The Truth

She’s lonely. That’s the closest thing to truth she’s given anyone in her family. She’s pretty sure her mother suspects something closer to the truth, her brother too. Her father doesn’t seem to be bothered, he just offers her a hug when it’s clear that she needs it. She doesn’t really care what her sister thinks; her sister has never shown a speck of care about her.

Other than her best friend, no one knows. She plans to keep it that way as of right now. She’s very comfortable keeping her struggles with insecurity and self-esteem on the down low, especially when her family regularly makes fun of people for feeling the same way she does.

Ultimately, even if it isn’t wholly the truth, Stevie is still really lonely. She’s never been good at making friends, and the idea of having to bring them home to meet her family makes it so much worse. She does have her best friend Alex, who is her only friend. The problem with that is while Alex is her only friend, she is not Alex’s only friend.

Therefore, Stevie spends a lot of time in her bedroom playing video games. There are people online that she regularly talks with and plays video games with. They don’t really qualify as friends, but they give her the normal social interaction that she needs. One of those people edits the fiction she writes, and during one of their Skype sessions, she almost tells him. But the wifi connection goes out, and he figures it was an omen for how little work they were getting done.

Then her parents start fighting a lot, and Stevie finds herself going on a lot of walks so that she can get out of the house. She’s still really lonely, but now that she’s getting an ample amount of vitamin D, she’s not so sad about it. She walks away from angry words being hurled back and forth and returns to awkward silences over dinner.

Since her brother lives with his girlfriend in another state and her sister goes to a university three hours away, she’s forced to handle their parents’ constant threats of divorce on her own. In all of this darkness, one bright thing starts happening. Alex makes Stevie her top priority and Stevie doesn’t have to handle the threats by herself.

She spends a lot of time walking around with Alex and cuddling in her queen sized bed and watching good movies she would never watch on her own. Something, at some point, shifts where Alex starts holding her hand and kissing her cheek and paying for her food. Stevie loves it, really likes Alex. One of those lovely times, Alex becomes her first kiss.

The night she gives Alex her first kiss, she returns home to find her father, brother, and sister gathered in the living room with no sign of her mother or her mother’s things. Her good mood is efficiently ruined, and she hides in her room under the knitted blanket her mother made her for her tenth birthday.

Her father sends her away to her aunt’s when their divorce and custody case goes to court. While she spends time on the beach with her loving aunt and uncle, she comes to terms with the fact that her insecurity and self-esteem are just disguises for her true struggle with sexuality. She cries into her aunt’s arms every night she’s there. Her aunt believes it’s because her parents are coming to the end of their marriage, but Stevie had known that it was coming for a long time. She had mourned alone in her bedroom a long time ago.

The last night she’s there, a storm comes and the power goes out. In the candle light, she tells her aunt and uncle the truth. They listen, so free of judgment and so full of love. Then she admits that she had been struggling with the truth since before her parents had started threatening divorce several months ago. That’s what her aunt and uncle get angry about; they get angry about her parents not being able to see past their own problems to help their daughter.

She returns to find that her father has sole custody of her and the people left in her family are bitter over recent events. Because of snarky comments murmured under vicious breaths, she spends all of her time with Alex again, who teaches her how to kiss and touch and grab and take and give. Her brother figures out the truth and takes her on a drive in his crappy truck to confront her. She just smiles and tells him that she’s happy for the first time in maybe ever. Her brother smiles back and tells her that he’s happy for her.

It slips out during a late night Skype session with her editor, and he tells her that he’s proud to call her his friend. She starts crying, and he just mumbles words of encouragement to her.

It’s the day before her senior year that she tells her father the truth. They’re sitting in an empty parking lot, and she very nonchalantly takes a sip of her peanut butter milkshake from Sonic right after confessing. Her father stares at her with the strangest expression on his face, and she stares right back. Finally, he looks forward and says that he’s glad she felt that she could tell him.

And that sets Stevie off to a good senior year. She has Alex by her side and some good family to back her up. She’s not lonely or grieving her parents’ marriage anymore. In fact, she’s pretty happy.