frat boy, but it was his face that held my gaze: the blue eyes, the half smile, the blond curls that fell over his forehead. I noticed these things, but most of my attention was spent in a struggle to assimilate the reality of his existence. That he was, in fact, corporeal. He didn’t say it, but I surmised that he was still afraid of me—of our age difference, afraid I’d meet him just this once and then bail, afraid that I would reject him. Preposterous. For two hours we tried to feel each other out, both of us quiet and cautious, laughing and talking about everything except what we really wanted to. Just like our days of Words With Friends chats, our conversation was entirely chaste, decorous—“appropriate,” as my family would say. I did manage to ask for a hug at one point. It was clear from his body language that he thought this a strange request—he kept glancing anxiously over his shoulder to the table where his friends were still playing blackjack—but he got up to oblige me. He stood nearly a foot taller than me and he didn’t bend down, so my face was pressed awkwardly into his chest. I didn’t mind. I inhaled slowly and closed my eyes.
It wasn’t the embrace I’d dreamed about back in Topeka so many hopeless months before—the city was wrong, and the season, his hands weren’t in my hair and it was midnight instead of noontime—but it was a damn good start. I said a simple goodbye, left him to his cards, and headed back out into the night.
* * *
The rest of the year felt like sprinting in slow motion, urgent and constant movement that made the hours pass like deep breaths. The odometer hadn’t quite reached five thousand miles the day my Pontiac pulled out of its spot on the Phelps-Roper driveway for the last time, and by the time November 11 rolled around again, more than forty thousand miles of cornfields, mountains, Midwestern thunderstorms, and Canadian countryside had raced past my windows. Grace rejoined me in Deadwood after five weeks in Los Angeles, only to leave again a few weeks later, our orbits converging and diverging as we tried to understand who we were and what it might mean to live a good life outside of Westboro’s paradigm. Every tenuous connection we’d made to the world while at the church suddenly became a lifeline, pulling us along from place to place, and into communities of people we’d learned to despise—from Bible studies with Christians in icy Des Moines, to Yiddish classes and volunteer work at the Jewish Federation in Montreal; from walking a former Westboro member down the aisle at her wedding in Connecticut, to supporting my former Twitter enemy Chad Darnell at the screening of his new film at the Kansas City LGBT Film Festival.
Month after month, my sister and I continued to drift around the country, never spending more than a few days or a few weeks at a time in any one place. We supported ourselves on the money we’d saved at Westboro, with Grace’s excess scholarship funds from her university, with an insurance settlement for damage done to my car by a wicked hailstorm in the Black Hills, and with part-time jobs we found—Grace working as an assistant at a daycare center, while I worked remotely for TDG and did freelance administrative work I found online. But more than anything, the sustaining force behind this period of wandering was our family and friends, friends of friends, even friends of friends of friends, people who opened their homes to us and helped us learn to see the world from many perspectives.
In the midst of my travels and several weeks after our St. Patrick’s Day adventure in Deadwood, Chad called to ask me out on my first date ever. We met for dinner in Omaha the following week, and caught an opening-weekend showing of—what else?—The Great Gatsby. It was a cool evening and everything was foreign to me, each sensation making it difficult for me to find my breath: the warmth of his big hand as it enveloped mine; the drumbeat of my pulse when he wrapped his arm around my waist; the way my whole body seemed to melt at being kissed for the first time. I knew I never wanted to say goodbye, but we did, and I cried after he left. He went home to South Dakota, and I returned to California to