Chapter Text
First Grade – Age 6
Jillian stood outside the elementary school staring up at the front doors. It was the start of her second week of school. Her mother beeped the horn of her car behind her by way of goodbye. Jillian had barely turned around to wave before the car pulled away. Taking a deep breath she tugged on her dirty blonde pigtails once, then grasped hold of the straps of her heavy backpack and started towards the building. The first thing she became aware of was the children looking at her. Everyone seemed to be staring at her. Self-consciously Jillian looked down at her outfit – pale cream dress decorated with the outline of grey flowers, black sneakers and pink backpack – and wondered if there was something wrong with the way she looked. She thought this was the way 6 year old girls were supposed to dress. Apparently she had been wrong. The second thing she noticed was that when she looked at them, people turned away from her as if they hadn’t been staring and whispered to their friends. People moved out of her way as she inched down the corridor, shooting her dirty or fearful looks. She managed to catch snatches of the whispers.
“Eliza told me she’s a lesbian”
“Don’t ever leave me alone with her”
“But she looks so normal”
“She’s a lesbian, that’s what I heard”
Jillian had no idea what a ‘lesbian’ was but at least now she knew that her clothes were socially acceptable. If she just kept her head down and acted like every other kid then maybe people would forget whatever it was that was making them look at her like she had just cursed every single one of them and told them she had the plague and was going to kill them all.
By lunchtime no one had approached her, talked to her, or maintained eye contact with her. She could feel their eyes burning into her back as she worked – first grade work was much too easy for her but she knew she needed to try and fit in so he never asked for harder work, just spent a lot of her time daydreaming – but every time she turned all she caught was the sharp movement of their heads as the averted their eyes.
“Miss Jackson can I ask you something?” Jillian stood in front of her teacher’s desk nervously as the shrill bell announcing the start of lunch ended.
“Yes, Jillian” She didn’t glance up, having gotten used to Jillian’s continuous stream of inquisitive questions, even in the short time she’d known her.
Blinking her big, blue eyes Jillian asked “What does ‘lesbian’ mean?”
This time, the woman actually looked up at the young girl “I’m not allowed to talk about that.” The woman’s eyes softened as she took in the tiny girl “You’ll figure it out one day, Jillian”
The pigtailed child frowned “People keep saying I’m a lesbian. No one’s talking to me”
“Jill–” Miss Jackson started, but was cut off by the little girl.
“It’s something bad isn’t it? I’m trying, Miss Jackson, I’m trying to be good. I– I wore this dress because it’s what girls wear. I got my backpack because Mama said girls like pink. I’m trying to be a good girl. I’ll do better I promise” She spoke faster and faster until she was almost hysterical.
“You are good, Jillian. You seem like a lovely little girl”
Despite her sadness, Jillian beamed. She loved getting praise, it meant what she was doing was right. That’s why she tried to fit in better, it meant she was right. She’d do anything to be normal, even if that meant forcing down every weird aspect of her personality until she forgot it was there and it was no longer part of her.
Packing up her work book and pencil case as fast as she could, Jillian hurried out of the classroom. She tried so hard to get other people to like her and today everyone had hated her. It had been a horrible day and she just wanted to get home so she could bury herself in her books and forget about the children in her school and the wicked names they had called her. She almost ran down the crowded corridor, darting in and out of the other children with impressive ease.
“See you tomorrow, lesbian” A girl’s voice that she didn’t recognise shouted at Jillian as her hand touched the handle of her mother’s car.
Jillian growled – a habit she had picked up from the family cat when she was very young – in anger but didn’t turn to face the laughing group behind her. Instead she closed her eyes, breathed deeply and got into the old car.
“What did those girls mean?” Jillian’s mother asked the second her daughter sat down beside her.
“What girls, Mama?” Jillian feigned ignorance, not wanting to discuss how she had been ostracized all day.
Grabbing her daughter’s arm to make her look at her “Those girls outside school. They called you a lesbian. Why did they say that?”
“I don’t know.” She shifted in her seat, suddenly uncomfortable under her mother’s gaze “I’m not sure what it means”
“Lesbians are disgusting, Jillian. They are sinful” Her mother said, her jaw tight and her voice tense.
Frowning, unable to understand what she had done wrong Jillian tried to explain “I think someone said that it’s a girl who likes to kiss girls”
“Jillian, girls do not kiss girls. It’s not normal. You remember that”
Her eyes pricked with tears that she desperately blinked away before he mother could catch sight of them, and her chest burned painfully as if she had been stabbed, or someone was strangling her but try as she might she couldn’t loosen the discomfort. Not trusting her voice to come out anything but choked she nodded mutely. She sucked in a breath as her arm was released. Jillian didn’t know why what her mother said made her so upset, they were just words. Words couldn’t hurt you, especially ones said out of spite.
Fifth Grade – Age 10
“Jason is so hot!”
Jillian thought of the blonde, floppy-haired boy and nearly frowned. He was painfully average, and she was sure she’d heard him say rude things about girls. Something about how girls couldn’t possibly be as clever as boys.
“Oh yes”
“You know who’s really cute? Andy”
Andy was nice, he’d never actively participated in any bullying she’d suffered from, even though they had been going to school together for years. He’d occasionally talk to her, normally to ask her for help with work. But she’d never consider him attractive. He was nice. That was it. She thought that maybe if she tried hard enough she could make herself like him because girls were supposed to like boys.
“Oh my God, Karen”
Jillian’s heat pounded in her chest, terrified that they’d ask her what boy she liked. She fought with her body to keep her breathing under control so the others wouldn’t notice anything was wrong. Boys had never appealed to Jillian. She knew that they were supposed to, that she was supposed to like their hair or their skin or some other crap, but she’d never found any of them attractive. Eventually (she hoped) she would, but she didn’t want her only friends to find out that she didn’t feel the same way as them. Jillian was already well aware that she was the least important friend in the group – she was quiet and if she suddenly vanished one day she highly doubted they’d notice. She couldn’t afford another thing to come between them.
Seventh Grade – Age 12
The locker room was loud and Jillian had to resist the urge to clamp her hands over her ears to block out the noise. Like a dutiful dog she followed her friends to their usual corner of the room and dumped her gym bag on the floor.
“I hope there aren’t any lesbians in here. Dykes are disgusting” A small, blonde girl who was changing to the right of Jillian said, her voice cutting through the rising noise like a knife through flesh.
Jillian felt her knees weaken and she dropped onto the bench. She grinned quickly at her friends, making sure they didn’t realise anything was wrong. Desperately, she tried to pretend that she hadn’t heard what the girl had said, tried to repress her fear, but the words twirled around in her head, burning away all her other thoughts.
She was so focused on obsessing over what she had heard that she didn’t hear the warning calls; didn’t see the ball flying towards her. She woke up on the ground. The baseball had hit her square in the temple and had knocked her out momentarily. Looking up she saw the girl who had said those horrible words in the locker room standing over her. Automatically, she scrambled away from her, hauling herself to her feet.
“Alright, Jillian?” Her teacher asked, her voice sounding almost, but not quite, concerned.
She nodded and stumbled a little as she handed the bat to a classmate “Fine”
Eighth Grade – Age 13
Jillian hadn’t wanted to go to the dance. She had no one to go with and her friends’ would all be occupied by their boyfriends so she would probably spend the evening alone. On top of that she wasn’t very fond of dances. She loved dancing, she did it all the time in her room along to loud music that was at least a decade old. But dancing and dances were very different. Dancing was freeing, it was self-expression, it was learning who you were. Dances were polite and they were all about conforming to social standards. For Jillian that meant changing who she was. But her mother had insisted, saying that she was an awfully shy girl and needed to make the effort to socialise and get along with the other children better.
So there she was, at the eighth grade dance wearing red dress that was uncomfortably tight and short. At the start of the evening she had danced a little with her friends, in that weird, subdued way people did when they were in public, but now she was tired. Jillian’s feet were aching from the ridiculous shoes her mother had given her (“they’ll make you look taller, Jillian”) and she’d spent much longer in the company of this many people than she’d ever intended to in her life. She was about to leave, find a payphone to call her mom to come pick her up when she caught something out of the corner of her eye. Standing alone at the side of the hall Jillian watched with her heart in her mouth as she saw Amy Sanders, the girl she had known since third grade, slow dance with Jason Danes. Her chest burned with the same irreparable pain it had 7 years ago when her mother had angrily told that girls did not kiss other girls. Girls do not kiss other girls, she repeated in her head. It had become a mantra, something she told herself over and over whenever she felt her thoughts betraying her, becoming dirty.
For someone who had been practising the art of not crying for so long, she was not very good at it. She felt the tell-tale tautness of the muscles around her eyes, the sore, uncomfortable lump in her throat and fled from the hall. Once outside, she leaned against the wall, feeling the cold open air on her face and letting it numb her. Unable to contain her sorrow, tears sprang from her eyes and she sobbed broken-heartedly. She felt the harsh brick of the wall tearing at the back of her dress as she slid down until she was curled in a ball, but did not stop. Because girls do not fall for other girls.
Ninth Grade – Age 14
Ever since she first heard the word ‘lesbian’ whispered judgementally at the tender age of 6, Jillian had never heard anything positive about the word. She’d heard it used to disgrace people, she’d been told that it was a disgusting, dirty, sinful word. Lesbians were horrible people; they went to hell. ‘Lesbian’ was not normal. It was not just others who said those terrible things, Jillian herself had said spiteful things to others and to herself.
Never let it be said that she was naïve, that she couldn’t see what was right in front of her. She knew what she was. She knew that she was vile. It had hit her that afternoon.
Sitting in French class, she had been staring out the window thinking about her previous lesson (physics), when suddenly her teacher’s head appeared in her line of sight. Miss Gibson was standing half bent over Jillian’s desk with her elbow rest on the edge and her chin on her hand. She was staring straight into her blue eyes with an ferocious intensity that made Jillian’s stomach flip.
“We’re not boring you, are we, Jillian?”
“N–no” She stuttered, her heart skipping several beats.
Leaning back a little, so that their heads were no longer so close “Good. We wouldn’t want that” She offered a bright smile, then straightened, turned and returned to her desk at the front of the classroom.
Jillian was left unable to breathe. The vision of her teacher's piercing green eyes danced tauntingly in her head for the rest of the day.
That night she sat in bed, her eyes heavy and yearning for sleep but instead she stared – unblinking. Pulling her knees up to her chest and she hugged them tightly, desperately trying to stop the sobs from wracking her chest. Tears fell down her cheeks in rivers and she wiped them away furiously with the back of her hand. At least she didn’t have to worry about alerting her parents, she had learned to cry silently a long time ago. Staring out at the dark spot at the end of her bed, Jillian cried. She had spent her entire life being told that she didn’t fit in; that she wasn’t normal; that no one wanted her. She had been called all kinds of names, been mercilessly taunted by both classmates and teachers all because she thought differently to them. And now there was this. Jillian Holtzmann loved girls. There was yet another thing the kids at school could tease her about. When she moved to high school she had hoped it would all blow over, but high school was bigger and there were a lot more kids there and news of her weirdness (the one she tried so hard to extradite from herself) had spread quickly and soon she had more bullies than ever. This was going to be yet another thing people would tell her she was just doing for attention – as if she wasn’t already drowning in unwanted negative attention. Jillian mentally berated herself, attacking herself for her stupidity. In her head she screamed at herself ‘Why can’t you just be normal for once in your fucking life’.
Junior Year – Age 17
Jillian stood at the kitchen counter chopping vegetables for dinner. She glanced over her shoulder at where her mother was preparing chicken “Mama, can I talk to you?”
“Of course, Jillian”
“Okay. See. Um. I've been thinking about something for a while now.”
“Jill, what's the matter?”
“Okay, just hear me out, Mama.” She paused for a second to steel herself for what she was about to stay “When I was 6 years old I walked into school to find everyone chanting 'lesbian' at me. I didn't know what that meant at the time, you told me it was disgusting, and it took me a long time find out what it actually was. No one would give me a straight answer – it was something no one talked about, something that was wrong. But it's not wrong. Being gay is not wrong”
Her mother's voice was stern when she spoke, as if she was struggling to contain her anger “Jillian –”
“No, Mother, listen!” She almost shouted back at her.
“Gay is not wrong! I am gay! It's not wrong. I am okay the way I am”
Jillian's mother's jaw was tightly wound as she looked at her daughter “How dare you!”
“What?”
“After everything I have done for you, how dare you do this to me? ”
“How dare I–I'm not doing anything to you!”
“I did not raise a fucking dyke”
Jillian stumbled back into the counter as if her mother had just physically slapped her. She tried to speak but her words had been knocked out of her.
“Get out” Her mother muttered, her voice strong despite its low volume.
“What?”
“I said: get out. I will not have filth under my roof”
“Mama, please”
“Get out, Jillian!” She screamed.
The teenager spun on her heel away from her seething mother and tore up to her room. Tears stung at her eyes, almost blinding her with pain, but she refused to let them fall, she ransacked her drawers and stuffed her clothes randomly into her old backpack. She could hear her mother stomping up the stairs towards her room, still screaming all kinds of profanity at her.
“Jillian, get your fucking ass out of my house now!”
She barged past her, bag slung over her shoulder “Don't worry I'm leaving” Jillian ran down the street away from her house as fast as she could. She ran without any proper direction, not really paying attention to where she was going. Her feet ran without the order of her brain, relying on pure muscle memory. When she finally stopped running it was dark, she hadn't even noticed the sun setting having been so focused on getting away from her mother. Suddenly overcome with tiredness Jillian dropped to the ground of the park. Eyes pricking with tears once more, she did nothing to stop them this time. Letting her tears cascade down her cheeks in thick, devastating rivulets, she wept. Wept for her mother's hatred and the loss of the only life she'd ever known. For the first time in her life Jillian found herself well and truly alone.