Meredith Russo

You don’t have to share anything with me unless you want to, you know, create something worth creating.

A bubble hovered at my mind’s edge, waiting to pop. I existed in the moment, free from the past and the future.

I was never going to be free of my past; it was always going to be there, waiting to suck me in and crush me like a black hole. The only way to escape it was to keep moving.

“Everybody’s got a past,” he said. “That don’t mean you can’t have a future.”

I felt hot tears coming but I blinked them away. I watched my reflection in the car window, beyond it trees and dusty road passing in a blur. “I just want to have a normal life.”

“And I just want you to live past your senior year,” Dad said, his jaw clenched. He let out a long breath. “People like you get killed by people like him.”

It’s what I’ve wanted for so long, but it’s scary too. It’s scary to think of leaving here, of being so far from my parents and everything I know. But then it’s the only way I can be really free, that I can finally live somewhere that people understand me.

my biggest secret isn’t that I’m bi,” Bee said, leaning forward slightly. I cocked my head and listened. “I was raped in tenth grade.”

“Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

“Whatever,” Bee said, waving my condolences away and snapping a few pictures. “It’s not a … I mean, it was a big deal. I needed therapy and shit. But it’s not why I am who I am or whatever.

“You can have anything,” she said, “once you admit you deserve it.”

“this is wonderful. I don’t know what to say.”

“Yeah,” Grant said. I realized he was staring at me. “You make me feel that way a lot.”

As I spoke I thought back to what Virginia had said weeks before, about getting anything you wanted if you let yourself believe you deserved it. For as long as I could remember, I had been apologizing for existing, for trying to be who I was, to live the life I was meant to lead. Maybe this would be the last conversation I would ever have with Grant. Maybe not. Either way, I realized, I wasn’t sorry I existed anymore. I deserved to live. I deserved to find love. I knew now—I believed, now—that I deserved to be loved.