She was three days shy of eighteen when she found out she was pregnant. It was not exactly unexpected or unwanted but definitely an accident. She married the baby's father the day after graduation and seven months later the baby was born. They named him Johnny after his father but he had been born almost a month early and for several days even the doctors were unsure if he would make it.
It was clear that if he wanted to make it he would have to fight. On the fifth day his parents realized their son would succeed at anything he tried and three days later they were able to take him home.
Four years later he was the older of two children but there was something about the ethereal, pixie-like older boy that the youngest lacked. Watching him dance through the back yard on bare feet that seemed almost to float above the ground, one could almost see the wings fluttering at his back. No one commented on it but everyone knew there was something different about him, something special that few other people ever had or ever dreamed of having.
It was that same summer, just days after his fourth birthday when she saw the first sign that there was definitely something different about him. One Sunday when it came time to leave for the weekly visit to his grandparent's house his mother could not find him. He was supposed to be sitting on the front steps with his brother. There was the baby still in the carrier but the oldest was suspiciously missing. A search of the house revealed him sitting in the bottom of her closet in a dress and high heels, his face covered in make-up.
She cleaned him up, got him back into his own clothing, and never mentioned her discovery to anyone, not even his father, not even when it happened again and again.
The second sign came when he was nine years old. He and his brother had gone outside to catch fireflies and a shooting star streaked through the sky, followed closely by another and another. "Mommy!" He had shrieked. "Mommy! Mommy!"
She had all but run out to the porch, thinking something was wrong. "What is it?" She had asked upon seeing that neither of her children was bleeding.
"Look!" He pointed up at the sky, hopping up and down on the weathered boards of the porch. "Look at the lights. It's so pretty. What is that?"
She sat down in one of the white plastic chairs. "Those are shooting stars, Johnny," she said.
He looked confused. "Shooting stars? He asked. What are shooting stars?" He climbed into her lap, expecting a story or a long drawn out explanation at the least.
"I'm really not sure," she admitted. "It's just a rock or something out in space that has entered the Earth's atmosphere and caught fire."
Johnny looked up at his mother skeptically. "That's it?" He asked. "It's so pretty but it's really just a dirty old rock?" He made a face.
She smiled. Of course her sons romantic nature would not let him accept something so banal as being true. "It means somebody's in love," she said, repeating what her own mother, Johnny's grandmother had said to her when she had asked the same question.
Oh! Now that was an explanation he liked. Then he frowned, a worried expression crossing his delicate features. "Mommy?" He asked, sounding almost like he was on the verge of crying. "Will I ever fall in love?" He had been worried lately, that something was wrong with him. In all the stories and all the movies there were always boys and girls falling in love, princes waking princesses from enchanted sleeps with a kiss. That was not what Johnny wanted.
She hugged him close. "Of course you will," she said. "Some day you'll meet the right girl and fall in love."
He looked almost as if he were going to cry. "But I don't like girls!" He wailed. "They're whiny and icky and they try to kiss me!" He looked up at his mother. "I feel like I'm different from everyone else. I like boys. I want to fall in love with a boy." And then he did cry.
She held him, assured him there was nothing wrong with that, and that night when she put him to bed she made up a story just for him that involved two fairy princes falling in love.
But she had just begun to suspect that her perfect, fairy-like son was a fairy in another sense as well.
It was years later before either she or Johnny knew for sure that what they had both long suspected was true. They realized it at exactly the same moment.
It was his first major competition on the junior level and he was thirteen years old. But looking back he would not remember what the competition was or even if he medalled or not. Looking back he would only remember that moment when he first realized he truly was gay.
He was walking down the corridor beneath the stadium with his mother, on his way to the dressing room when it, or rather he, hit him. "I'm sorry," the other boy said, his eyes meeting Johnny's. "I guess I didn't see you." He had in fact been almost running down the corridor, late for a meeting with his coach.
Johnny, almost drowning in the other boy's eyes, barely heard him. "Its okay," he breathed. Once the boy had hurried off he turned to his mother. "Mom," he said, still looking a little stunned, "that's the boy I'm in love with."
She only had two words to say:
"I know."
Later that same night when Johnny's first love took to the ice the commentator announced his name as Evan Lysacek.