I hope you guys don't mind how I wrote Gabriella, I like Gabriella I just think she would be a "bad ally", in that she wouldn't understand queer stuff, especially trans stuff, and she would have to reflect on herself and listen to other people's voices before she really got it.

The title of this story is a quote/paraphrased quote from one of my favorite novels, Smiles To Go by Jerry Spinelli.

By now almost everyone at Yale knew that Carol was trans and that she and Taylor were together. But outside of Connecticut, only a handful of people knew. Just Carol's parents, Taylor's parents and sister, and Taylor's ex-boyfriend and his boyfriend.

So when they started thinking about how to tell people they were engaged they realized they were going to have to tell a lot more people about the trans part.

They drafted posts to put on their social media accounts about their relationship and identities and then decided who would get to find out before their secret went public. Carol had a few friends back home she'd always planned on telling, and Taylor had Gabriella.

Taylor and Gabriella had done a poor job of keeping in touch, despite the one-and-a-half years of high school where they'd been best friends and confidants. Still, she'd kind of kept Gabriella in the loop about her relationship. Just not the part about her partner being a trans woman. Gabriella had been pretty chill when Chad came out as bisexual but this wasn't exactly the same, so Taylor had no idea how she'd react.

She figured she should at least do the telling over the phone, instead of in a text or an email. Even though she'd explicitly told four people before this she'd never thought about it as coming out until now. She'd never been the one coming out, Carol was the one who was queer. But that had been when Carol was her girlfriend, not her future wife.

Even though Taylor wasn't sure she'd feel attracted to any woman other than Carol, she recognized that it recontextualized some things. At the very least she could hardly call herself straight. She fretted over semantics for a solid minute before realizing it was okay that she didn't know the answers. What wasn't okay was that she was stalling, so, finally, she made the call.

Gabriella seemed understandably shocked to receive a call from Taylor, but her shock quickly turned to delight.

"Tay! How are you?"

"I'm doing really well," Taylor said, which was true. Between a major she adored and a fiance she was head over heels in love with, she couldn't ask for much more. She just had to get through this conversation.

"How about you?" Taylor added, remembering formalities.

"Oh yeah, same. It's really beautiful here in the spring."

"I'm glad to hear it. I did actually want to tell you about something, though."

"Oh, yeah? You can tell me anything."

Taylor swallowed the lump in her throat.

"So last month I got engaged-"

"That's amazing!" Gabriella gushed.

"That's not all," Taylor said quickly.

"Oh, it isn't?"

"I'm not pregnant if that's what you're thinking."

"It crossed my mind."

"Anyway, it's about my fiance. I know I mentioned my relationship with CJ before, but last year CJ actually came out as a trans woman. Her name's Carol and I thought you'd want to know before we posted about it and our engagement."

Dead silence on the other end.

"Gabriella? You still there?"

"How does that work?" Gabriella finally asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I just… I guess I don't completely understand how a man can decide to be a woman."

"Carol didn't decide to be a woman, she is a woman."

"Isn't it just… Pretend? Like a fetish?" Gabriella asked cautiously.

Taylor took a deep breath so as to not respond in anger.

"I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you don't know better. It's not a fetish and it's not playing pretend. Carol spent her whole life pretending to be a man because that's who society told her to be. And that whole time she was miserable because she knew society was wrong. Now that she gets to be herself, she's happy."

"I'm sorry, I didn't realize-"

"Most people don't understand. I just ask that you listen and try to respect us."

"Of course I respect you. And if you and Carol are happy then I will be happy for you even if I don't understand it myself."

"You're smart, Gabriella, you'll figure it out."

Taylor got off the call and flopped down on the couch next to where Carol was working on homework.

"How'd it go?" They'd told everyone else, Gabriella had been the last one on the list before they went public.

"Not great but not terrible.'

"Yeah, that's kind of what I was expecting."

"I don't know what I was expecting," Taylor groaned. "I just want it to be easier."

"I don't think it's ever going to be easy for us," Carol admitted. "Especially after we tell everyone. We just have to believe it's worth it."

"It is worth it," Taylor agreed with a tired sigh.

"Hey," Carol said, putting her hand on Taylor's leg, "We can wait to announce our engagement if you want."

"No, I… I'm ready. It's like ripping off a bandaid, best to do it all at once."

Carol nodded and pulled up her prepared statement on her laptop. Taylor did the same.

"Ready?" Carol asked, bumping her shoulder against Taylor's.

"Ready." In a matter of anticlimactic seconds, their secret was no longer secret.

Immediately messages of confusion and concern rolled in, which Taylor could only take so much of.

She turned off her computer, silenced her phone, and went to go lie down. When she was brave enough to check her phone, though, she was surprised to see some "Congratulations" mixed in with all the noise. It would be hard, but there would always be people who tried to understand and accept them. So it would always be worth it.