Senior Year, the Silence

Shame got operational. Real. The kind that lived in her body and demanded she do something about it.

Not abstract anymore. Not just something she felt in the dark of her room, journal hidden under her bed, writing things like "What am I?" and "How do I hide this?" and "God, what if Mom and Dad knew?"

Library computer. Browser history cleared. Hands shaking.

Her parents talked about her older cousin who'd come out as gay at Northwestern. They were supportive—they said the right things, they had friends who were queer—but there was an asterisk in their comfort. A limit. A ceiling. An unspoken not for you.

She found forums late at night. People talking about bisexuality, sexuality as a spectrum, how you could love people and the chemistry could be real with more than one gender. The words were there if she wanted them.

But wanting words and actually using them were different things.

And there was still something underneath it all that wasn't about what she was but whether. Whether she'd imagined it with Sandy. Whether Richard had been real desire or just a strategic move to prove something to herself. Whether her body was telling her the truth or lying to protect her.

She took that doubt and weaponized it against herself. Maybe she was just confused. Maybe she was just broken. Maybe every moment with Sandy had been friendship she'd mistaken for desire, and maybe with Richard she'd just been acting the part convincingly enough that her body played along. Maybe she was hungry for something—community, visibility, a way to be weird that felt chosen instead of accidental—and she'd confused that hunger for desire.

She saw a therapist. The therapist was gentle and used words like "sexual orientation exists on a spectrum" and "you don't need to label yourself unless you want to." Which was true and useless.

Her parents remained completely unaware of the sexual orientation questions beneath the anxiety framing; they thought it was just stress from school and college applications. Everyone else got to assume. Everyone else got to just be. Only she had to manage the infinite ambiguity in secret, with her parents an impossible distance away, with her body a thing she couldn't trust or explain.

The guilt settled into her bones. It would travel with her to college, unpacked and permanent.