The summer after Emily's freshman year in high school was an eventful one. It was the summer when she went away to swim camp and met the girl who, although Emily couldn't have known it at the time, would change her life.

It was also the summer when she when she came face to face with her sexuality. We'll get to that part of the story. But first things first.


Emily Fields stood at the entrance to the dining area of the cafeteria, nervously running her thumb back and forth over the edge of her tray as she scanned the room. She hated this: the first day in a new setting. She wasn't antisocial by any stretch of the imagination, but she always found it hard to break the ice; to find her comfort zone amid a sea of strangers. She wished that she could fast forward a couple of days - after all the awkward introductions of herself and the getting-to-know-you chats - to a time when she was already settled in with her new group of friends.

She had been looking forward to camp for months. It was a great opportunity to hone her skills as well as to connect with coaches and swimmers from across the state. Her parents had dropped her off late in the evening the night before, with only enough time to get her checked in and shown her bunk-assignment before lights-out. That morning's practice was good, but it was all business. Lunch at the cafeteria was the first time that she would be forced to meet and interact with her fellow swimmers in a social setting.

Her eyes fell on a girl sitting by herself on the other side of the room: Paige McCullers, the hot-shot swimmer from Western PA who had recently relocated close to Emily's hometown of Rosewood. Emily's coach had met with Paige's father earlier in the spring, when he was looking at schools in the area. Eventually, they settled on Ravenswood High, Rosewood's strongest competition.

Emily had been looking forward to getting to know Paige, so she made her way over to the table where Paige was sitting.

Before Emily could introduce herself, she noticed that Paige was using her fork separate the string beans, corn, peas, and carrots from her mixed vegetables into separate piles on her plate. Emily couldn't hold back a giggle. When Paige glared up at her, Emily jovially said, "I think they're called mixed veggies for a reason!"

Paige stared at her in silence.

Okay… We're off to a good start. "Hi, I'm Emily Fields," Emily said, pressing on in spite of the awkwardness.

"I know how you are," Paige said, her voice not betraying any emotion.

"Sorry – is it okay for me to sit here?" Emily felt that she must have caught Paige at a bad time.

"It's fine," Paige said, pushing the vegetables back into a single group on her plate and covering them with a napkin. She chugged her remaining milk and added coldly, "I was just leaving."

Emily's shoulders lurched forward as soon as Paige left. "Wow."

The next afternoon, the tables were turned, so to speak. Emily was sitting alone at a table with two chairs, reading a book that she had brought to keep her company, when she saw Paige approaching and seeming to be in a better mood.

"Is anybody sitting here?" Paige asked, pointing to the empty chair.

Emily realized that her hunch from the day before had been correct. Paige had been having a bad day, or maybe she had taken the comment about her eating habits the wrong way. Whatever it was, Paige had, apparently, gotten over it, and she had come over to make amends. Emily was delighted to make a fresh start. "Nope!" she replied, smiling enthusiastically.

"Great! Thanks!" Paige grabbed the chair without so much as a smile and took it over to another table where she settled in with another couple of girls – friends from her old school, Emily assumed, or, perhaps, her new school. Her demeanor with them was light and casual, all smiles and giggles; the opposite of what Emily had ever seen of her.


"Don't let it get to you," Spencer advised her when they talked that night on the phone. "I'm telling you. It's just mind games. She's trying to get into your head."

"Why would she be doing that, Spencer?"

"Because you're the enemy, Em. She's trying to get any advantage that she can. Anything that will keep you off your game when it comes time to swim against you."

"Spencer…"

"Look, I know that you find it difficult to understand, because you don't think that way at all."

It was true. Emily enjoyed swimming for the fun of it. Of course, she wanted to win, but that didn't mean that she couldn't congratulate a rival swimmer when that swimmer swam well, or that she wouldn't give another team's swimmer some tips on how to improve her performance. Why spend all that time in the pool if you didn't enjoy it? And why participate in team sports at all if you couldn't make friends from other schools and other cities? Most people couldn't do what she and Paige did, at the level at which they did it. Shouldn't that be enough of a basis for friendship?

But Spencer had seen first-hand what Paige was like in competition. As the only freshman who earned the right to travel with the field hockey team to the state championships in Harrisburg, she had seen how Paige McCullers made a name for herself with her take-no-prisoners, no-holds-barred approach to competition. "Paige the Rage." They had even named a penalty after her.

"Just be careful," Spencer advised her. "You go around trying to find the good in everyone. But don't bother this time. Trust me. You won't be able to find anything good in Paige McCullers."


As the seventh-grade school year progressed Emily's friends, one by one, began to find an interest in boys. Soon, their conversations became focused less and less on the group itself, and more on the boys whom the group found attractive. At first, the ones who wanted to talk about boys were in the minority, the rest still pointing out how gross, smelly, and beast-like the guys were. But, little by little, the scales tipped as more and more girls confessed an interest in guys.

Emily grinned and nodded as her friends discussed various boys. She was able to see their attractiveness, even though she never felt anything in particular for any of them. To her, it was like watching elephants in the zoo: Emily could see them as amazing physical specimens, but she didn't want one as a pet, to play and cuddle with as she did with her German shepherd.

Emily always assumed that the attraction to boys would come; that she was simply too involved in other things, as she told her friends, to start chasing after guys. There was her swimming and her academics. She would have to stay on top of both if she hoped to get into Stanford, her dream school. And there was her family. And her friends. She couldn't see giving her heart to anyone else.

But, in the summer after her freshman year, things began to change. Emily could trace its beginnings to one Saturday afternoon at the movies with Hanna. In the middle of the film, Hanna nudged Emily with her elbow and pointed out a couple who were shamelessly making out a couple of rows in front of them. Hanna's attention quickly moved on, but Emily was transfixed. After a while, she realized something, and it scared her: In her mind, she wasn't visualizing herself being kissed by the boy. She was visualizing herself being kissed by the girl.

Emily said very little the rest of the evening with Hanna. She was deep in thought long after Hanna went home, and long after she herself climbed into bed. She wasn't sure what her mind's visualizations meant, or where she stood on the spectrum of gender-attraction. And she wasn't sure how to find out. Was there a test to take? Should she try dating boys? She was pretty sure that Hanna would be willing to kiss her, to help her figure out whether or not she felt anything, but she was also pretty sure that she wasn't attracted to Hanna in that way.

Once that initial realization had come, though, further realizations followed rapidly. She began to recognize the way that her body reacted when she saw certain commercials or certain pictures in magazines, or certain girls around Rosewood who had a kind of swagger or who dressed a certain way.

So Emily was armed with this self-realization, but she didn't know what to do with it.

Emily knew where her parents stood on homosexuality. It was one of those things that she had known since childhood – like the alphabet: She never remembered having learned it; it was just always with her. She knew that her parents didn't condone homosexuality, but that they condone bigotry, bullying, or discrimination against homosexuals, either. So, if Emily came home and told them that her best friend was gay, nothing would change. If, on the other hand, she came home and told them that she was gay, the whole world would change.

Emily knew that she would have to tell them. She would have to tell them at just the right time, when they could discuss it calmly and rationally. And, with her father's National Guard unit deployed, and her mother consequently in a constant state of pins and needles, it was certainly not the right time. Emily decided that she should tell her three best friends first, as a sort of dress rehearsal for the inevitable conversations with her parents and the rest of her family and acquaintances.

The conversation with Spencer, Hanna, and Aria couldn't have gone any better. Emily was affirmed, hugged, and genuinely loved. And, in the weeks that followed, nothing really changed between them and her – except that Hanna's inappropriate comments about Emily and random guys were swapped for inappropriate comments about her and random girls.

Things had gone so well that Emily was really looking forward to the conversation with her parents. She knew that she would have to keep it under wraps for a while longer. There were still three months before her father came home. Emily planned the timing out on her calendar. She would give her parents a few days to reconnect, she would spend a Saturday out in the garage working on the car with her dad, she would tell them that she wanted to make a special dinner, and they would talk. The talk would be a shock, some tears would be shed, but that was unavoidable. As long as Emily stuck to the plan, though, she felt that she could keep the pain, shock, and drama to a minimum.

But there's a funny thing about the way that the world works. Somehow, the more meticulous the plan, and the greater the preparation, the less likely it is that things will go as planned.

Emily's news came out at the worst possible time. She was in the middle of a screaming match with her mother. It had started over something trivial – the music was too loud, and Emily's room was a mess – and soon, their emotions were out of control. Pam said something about how she didn't know who Emily was anymore, and Emily screamed, "That's right! You don't know who I am! I'm GAY!"

The word tumbled from Emily's mouth as if in slow motion. It was like watching a priceless Ming vase tumble from its stand, seemingly falling for an eternity before crashing against the tile and shattering into a million pieces, while Pam and Emily looked on, horrified but powerless to stop it. Pam couldn't believe what she had heard. Emily couldn't believe what she had said. Pam buried her face in her hands and ran from the room, crying.

It was a long time before things got back to normal in the Fields household. Pam kept asking herself, and Emily – and God – where she had gone wrong, or what she had done to deserve this. She tried to talk Emily out of it, or to convince her that she just needed to give it more time and the attraction to guys would come. Her mantra became, "Well, let's wait till your father gets back," as if, once Wayne returned, "everything" - meaning Emily - would go back to normal.


Emily woke up late one night and heard noises in the living room. She crept stealthily down the stairs and came upon her mother, with her legs tucked under her, sobbing softly into a tissue, with a pile of soiled tissues next to her. Emily's first thought was that something had happened to her father, but she realized that Pam would have awakened her immediately, had that been the case. As she stood in the entryway, she saw her mother holding one of Emily's baby pictures, telling it over and over, "Oh, Emmy! Emmy! My Baby!"

Emily was flooded with emotions. On the one hand, it hurt her to see her mother so wounded. But, on the other hand, she herself was wounded that her mother found who she was so disgusting that she was mourning over it.

Emily groaned out loud and turned, walking back up the stairs to her room. Pam, who had never intended for Emily to see that scene, got up quickly and trailed after her. They had it out in Emily's bedroom, with no screaming, but a lot of pacing, a lot of tears, a few hugs, and, finally, the reassurance that Emily wasn't a disappointment to Pam. It was just a sea-change, and Pam needed to figure out how to navigate in these new waters. And Emily was able to accept that; after all, she had needed a few weeks to come to terms with it herself.

Soon, her father was home, and they were working together in the garage again, and Emily was working with her mother in the kitchen again, and, by the time Christmas came around, they were pretty much back to being their normal, happy family again.


A/N - Hello!

This story sprang from a prompt from Pll12paily:

[Paige and Emily] are high school state swimming rivals but both get scholarships to Stanford university and end up dorming together. They start out enemies but then they start to have feelings for each other.

I was kind of hesitant, because I've already written Paily as roommates at Stanford, and I didn't know how I could make this one different, once they got together. But then, I got a whole bunch of mini-prompts from thecatfromaliceinwonderland that opened my eyes to some fun things that I could do with the build-up to their relationship.

I sincerely hope that I can do these excellent prompts justice. And I hope that you'll stick around as I give it the old college try (pun intended).

Thanks for reading! I honestly love you all.