Stories, Thoughts and Snippets
Leaving Home 1 Leaving Home 2 Leaving Home 3 Leaving Home 4
I was fairly good looking, enough so that girls would flirt with me, or try to. Every now and then a particularly forward one would even ask me to a dance or out on a date. With the girls I made excuses. I couldn't just turn them down, flat. That would have been too much of a give away, if I could have stood going to church I probably would have outwardly become devoutly religious, maybe even profess that I planned to enter the clergy and as such was above such earthly desires.
Every day I was afraid it was going to be the day that some asshole called me gay and I wouldn't be able to argue out of it. The day never came, after awhile I realized that people who already knew me just did not want to know, and they would defend me in order to maintain the illusion they had built up in their world. If I turned down a girl and whispers started one of my old friends would leap in and defuse things by saying that I just thought I could do better than her was all. Rumors even started going around that I was fooling around with Lisa Barnes, who was the reverend's daughter and was strictly forbidden to date, the rev had even threatened in church that any boy he found trying to corrupt his daughter would not only be damned to hell, but he would personally help them get there expeditiously.
Lisa never said anything about these rumors, I think she enjoyed the attention, maybe even the idea of what it would be like to disobey her father so grievously. Whenever anyone asked me I would just shrug my shoulders and say something like "Maybe." The grand culmination of this was Lisa marching next to me at graduation, she even whispered in my ear as we were standing in front of the entire town that she wished the rumors had been true. I smiled. The reverend glowered at me, but he needed a little evidence before he could hurry me on to my eternal reward, and the simple fact was that there just wasn't any.