though it later turned false, for the first time I thought I could be okay, and that was enough.
Flynn walked me back into the living room, where Robin was now at the old piano banging out songs from a book of 1980s soft rock sheet music while others belted along. We traded the gifts we’d all brought, white-elephant style, and I ended up with a riding crop that made everyone whistle and hoot, and Flynn shot me a wicked look. It would never leave our closet, but we wouldn’t have believed that if you’d told us then. The always I believed in could not fail.
In the end we all descended to the basement for a raucous, drunken, dozen-member jam session, and I played the same two barre chords on the guitar over and over, with little skill but with such force and speed my fingers became embers and my ears rang like bells.
Expectations
I COULDN’T STAND IT. THE NIGHT AFTER BREAKFAST WITH RYAN, I dialed Vivian’s phone number in Olympia. I expected to get her answering machine—with my luck, she’d be blocks away in Portland—but she picked up.
“What can I say? The heart wants what the heart wants,” she said ruefully.
“Did you really just say that?”
“I’m sorry it turned out this way, Andy. I am. But it’s really not about you at all.”
“Well, it’s obvious you weren’t thinking of me,” I said. “But what about Flynn? Didn’t you know better?”
“What Flynn and I have is completely different,” she said gently.
“Which you only know because I told you everything!”
I hung up and stomped around the house, burning in my bones. I tried to get Bullet to tug a rope with me but she let go after a few good-natured pulls and looked up at me, tail wagging. I took a few deep gulps from a bottle of astringent white wine that had been open in the fridge for a month. I called Meena. Not home. I called Lawrence. Not home. I called Ryan. He picked up.
“Rematch,” I said. “Let’s play Scrabble.”
“Oh, you’re ready to take me on again?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I feel like winning.”
“You sound serious.”
“Dead.”
The streetlights flicked off as I pulled over in front of a grand, disheveled turn-of-the-century apartment house that filled its lot right up to the sidewalk. I was sunk in darkness, only a few lit windows brightening the street. I had not meant to feel furtive but now I did. At the bottom of the porch steps I stopped and looked behind me. I pulled my hood over my head.
The front door was unlocked. The banister was balding, the wood smoothed by touch. Each stair creaked like a question. I answered by putting one foot on the next and then the next. It’s just a game.
I was used to a maximalist punk-house aesthetic: a palimpsest of every current and previous tenant’s taste, with furniture that had lived there longer than any resident. But Ryan’s apartment had white walls and little furniture, only hundreds of records and CDs, neatly crated and stacked. In the corner, a guitar leaned against the wall. There was no other word to describe the guitar but fucked—the neck was broken and splintered, strings flailing. Ryan offered me a seat on the nubby sofa, a slim, lightly scratched-up Danish modern with great bones. He’d traded it with a friend for a television.
“How the hell did you convince him to do that?” I said, running my palm over a smooth teak arm.
Ryan shrugged. “People love to think they’re getting a deal,” he said. “To that guy, the television was worth more.”
“And you didn’t inform him otherwise.”
The Scrabble tiles rattled in their bag like wooden coins. “How do you think that shop you work in fills up with all that great stuff?”
“You devil,” I said. “I’m going to watch out for you.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about with me.”
“We’ll see.”
Ryan took his seat across the coffee table and we got serious.
“This time, if you win,” he said, “I’ll give you a free haircut.”
I considered this. I could use one. “What if you win?”
“But I won’t, right?”
“Not if I can help it.”
&n
bsp; This time our game was neck and neck. The Scrabble board grew dense with entangled blocks of short words, every letter doing double duty, compacted to the point of unplayability. I sacrificed by stringing out a long cheap word to open things up, and Ryan regretfully yet decisively seized the opportunity to use all his letters. I clawed hard but never caught him again.
“I couldn’t have won without your RILING,” he said when we’d added up the final points.
“A benevolent move never did anyone any good in Scrabble.”
“Your sacrifice is honored.”
“No free haircut for me,” I mourned, slumping back on the sofa.
“But you get a consolation prize.”
“I do?”
“Let me see what I can do.”
Ryan disappeared into the bathroom. Behind the door the faucet pulsed on and off. I resisted looking through his records—too obvious—and instead picked up a battered road atlas from the floor. I paged through it—most of the states had highlighter lines tracing routes from city to city—and paused at Nebraska. The town I came from was a tiny black dot. A dot like an atom, teeming inside. I touched my finger to it as Ryan emerged from the bathroom. He came over to me. I looked up from Nebraska, finger still on the dot, as he sat down beside me and pressed his lips to mine. Smooth.
“You shaved? Just now?”
“Out of courtesy. Just in case.”
“Wait, are you my consolation prize?”
“If I can bring you consolation, I’m happy to do that.”
I was curious, now that I was sober, what it would feel like, so I kissed him. Warm. I liked not wanting it but not not-wanting it—a safe feeling, like standing a few feet back from myself. “It’s not wrong, is it? It kind of feels wrong.”
“To whom?”
I thought about Flynn. I thought about her closing the door behind Vivian. I liked that Ryan had said whom.
“I guess I can do whatever I want,” I said, and realized it was true. “This can be our secret, right?”
“You really overthink things,” he said.
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