for people, and you want to *be* good to people. It’s hard for me to believe that there’s a person in the world you couldn’t win over.
You probably didn’t need all this—but sometimes you say obvious things to me, and it helps me be focused and think clearly. Love you, Sun.
Given that we still weren’t allowed to speak, the four of us began a disjointed discussion about our plans. Justin and Lindsey wanted to move to North Carolina, and at first the dream was for the five of us to buy a house together. I would get a job, and the other three adults would go to school, and Grace and I would help take care of Justin and Lindsey’s sweet baby boy. If we were living with our good friends—people who knew this life, who knew our family, who understood what it meant to leave them—then maybe we wouldn’t be so lonely. The problem was that the more time passed, the more strained these relationships became. The four of us could hardly keep ourselves together under the intense pressure, let alone be a support for the others.
Desperate for help dealing with the emotional fallout of our decision, Grace and I reached out to one of our old high school English teachers. Whereas most of our teachers had preferred to ignore Westboro’s existence while we were in school, Keith Newbery had been one of the very few who hadn’t been afraid of the subject. He was a bit of a gentle giant—a former offensive lineman for Washburn’s football team when he was in college—and though he was less than a decade older than me, I had a sense of him as an older, wiser, calming presence. In school, he had never shared his beliefs or tried to shame us for ours; he just asked thoughtful questions when related issues came up in our homework or in the news. Twitter had opened an even closer line of communication with Newbery, and we’d kept up with him there over the previous year. He ran an account called TchrQuotes (“Teacher Quotes”), which he filled with sarcastic riffs on things his students said. His posts were funny and inoffensive—“Nobody in this meeting knows I have a McChicken in my pocket.”—but whenever he tweeted me in a friendly tone, he was vehemently attacked by Westboro’s critics. That this cycle never dissuaded him from his kindness was part of what made Grace and me believe that we could trust him.
Newbery was everything we could have hoped and more: a calm, rational, dependable third party. Objective. Someone who knew us, and our history, and our family, and who wanted to help us, whatever we decided. We started moving boxes into his family’s garage in late October, with the understanding that if Westboro changed, we would bring them all back. I could hardly think straight during that time, and I unleashed onto Newbery all of the thoughts and fears and sorrows and grief that I couldn’t subject my sister to. He was a voice of compassion and reason when we needed it most—which was fortunate because confusion was mounting.
Justin explained that he and Lindsey were splitting up. The last several months had been too much pressure on their relationship. They were both planning to move to North Carolina, but now to different cities. Now what? I still wanted to help them, but getting into the middle of an increasingly messy situation seemed like a bad idea. I started to back off. Maybe we’d just have to go our own way after all.
But then Justin sent a message to Grace on her twentieth birthday: he wanted to be more than friends. I was aghast. He was a worldly twenty-eight-year-old, married, with a young son. She was naïve, much younger than her years, and was on the verge of losing everything, still living in an impossibly controlling home under even more scrutiny than usual. How could he possibly do this—especially now?
I thought of Lindsey. I had told her there was nothing between Justin and Grace. I could not imagine being in her place. She had come to Westboro looking for God, and she was leaving a year later with her world a shambles. I could not believe what had happened to her. I was ashamed of all of us.
Justin was not pleased to find out I was discouraging Grace. He insisted that he and Lindsey had been planning to split anyway, independent of Grace. He’d told me about their split