Three and a Half Secrets

Dear Mom,

I spent a long time planning how I would come out to you. I would leave a letter on your pillow. I would write an entire novel with a lesbian main character and print it out and ask you to read it. I wouldn't come out at all, but I'd bring a girl home for dinner and say, "This is my girlfriend."

Things did not go as planned.

Halloween, 2020. You remember. You came to let me know my sister and her boyfriend were going to carve pumpkins on the porch, and would I like to join? Maybe it was the mention of the boyfriend, but the truth of me was bursting in my mouth, impossible to keep inside anymore, so I finally just said it—right there in my bedroom, without any fanfare or strategy.

I'm kind of gay, I said.

You didn't say anything. You sat there looking disappointed.

Say something, I said. Just say something, please.

And you did. You told me all the old clichés—which I won't recount here, because you remember, I'm sure, and who wants to hear them again? This isn't a sob story, I promise. That's not what this letter is about. But still, I felt like I'd stepped into a bad movie. Did parents actually tell their college-age daughters that being gay was a corruption of God's plan? Did people actually say in 2020 that being gay was a choice?

I sat still and shocked and cold all over. I wished I had never asked you to speak. I felt like a building had collapsed inside of me.

At some point, you said something about how, clearly, your suggestible, innocent daughter was just going through a phase. Clearly, she was reading too many of those gay books and they put ideas in her head, because you had never expected that your own daughter would be gay. It came out of nowhere.

It didn't come out of nowhere. I just learned, early on, to keep my secrets. I learned never to talk about what I felt, or even to articulate it to myself. I learned a language of absences.

You asked me, You never had crushes on girls growing up, did you? Who on earth do you think you could feel that way about?

What I told you then was that I was not going to rip up my past for you. I would not bleed such private thoughts at your request. Not after I'd spent years pushing them deep inside of myself. I'd compressed all my illegal feelings into a cold marble at the bottom of my stomach, and I'd have to reach down, past my teeth, through my esophagus, and into my belly to yank them up.

I wasn't ready then. But I'm ready now.

Here they are. Here are the secrets I have kept, the girls and the women I have loved.

I hope, after you read this, that maybe you will understand.

The first secret

I am ten. My sister and I are embarking on an important journey, a crucial step to womanhood: learning the nebulous task of doing hair. I can braid, but that's about it, and I want to learn more, so you bring a pile of how-to books home from the library.

Most of them are geared towards kids, with bright illustrations and clear instructions and simple styles. One is not. It's full of elaborate updos and words I don't understand (what is backcombing?) and beautiful models. One model in particular catches my eye. She has pale, pale skin and dark, dark hair and eyes the color of sea glass.

I can't stop staring at her—at the freckles that run across her nose, at the upturn at the corner of her lips, at the curve where her neck meets her shoulders. I have never before been so interested in somebody's neck. I have never before been so interested in somebody, period.

I can't explain why looking at her makes me feel this way, blushing and transfixed and warm. I know, based on undercurrents I can't yet articulate to myself, that mentioning these feelings will be bad. So I don't mention them. I stay totally, completely silent.

But at night, after my bedtime, when the house is sleeping and the lights are off, I sneak to the office where we keep the basket of library books. I open to the page with the model—whose name I don't know, but desperately wish I did—and I use the strip of moonlight that comes through the window to take in her freckles and lips and neck.

I feel bad for breaking the rules. I feel bad for not telling you. But I can't be doing anything too terrible, I reason. I am only admiring a pretty woman. There can't be anything wrong with admiring. There can't be anything wrong with loving. Loving could never be bad.

So why do I feel so guilty?

The second secret

I am twelve. Jason, this guy in my grade, keeps annoying me at recess and lunch. He's trying to figure out who I like. It's not like he has it out for me specifically. He's made it his personal mission to figure out who everyone in the sixth grade likes, and I'm the only one he hasn't been able to crack.

The reason he hasn't been able to figure me out is twofold: First, I dislike Jason, so I'm disinclined to talk to him. His hair is cut long and floppy over his face like Justin Bieber's, and he makes a huge show about flipping the fringe out of his eyes every three minutes, which annoys me. Second, I already gave Jason my answer—which is that I don't like anybody, because I don't. But he didn't believe me.

Everybody likes somebody, he said.

Well, I said. Not everybody. Not me.

He hasn't stopped pestering me. And I am starting, for the first time, to realize that something deep inside of me is cracked. I am not built the same way as my classmates, who giggle about boys and apparently get extra fizzy over the Justin Bieber hair. I'm missing whatever piece was supposed to make me feel like that.

Jason and I proceed at a stalemate until, finally, he gets the brilliant idea to call in auxiliary forces. Auxiliary forces, in this case, consist only of Alexis, a sixth-grader with curly hair that she wears in a braid halfway down her back and a smart mouth that's always getting her in trouble. She doesn't wear makeup, and her cargo pants and t-shirts mean she's friends with mostly guys. Including Jason.

I have always wanted to be friends with Alexis, but I'm too shy to reach out. Once, we were partners for PE and I grinned for the rest of the day. Another time, we were both invited to the same birthday party, where we and our classmates walked around the mall. We were in Hot Topic when she said she had the same bra that the store had on the shelf.

"See?" she said, and pulled up her t-shirt, so we could all see her black Batman bra. None of the other girls thought much about it, afterward, but I couldn't stop blushing, and blushing, and blushing. I couldn't get the image out of my head.

Now, we both stand in the grass of our school's sad little soccer field. Unfortunately, she's not here because she wants to be friends. Jason obviously sent her here. She keeps shooting glances at him over her shoulder.

She asks me outright, bluntly: Do you like anyone?

I look at her, and her wild curly hair that always escapes its braid. The black straps of her Batman bra show past the edges of her t-shirt's collar.

She has this amazing smile, one that pushes up her cheeks and makes you feel like you're in on a secret together. That smile makes me stupid. It makes me want to say, Yeah, you.

Which is a ridiculous and scary thing to think, because even if I'm missing the piece in my brain that makes you like boys, it does not mean I like girls. Only lesbians like girls. I know that much by now.

I just want to be left alone. So I say, "Yeah, Jason."

Let Jason make what he wants out of that. I don't care what he thinks of me.

I do care what Alexis thinks of me. Maybe I shouldn't lie, but this way she won't know just how stupid her braid and her bra and her smile make me feel.

The third secret

I'm fourteen. It's a cliché: the camp counselor. This time around, I recognize the feeling.

I'm at MOSS, McCall Outdoor Science School. It's a school camp, the kind where our whole eighth grade class takes a rattly old bus up to the mountains to learn about lichen and lake-water microorganisms and pine trees. It's also the dead of winter, and most of our outdoor activities involve traipsing through knee-high drifts of snow. I haven't been warm for three days, but I refuse to wear the long underwear you made me pack, Mom, because that would be weird. Eighth graders don't wear long underwear.

The good news: I'm at a new school by now, so I don't have to deal with my annoyance at Jason or my unwieldy feelings for Alexis anymore.

The bad news: This guy in my camp group—who's so bone thin that back at home I give him a granola bar from my lunch every day, because I worry about him—he decided to hug me this morning. He just walked up to me and wrapped his skinny arms around me, and he smelled like Axe body spray and it was awful.

I never, ever want to do that again.

I so very much never want to do that again that I keep glaring at him, accidentally, whenever he gets within five feet. I'm not shooting him looks on purpose. I care about this kid, kind of, in a give-him-my-granola-bars way. But whenever he gets close, everything inside me seizes up and I can't keep a smile on my face.

The counselor who is assigned to my group notices all of this and watches with her lips pressed together, mildly, but doesn't say anything. She's an ecology grad student at a nearby university and probably doesn't get paid enough to deal with eighth-grade drama.

She's also the smartest person I've ever met. She knows a thousand facts about the forest and lake around us. Yesterday, she took us to visit an aspen grove, and for once it wasn't snowing or raining. The light came bright onto the white trunks of the aspens, and the wind clattered their branches together.

All the aspens in the grove are connected to each other, she told us. They're one big organism, speaking to each other through their roots.

I wished I were connected to the people around me like that, so I could speak to them without talking. Maybe then I would understand the crack inside of me. Maybe I would understand why I hated being hugged, even though I don't think I was supposed to.

The counselor, on the other hand—I wouldn't mind her hugging me. There's that brilliance of hers, and then there's her dry sense of humor, which slips into her speech so effortlessly it's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. And then there's the round moon of her face, which is made for smiling, and the steadiness of her shoulders and the muscles of her arms.

If I were gay, I think, I would probably have a crush on her. But I'm not gay. I'm not like that.

It will take me four more years to understand that yes, I am like that. By then, I'll be in high school, surrounded by some teenagers with dyed hair and LOVE IS LOVE stickers on their laptops, and other teenagers with MAGA embroidery on their hats. By then, I'll know more than ever not to tell you the truth about the model or Alexis or the counselor.

If I tell mom, she'll want to excise my brain, I will write in my journal. She'll want to cut out the part of me that they think is wrong.

By then, I'll be very good at keeping secrets.

The third and a half secret

I'm out to you now, Mom, even though it didn't go the way I planned. I don't want you to get it wrong—I love you, still. You don't understand me, but you also found every hairstyling book in the library for me and bought me long underwear to take to MOSS because you didn't want me to be cold.

I understand you're doing the best you can. I understand you love me, even if that love is in some ways conditional, more conditional than maybe you would like to admit.

I hope you'll forgive me if I keep one more secret, or maybe it's more like half a secret, now that I'm putting it in writing for you. I've met someone, and I am not ashamed.

I guess I have a type: She has freckles that scatter across her nose, and hair that falls past her waist, and broad shoulders and strong arms.

She has something interesting to say about everything, and uses words like "thus" and "amenable" in the same sentence as "y'all." She has a sense of humor that mixes irony and Marvel references and Greek philosophy. When she looks at me, I feel like the only person in the world. She makes me feel real.

I don't know where things will go with us. Our getting-to-know-each-other is a tender and gossamer thing. But I know that tomorrow we're getting coffee. (I'll get chai tea with oat milk, and she'll get real coffee, black.) We'll talk about books and writing and gardening, and it will be good. It will fill the crack inside of me, which I realize now was never a crack at all, only a different way of loving.

I'm certain of it now: There can't be anything wrong with loving. Loving can never be bad.

Forgive me for my secrets. Maybe you understand now why I needed them.

Love,

Emma