In the fall that I was seventeen, I came out of the closet.
Or, I was beaten to a pulp and dragged out of the closet. I never explicitly walked up to somebody and said, "I'm gay." It was a secret one day, and common knowledge the next.
Although my once-esteemed family was no longer rich, we hadn't quite escaped the town's blinding spotlight. A lot of people reveled in our downfall; bankruptcy and divorce, the Northwests weren't so invincible after all! And now, a gay daughter to put an end to the bloodline. Once an heiress to fortune and fame, I was now dubbed as the 'girl who lost it all.'
Fitting title, really, considering that every time I caught a glimpse of my scabbed knuckles I was transported back to the road outside the Mystery Shack, and I saw my soulmate exiting my life all over again.
That afternoon after Mabel left, Wendy found me sitting on a bench on Main Street. I hadn't gone home, because all of my bags were back at the lake house. I had just wandered to the nearest place that wasn't as devoid of life as I felt. She picked me up in her van and she asked me a series of unimportant questions, to survey my sanity. She clearly knew, at that point, that Mabel and I had fallen out, but I didn't know if she had the full picture pieced together yet. Wendy is a kind and insightful girl, always has been, so she didn't ask me about Mabel. If I wanted to talk about it, I wouldn't have had such a glazed look on my face as I slowly chewed through the cheeseburger Wendy bought me in the drive-thru.
We spent a quiet night at the lake house - Wendy, Candy and I - and I pretended to be fast asleep on the couch when they headed up to bed, because I wouldn't have been able to sleep in the very spot in which I had desecrated my closest relationship.
I've never known who found out about that night first. It could have been Dipper, or Wendy, or Candy. Or Naomi or Elise. Or somebody else entirely. The story became less accurate with each ear that it reached, it seemed, and the student body of Gravity Falls High was under the impression that I had made out with a girl at a party and that she had told me she was straight, which was almost laughably watered down from the truth.
In early October, I was suspended from school for four days for making a girl's nose bleed.
You might remember my old friends Tiffany and Alina. I won't blame you if you don't - they were shallow girls, devoid of personality, and also the kind of people that constantly sought to trade up in social status. And, well, halfway through our junior year, they traded up. Tiffany started dating the football team's quarterback and they migrated to the cheerleading squad, and suddenly I was eating lunch by myself.
One morning, I was enjoying a quiet pee in one of the newly renovated bathroom stalls, minding my own business, and when I went to wash my hands I noticed Alina was checking herself out in the mirror at the next sink over.
"You're looking nice," I heard her say.
It's easy to let your guard down when you're desperate for an ally. "Thanks," I said. "So are you."
"Yeah?" She turned to face me, leaned against the sink. "Would you?" she asked, using both hands to gesture to her body as a whole. There was a smirk on her face - I was stupid not to recognize that she was mocking me.
I shut off the faucet and looked over at her. I imagined my lips on the dark skin of her neck. I pictured my fingers raking through her thick black hair. I performed a quick mental x-ray through her t-shirt. "Yeah," I shrugged, turning back to the mirror.
Alina chuckled and said, "funny. I never pegged you as a dyke."
I saw the madness in my own eyes. They were the same blue eyes they had always been, but I was wearing that glazed look that Wendy had told me about. Like I was halfway through being possessed. "What did you just call me?" I said, a bitter taste on my tongue.
"A dyke," she repeated, punctuating the word for the benefit of my hearing.
Well, what were my options? I could have ignored it, took the high road, feigned indifference. I could have reported it to a teacher - our school was very protective of its LGBT students, more for the sake of political correctness than our comfort, but protective nonetheless. But consumed by rage, I was aware only of one option.
I walked up behind her. She thought I was leaving the bathroom. I took one last look at her self-congratulatory smirk in the mirror, then I grabbed a clump of her hair and slammed her face into the sink. She struggled, naturally, so I pressed her face to porcelain while I turned the hot water faucet and stared at my own maniacal reflection. Her face must have been covering the drain, because after a few seconds (a minute?) I felt the hot water reach my hand. I yanked it away and Alina threw her head back, frantically rubbing the water out of her eyes, and when she backed into the door of the stall I knew she would forever be terrified of me. I watched her take heavy breaths, a stream of blood from her nose seeping into her mouth, her wet hair stuck to her cheeks. She maintained eye contact for what felt like an eternity, then dashed out the door. I turned back to the sink, watched the last of the pink water swirl into the drain, and then I looked up and saw myself gulp. My fingers were twitching. It felt like my blood was burning me to a crisp from the inside out.
I don't know where Alina went for the rest of the day, or if anybody found her in such a state, but after sixth period I was called into the principal's office and issued a four-day holiday. I was told that my punishment could have been far more severe, like anger-management severe, if Alina hadn't come into his office earlier in the day and admitted that the attack had been provoked and even deserved. Whether she had done that, I didn't know. Like I said, the school was very protective of its LGBT students, perhaps to the point of corruption.
I spent the first day of my suspension on edge, confining myself to my room, worried that anything at all in the outside world could cause me to snap again. I didn't like feeling that I wasn't in control of my own body. Northwests fought their battles with verbal attacks, not physical. My mind settled into a pattern of playing the scene on repeat, and each time I came up with a response better than bashing Alina's brain into the sink.
I'd rather be a dyke than an ugly duckling.
And yet, boys will continue to pursue me and ignore you.
Hey, does it smell like vicious loser in here? Oh, wait, my bad. It's just you.
On the second day, I calmed down a bit.
On the third day, while scrolling through Mabel's Facebook feed, witnessing secondhand her life rolling on as usual, I had a rare moment of clarity. I knew that I simply could not lie in bed and feel sorry for myself forever. I removed her from my friends list, blocked her, and then went into my phone and blocked her there too. It might not have mattered. She hadn't called yet and maybe she was never going to.
I got out of bed, I took off my clothes, I threw on some shorts and a plain white t-shirt, I raided my closet for an old pair of sneakers, and then I took off out the door. And I wasn't running after a girl anymore, I was running to forget her. I got to the bottom of the street and realized I had forgotten my headphones, music would have made this more momentous, but it didn't matter, I would play the music in my head. Running on Empty? Too cliché. Run to the Hills? Too hardcore. Heart of Glass? Nothing to do with running, but what a song. I played that.
I vaulted over a fallen tree. I stopped and petted a dog. I balanced on a log to cross a stream and it was so lame but I laughed, because I felt invincible, outside, always moving, never stopping to think, or dwell on anything.
I quit playing the piano. Everything I produced when I sat down at the keys was an ugly mess, fueled by anger, punctuated by laziness. I remember one night I was sat there, my hands in my lap, trying to charge my fingers with magic, and then an ungodly shriek from the back yard caused me to spin around, and my neighbor's cat was out there, murdering a crow. That sounds better than my music, I thought, and I closed the lid over the keys and stood up, so that the stool could begin to gather dust without me.
My dad finally moved out. I had no idea how Mom ended up entitled to the house - I hadn't followed the proceedings at all, and I didn't care. Dad got an apartment and an office job in a town called Roseburg, and sold his soul to the nine-to-five grind. Although the man had devoted little to no energy in his life to spending time with his daughter, all of a sudden he was texting me asking when I was next coming up to visit.
Who is this? I texted back.
It's your father.
I frowned at the phone. Are you sure?
We started to play golf together, every other weekend. His personality hadn't undergone some miraculous transformation, and I wasn't naive enough to think that it would. He would ask me about my life while he concentrated on putting, and then interrupt me at the first opportunity to relate whatever I had said to his own past. He used to lecture me about making sensible decisions, financially, even romantically, and I'd be tempted to swing my club back and whack him in the face because hello? These are all the areas of life that you've failed at, buddy. Still, I didn't mind. I welcomed every distraction, and despite being a teenage girl, I enjoyed golf. Scoring lower than him nine games out of ten was an unrivaled thrill. And above all, I looked cute in my little golfer's outfit. I had a pink cap with my ponytail threaded through the back, a white polo, and white shorts with purple stripes down the sides. I bought everything one size too small, because if there was a perfect place to whore myself out, it was a golf course crawling with old men.
Kidding, obviously. Something bizarre did happen, though.
My dad had a habit of visiting the pro shop in the club after every round, one-hundred percent certain that his clubs were the cause of his loss and that he needed an upgrade, and, in case you weren't yet convinced that he lived a life of delusion - I was using the same clubs as he was. Anyway, I would walk around the small shop, studying the overpriced inventory. The girl that always worked behind the counter I recognized from school. One day I looked up and caught her eye, and she looked quickly away, down at the cash register. She had shoulder-length brown bangs, always topped with a white beanie, and thin pink lips.
The next time I was in there, I listened in on my dad arguing discreetly with the girl about the grooves in the head of his nine iron, and she was explaining apologetically that she wasn't a golf pro but she was pretty sure they were just made that way, and they shouldn't have affected his game in any noticeable way. When Dad was finished spewing his bullshit excuses for the day, I followed him out, mouthed "sorry" to the girl, and she grinned at me like I'd just asked for her hand in marriage.
Definitely gay, I thought to myself. I found her Facebook profile that night through the golf club's page. Her name was Katie. She was in her sophomore year. She had a little brother, three cats, and a parrot. And sprinkled among her liked pages were an assortment of LGBT-themed groups and chat rooms. Needless to say, this made me more than a little excited.
I scheduled a game with Dad for the next weekend. Katie smiled at me in the halls three times that week, but I never approached her because she was constantly flanked by other girls that I wouldn't have known how to deal with.
On Sunday I stood behind the shelf of golf balls, watching her deal with a customer out of the corner of my eye, waiting to pounce. My dad was in the bar, drinking away another embarrassing defeat. I don't know why he still bothered to show up.
Katie finished up with the customer and immediately turned and wandered through a door, and I thought, fuck, she's gone forever, but she re-appeared at the counter within seconds. She didn't see me walk up so I startled her when I said, "hey."
"Hey," she said, with a smile that told me she had never expected to hear a word from me, ever.
"I get sweaty hands," I said. (A fantastic opener.) "I find that it's hard to grip my clubs properly."
"Okay. Sounds like you could use some gloves?"
"That's what I was thinking. But there's one problem, I just don't know what color to get."
"What... color?"
"Yeah. I was hoping you could help me with the whole... color-to-sweat-reduction ratio."
"Okay," Katie said, beaming like a lightbulb had flickered on in her head. "If you'd like to follow me..." She led me around to the shelf near the front of the shop, with the gloves and the wristbands. "So we have the standard blacks and whites, and then we have... I don't know what color you'd call that. Tan? But right up here," she said, reaching for a pair, "hot pink. This is what you want if your hands are sweaty. I've heard that the vibrancy of the color seeps into your bloodstream and chills out your sweat glands."
"I've heard that too, actually."
"Plus, the more important thing - you look really cute in pink."
I think I blushed. I was supposed to be the one in control of this interaction. "I see," I said, a grin consuming my face. I took the gloves from her hand and our fingers brushed. "Pink it is."
When she rung me up at the counter, I said, "you've been a really big help, Katie."
Her smile fell apart and her eyes twinkled. "How do you know my name?"
I smirked. "You're wearing a name tag."
"Oh." She blushed and handed me a plastic bag containing the gloves I didn't need.
"Thanks," I said, and feeling confident, I winked before I turned to leave.
My intentions had been made perfectly clear - two weeks later she asked if I wanted to talk out back during her coffee break, and I followed her through the back of the shop, outside past a pair of dumpsters and into an array of parked golf carts. Katie told me she had something cool to show me, and she hijacked one of the carts and drove around the outskirts of the course until we came to a small lake on the edge of the grounds. The water was murky, and the sky was overcast, and Katie said, "cool, huh?"
"Not really," I answered, but the arm draped around the back of my seat told me that she hadn't brought me out here to stare at a lake, so I shifted closer to her and we made out for twenty minutes.
It meant everything to me, and it meant nothing to me. Katie kissed with an intensity I'd never known before. Every time we pulled apart she left my body buzzing, like I was recovering from a lightning bolt straight to my chest. I was glad to have come out to the world just for the sake of those moments, sometimes hidden in the trees behind the seventeenth hole, sometimes in the back room of the pro shop. I started hanging around at the golf club on the evenings that she worked, waiting for her to go on break, and she'd always greet me with a flirtatious smile and lead me by the hand to wherever we were due to explore one another's faces that night.
And although we liked each other, we never ventured further than that. We were honest from the get-go - I was desperately trying to get over the love of my life, and she was in love with a girl she had met online years before I arrived on the scene, a girl who was due to move to Oregon over the upcoming summer, and a girl that had already agreed to start a relationship with Katie the moment she first laid eyes on her.
Katie was a fun assistance in my overcoming my feelings for Mabel. She truly helped me through it. More than anything, it was nice to have somebody to talk to at school, someone to smile at me in the hallways and remind me it wasn't me versus the world.
And between Katie and golf and Wendy and running, for a while, everything was okay. Each day I came closer to knowing that my life didn't revolve around Mabel, and it never had.
That little lull in my life, in the spring that I turned eighteen - I know it now as the calm before the storm.