as unsinkable as i can be // the wilds

chapter fifteen.

"A few months ago, I fell in love with a girl. Her name was Camille, and she was the captain of the soccer team at our school. Everyone knew who she was, and her entire life, she had dated guys. But finally, she was single, and I noticed her. I saw her.

She was a senior, so a year older than me, and... I went to every single one of her soccer games. I hid in the back of the bleachers so nobody could see me, and I would watch only her, even if she wasn't on the field, even though she was rarely ever benched. She was... she was everything to me.

Camille didn't even know that I existed, until one day, her brother came up to me in the hallway. He was a year younger than me but was over six feet tall, and looked like he was about to beat me up. He told me that he had noticed me at all of Camille's games and that I needed to leave her alone because Camille wasn't... a freak like me. H-he threatened to tell the head of the newspaper that I was gay, knowing that I would be kicked off, cause that's the south for you.

My-my parents didn't even know, because I knew they wouldn't approve. They'd probably disown me if they knew what I imagined when I was laying in bed at night, or what I was writing in the journal that I kept in a loose board behind my bookshelf. W-we're Southern, you know? People like me, they aren't accepted, not like in the north or on the west coast. They're ostracized, and they have no friends, and they spend each and every day at school talking to absolutely no one.

Camille... one day, she finally noticed me. She saw me walking home after school when she would usually have soccer practice. Apparently, her coach's daughter was sick or something, so practice had been canceled. She lived a few houses down from me, so she asked if she could walk home with me. Just like that, I found myself waiting after her practices, and then we'd walk home together.

I told my parents I was studying with Camille, yet after a while, we would go to this abandoned park behind our neighborhood, and we would sit and talk for hours... every day. And she would help me with my math, and I would help her with English, and I... I found myself falling in love with her, not just the idea of her.

Finally, a few months later, she kissed me. Just like that, she pushed me up against a tree and kissed me so hard my body was dizzy and I didn't know what to do with my hands. She... she saw me, in a way that no one else ever did. It was... it was the first moment in my life I had finally felt like myself.

I knew that we had to be a secret. It was an unspoken rule. But Camille... she started wanting people to know, trying to hold my hand in the hallway, but... she didn't notice the other kids like I did. She didn't realize what would happen to us.

So... I told her I couldn't. I told her I couldn't, not in public, and she... she got mad at me. We were in my room, and she knew about my journal behind my bookshelf, and she... she took it from me. And she wouldn't let me inside her house, not to get it back, and the next day... the next day, she had ripped the pages out of my journal that I had been writing about her, and she blew them up and copied thousands of pages of them, and she taped them on the lockers. Everywhere.

My parents were called when I had a breakdown. It was my first one ever. And when they saw what had happened, they hadn't tried to comfort me or tell me it was okay. They sent me to a Christian therapist, who would convert me "out of my sin and into a new life."

Then... then I tried to end it. My dad had had knee surgery the previous fall, and some of his really intense meds were still in the medicine cabinet. So... I waited until my parents were gone, and I told the whole bottle.

Apparently, my mom had forgotten her keys and asked me where I was, and when she came up to my bathroom, she called 911. They pumped my stomach, I spent three weeks in the hospital and then two months in the psychiatric ward, and then they sent me here. This was where I was supposed to get better, or something like that.

The anxiety attacks, they... they just started to get worse in the hospital, and so they thought a change of scene would help. And here I am, no better than I was before, maybe worse than when it all first happened.

So yeah, I'm not okay. Yeah, maybe I'm a psycho.

But Toni Shalifoe... I love you too."

---

This chapter is really near and dear to my heart, especially since I'm writing very out of pocket. I wanted to have Raelynn come from the south because that's where I'm from, and being a bisexual in the south is something that is so awful. 

Shelby Goodkind is almost the exact situation that I am in right now: parents find out, and all they want to do is pray away the gay. It's been extremely hard, so after watching The Wilds and seeing such beautiful representation, I knew that I wanted to write a character who dealt with similar things that Shelby and I did. 

(I honestly think that's why Shelby is my least favorite character: I see so much of myself in her that it's hard to watch)

I really do want to thank each and every one of you, because, without this book and the readers that have been on this journey with me, I wouldn't be as happy as I am right now. 

So thank you. Really. 

xoxo,

Em :)

(also, don't worry. I'm safe in my house, which I am very lucky for. I just don't have the support that I want from my parents.)

(ALSO, 4K!)