Small town pride, p.1
Small Town Pride, page 1
Dedication
To my own overly supportive parents.
Mom & Dad, this one’s for you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
It’s all cornfields from this side of the bus.
Empty cornfields. According to my daily planner, it’s almost officially spring, but it still feels like winter won’t let go. This is by far the worst time of the year: the frost flicks off the grass onto my ankles when I run to the bus in the morning, and even on my way home from school, I have to wear a coat. All that cold, yet there’s no snow. No snow days. And to top it off, all I get on my bus ride home is this view of dirt.
It’s almost time to plant corn, which I know from experience. Well, kind of. See, I spend almost all my downtime playing Songbird Hollow, this farming simulation video game where you can do all kinds of things: build farms, fish in rivers, get to know the other townspeople.
You can make friends with the other villagers; you can even fall in love and get married, if that’s your thing. And in this game, no one cares who you are, how you act, or what you look like.
But I do it for the farming. In real life, you’d never find me on a tractor, but my farm in Songbird Hollow is massive. I’ve learned a lot about farming from the game, so I know that here in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to watch the corn slowly grow outside my bus window, which will finally give me something to look at on my ride home that isn’t cold dirt.
Something to distract me from the awkwardness waiting for me at home. I wonder if all bus rides will feel like this from now on. Did coming out to my parents really change things forever? Or will this pass? I decide that definitely, probably, it will pass, and then I resume staring out my boring window.
At least if I were on the left side of the bus, I’d see a few cars and trucks drive by, and I’d get the full view of the mayor’s house as we pull up to our stop. I have a running bet with Jenna if they’ll ever take down their tacky Christmas decorations. But I guess when you’re the mayor, you can do whatever you want. Including seasonally inappropriate decorations.
My mind drifts while I watch the fields turn into woods, and I feel the urge to rest my head on the cool glass. But just as I do, Jenna nudges me in the ribs. I gasp, rubbing the ache as I turn to her.
“What?” I ask.
“Jake!” She throws her hands up into the air. “I just had an entire conversation with you, and you were zoned out the whole time.”
“It’s not really a conversation if you’re the only one talking,” I snap, still wincing in pain.
“Don’t be rude,” she says with a sigh. “Anyway, I was talking about you, so that should count.”
I smirk, then take in Jenna’s gaze. It’s almost scary the way she looks at me, so I better do some remembering. I try to recall any of the words she lobbed at me over the last five minutes, but I come up blank. My mind was elsewhere.
There’s a hint of concern in her face, and she keeps petting her frizzy blond hair, waiting for a response. When I don’t give her one, she rolls her eyes, and her face turns a light shade of pink. I’ve got to be honest with her about this weekend—and quick.
“I was asking you why your dad’s been so weird,” she says. “I guess I’ll do the whole story again. Your dad and I were cutting grass at the same time yesterday—side note: How do you get out of mowing the grass as a weekly chore? It seems unfair. Anyway, so we’re cutting the grass, and he stops his riding mower out back where our yards meet. Then he just thanks me. Out of nowhere.”
“For . . . what?” I laugh. “Did he thank you for accidentally leaving that strip of grass between our driveways uncut, like you do every week?”
Once you get past the first cornfield, the McDonald’s, the soy fields, two gas stations, and the second and third cornfields, you’ll get to a strip of houses that are a lot closer together. We call it “downtown” Barton Springs. And that’s where me and Jenna live, side-by-side neighbors since we were toddlers.
Calling it downtown always feels like a joke, though. It’s just a strip of houses flanked by—you guessed it—cornfields. We’re on Main Street, the only street that cuts straight through our village.
“You’re not funny,” she says. “But wait, I actually want to know why you don’t have to cut the grass. You have a riding mower. You have no excuse.”
“I have grass allergies,” I say, but I’m interrupted by her scoffing. “Fine. I just really hate cutting the grass. Dad makes me do all the laundry every week, and in return, he doesn’t make me do outside chores. Anyway, what did he say?”
Being neighbors forever, it’s not weird for our families to say hello from time to time, even if that hello devolves into a twenty-minute conversation outside where you start catching up about family, friends, church, weather, and pretty much anything else until one of you says, “Well, I’ll let you go”—country code for “OK BYE.”
“He just . . . thanked me for being your friend. So, I got all awkward and was like, ‘Well, of course I’m Jake’s friend. He has a Nintendo Switch and I don’t.’ Then I had to explain the concept of jokes to your dad. All in all, it was not a great time.”
“Oh, well . . .” I say. Here we go. Maybe by talking about it I can figure out how I really feel about it. Turning to Jenna, I lower my voice. “I kind of, maybe, came out to them on Saturday?”
“You what? Is that why you were MIA all weekend? We’ve been planning this for months and you didn’t tell me it was happening? I could have been ready with tissues or ice cream or fireworks or whatever the occasion called for. How did it go? Are you okay?”
We’d run through dozens of scenarios on how I’d do it. It’s kind of been our favorite bus activity lately, but I’ve always been too cowardly to go through with it. See, I’m out to a whole list of people my age, and they’ve all been really cool about it. But each time, I felt like I was practicing for this one, ultra-scary moment: telling my family.
I always said I’d tell Mom and Dad whenever it felt right. We’d sit down, I’d confidently break the news to them, and then we’d all hug it out. But . . . months went by and it never felt right. It was easy telling Jenna, sure, but telling my family? I wondered if I’d ever feel ready for that.
But I also knew I was running out of time. Word gets around quickly in this town. Especially when half the school knows, and your mom is the janitor.
“This didn’t follow any of our plans,” I say. “Believe me. It just came up and I told them. But it went well, I think.” My stomach clenches to stop all the uncomfortable feelings rattling around in there. “I still feel a little weird about it, though.”
Jenna grabs my hand, and the butterflies in my chest settle, if only for a bit. She’s a first-class weirdo, but she’s always been there for me. Maybe I should have told her right when it happened, but I couldn’t find the words.
“Mom handled it better,” I finally say, “but I think Dad was just surprised, big-time. He’s cool, though, I mean . . . he voted for Biden.”
“Sure?” she says. “But who he votes for doesn’t mean he’s, like, automatically accepting of it. Or accepting of you. Though, if he’s out there thanking me for being your friend, he must have come around to it, right?”
This . . . is why I didn’t want to talk about it. My parents were good. They said the things they were supposed to. They were supportive!
Still, a part of me wanted more. I thought I’d feel like a whole new person: confident, full of pride. It’s not like they did anything wrong. But I wanted them to, I don’t know, prove to me that this doesn’t change anything. Make me feel like my whole family supports me. My whole village supports me.
My eyes turn back to the window. How do people in cities, or even in the suburbs, zone out when they need to think? Do the skyscrapers all blend together, the people? There’s nothing like staring out at the fields, hoping the answer pops through like summer corn.
“Was he just sad about it?” she asks. “He seemed sad when he thanked me. Not sad about you being gay, I’m sure, but maybe he was sad he didn’t know earlier? Did you tell him you told me first? Maybe he’s jealous! No . . . that would be weird . . . I mean, you and I have been best friends forever. But as far as grown-up interactions go, it was an eight or nine on the awkward scale.”
Then it clicks. He was sad. Picture this: It’s last Saturday, before family dinner night. I’m doing homework in the living room, Dad’s on the reclin er dozing in and out after his weekend shift at the factory, and Mom’s on the treadmill watching recorded episodes of Good Morning America,
Something about this episode got to me. A cute older boy from Houston was on, and he was talking about how he was chosen to be the grand marshal of his city’s pride parade. He was seventeen, sure, but compared to all the adults in the studio with him, and the pictures of his whole community supporting him, he just seemed so young. And god, he was so confident. I wondered if he’d ever spent time in the closet, or if he’d ever felt like he didn’t belong.
I wondered if I could ever be like him. To hear the word “pride” and know exactly what that means, what that feels like. To have your whole neighborhood behind you.
All of a sudden, I started crying all over my math homework, and I’m not a crying person. Even when it comes to math.
To my classmates, I’d tested coming out in so many ways—directly dropping the words or slipping it into conversation to see if the other person is caught off guard. At this point, I was a pro at it.
And though Jenna and I ran through every scenario, every possibility for telling my parents, when that guy on the TV started talking about what pride meant to him, I realized I wasn’t just waiting for the right time . . . I was hiding this from my parents, and I didn’t want to hide anymore.
And, well, try crying in front of your parents and then not explaining why. Yeah, that didn’t work. So, I told them. And Dad just kept saying how he wished he knew.
I clear my throat. “He knows our town—”
“Village,” she corrects me.
In Ohio, it takes five thousand residents to make a town. Jenna always likes to remind me that Barton Springs is many things, but with its two thousand residents, it is not a town.
“Right, our village is a little backward sometimes.” I sigh. “Like those idiotic ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ bumper stickers.”
“Oh, or the balls hanging from people’s trucks!”
“And don’t get me started on the Confederate flags as you go farther back in the farmlands, as if Ohio wasn’t literally in the north. But I mean, it’s my dad’s hometown. He went to our school. My whole family lives within twenty miles of here.” I pause for a moment, then say, “Do you think he finally gets that this isn’t the most enlightened place for his gay kid to live?”
“I bet that’s it,” she says, and I think about it.
The bus pulls to a stop. Jenna and I stand to get off at the stop along with the mayor’s son, Brett, who’s our across-the-street neighbor. I follow Jenna to the front of the bus and give our bus driver, Linda, a quick thank you. When we get off, I bend down to tie my shoe.
“Uhhhhhhhhhh,” Jenna starts. “Do you think your dad will . . . I don’t know . . . come up with some big gesture to overcompensate?”
“What do you mean?” I ask as I finish tying my shoes.
But when I look up, I see it. Everyone sees it.
I mean, you can probably see it from an airplane.
Some important context here: we have a flagpole in our front yard. It’s never really bothered me—we just replace the American flag every few years, try to remember to put it at half-mast when we’re supposed to. Nothing big and flashy.
Until today. My eyes lock on the huge, beautiful rainbow flag waving above me as the bus driver eases back onto the road.
Yep, that’s overcompensating.
Chapter 2
I take in the new flag that’s been added, just underneath the American one. For a brief second, pride swells inside me, and I feel hope. Hope that my parents are fully behind me, hope that maybe one day I can be that proud seventeen-year-old, grand marshal of my own pride parade.
I’m brought back to reality, to my backward-acting farming village. Sure, my home might be an accepting place, and my friends have been good about it, and that’s amazing. But I remind myself that, especially when it comes to the adults in Barton Springs, there are definitely homophobes out there, and they could be anywhere.
They could be everywhere.
“Well, crap,” I say to Jenna, still staring at the comically huge flag flapping above me. “I would have been fine with a hug, you know.”
All the colors of the progress pride flag stare back at me: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple horizontal stripes with a triangle of white, pink, light blue, brown, and black on the side. It’s a huge, beautiful message of acceptance. It’s an invitation to me, their gay son, but it’s also a challenge to the village.
A weird feeling crawls up my skin, and it makes me want to take a shower to get rid of it. I feel exposed, like I’m standing outside in my underwear or something.
“Are you okay?” Jenna asks.
I don’t really know how to respond to that.
“It’s a lot,” I reply as my parents rush out of the house to greet me.
Against my better judgment, I turn as the bus slips away, and I see how many faces are pressed to the windows. And this point, everyone on that bus has probably heard rumors about me, if I haven’t told them myself, but the flag is confirmation. Now they all know.
Jenna casually steps in between me and the bus, marking her place as my protector. If I haven’t been bullied for it by now, I’m not sure why having a flag would change things. But it’s not like homophobes are known for being logical.
When the bus is finally out of view, I look across the street and see Brett Miller standing on the sidewalk, watching the flag flap in the wind.
I turn, hoping Brett gives up on the whole staring thing. Jenna slips away to her house after a light squeeze of my hand. When she greets her dad with a hug, I see him study the flag with a concerned expression. But then I look at the smile on my dad’s face. He’s so hopeful and eager that it almost makes me want to join in.
“Aw, I wanted to be out here when you first saw it,” Dad says, wrapping me up in a hug. “I just raised it about thirty minutes ago. What do you think?”
Honestly? It’s equal parts pretty and terrifying.
Pretty terrifying.
“It’s . . . big” is all I can mumble. I feel my cheeks get hot, so I add quickly, “My book bag’s really heavy today. I just need to, uh, drop it off inside. I’ll be back.”
I walk, or run—am I running?—to the door, and as soon as I’m inside, the comforts of home calm me down a bit. In the living room, I see the box and wrappings that once held the flag in the middle of the floor, with our clothes steamer next to it.
I’m so ungrateful.
That’s how I feel, that’s what I am, and I know it.
I can picture Dad pulling out the flag and carefully steaming it to let the folds release their creases. Thinking about how he’s doing this huge thing for his queer kid.
It’s nice, what he did. He’s saying this is a safe space, that he and Mom accept me for who I am. I guess it’s Dad’s way of saying all the words he didn’t say this weekend.
It’s also his way to help me with the problem I clumsily admitted while crying—that I was out to a lot of people, but with each new person I told, I thought I’d feel more confident, but I didn’t feel that pride I guess I’m supposed to feel.
I take the stairs two at a time and burst into my room, dropping my bag on the floor. Out of habit, I almost take a seat at my desk to start busting through my homework. (I like to get it out of the way as soon as I get home so I can play Songbird Hollow for the rest of the day without my parents bothering me.)
I’m not doing homework right now. I look outside my window and see that Dad’s still standing outside, staring up at the flag. The bus is gone, Brett and Jenna are gone; he’s all alone.
I should go back. I should talk to him.
I know that.
But, for whatever reason, I’m too scared. So, I shut the door, turn on Songbird Hollow, and get lost in the only village where I know I can be myself.
“Jake?” Dad asks after knocking lightly on my door.
I’m not sure why he knocks as he’s opening the door, like he’s trying to respect my privacy just as he’s violating it. But it doesn’t matter, I’m not doing anything.
In-game, about six days have passed since I picked up the controller. Since each day in the game is about ten minutes, I’ve been hiding up here for an hour.
“Yeah?” I reply. I try to be chill about it, all cool and disconnected, like I didn’t bolt from the front yard and shut myself in here for a whole Songbird Hollow week.
