of God’s love like Mrs. Michalchuk, my former Sunday school teacher, had thought it was.
“You know—” I start, intent on asking her about my discovery. By the time I fell asleep last night, I’d convinced myself that the email was no big deal. Just Clem testing the waters to see if she could even get in and how far she could take it before backing out. The same thing happened with swim team in tenth grade. She joined, quickly became the best on the team, and won the district championship in the hundred-meter butterfly. When the time came to pick it back up again the following year, she skipped out and said she’d already proven to herself she could do it and that was enough. Clem is a joiner. She likes to join every club and team and group there is. To her, life is a buffet, and everything from mock trial to astronomy club to the soccer team is on the menu.
She reaches out and rubs the light stubble on my chin. “Isn’t it so weird that we have body hair? I swear to God, one day we were eleven years old and hairless and then BOOM! Pubes and facial hair!” She jumps up. “Okay, I promised Hannah’s grandma I’d come over today and force Hannah to organize her room. It’s the only way she’d let her out of the house this weekend.”
“That sounds miserable,” I groan.
“I didn’t say I’d be doing the cleaning,” she points out. “Just watching.”
“Kinky.”
Six
I like to think of my life in moments. In scenes. Like the moment I came out to my family in ninth grade over Christmas break. I could see it exactly in my head before it even happened. My mom would cry and my dad would clear his throat (the closest thing to crying I’ve ever seen him do), and they’d both tell me that they’d love me the way I was no matter what. It would be a moment in time when their hopes and dreams for me would change. I’d never marry a girl in a puffy white wedding dress, and maybe some people in town would think differently of us. It would take adjusting. It would take time. It would be difficult, but I would prevail and maybe one day Mom and I would walk in a Pride parade and we’d hold hands, our eyes glistening as we remembered all the obstacles we overcame.
I know that, in reality, coming out is not an easy thing for most people, but imagining this slice of my life as a dramatic highlight reel gave me the courage to follow through with it and maybe even got me a little excited about it too? Is that so bad? To love a bit of drama?
But what happened instead the morning I came out was about as eventful as announcing I had an anatomy quiz.
I chose a Saturday morning on a day when Dad didn’t have a job scheduled. I waited for Mom to be completely done making breakfast. In fact, I even let her finish her breakfast first. We had bacon, waffles, and scrambled eggs.
I hadn’t given Clem much of a warning, only that I wanted to do it sooner rather than later.
“You two want to help me take care of dishes, so your mother can relax a bit?” asked Dad.
“Sure,” said Clem as she began to scrape everyone’s leftovers into one big pile for the trash. The plates were Mom’s favorite, a plastic Christmas hand-me-down set that would most definitely not survive a trip through the dishwasher, so this would be a hand-wash-and-dry effort.
“Wait, wait,” I said. “I have an announcement.” In the background, Elf played quietly on the television. It was the part where all the North Pole creatures looked like Claymation and the narwhal pokes up through the frozen lake and says, “Bye, Buddy. I hope you find your dad.”
Okay, so maybe this wasn’t exactly how I had imagined, but there would be no perfect time.
“Mother, Father,” I said, in my most formal-sounding voice.
Mom looked to Dad and tugged on his wrist, pulling him back into the chair beside her.
“I need to tell you something, and it’s something I’ve lived with for a very long time.” This was my moment. This was my Ursula from The Little Mermaid “Poor Unfortunate Souls” solo. (. . . and don’t underestimate the importance of body language.) I’d rehearsed it over and over again, and there was more to it—much more—but suddenly I just