And Lonnie thought coming out had been difficult.

Though, to be fair, she hadn’t done that on her own terms. Having such a large family meant that it was damn near impossible to keep any secrets. One of her cousins had told another cousin who told the third one, who then proceeded to spread the word to the fourth one and the fourth one’s much chattier sister, who then blurted it out during one of Penny Knox’s patented Sunday dinners.

By then, the story had morphed into an otherworldly being where Lonnie had gone from holding a girl’s hand on the way to school to having a full-blown make-out session in the locker room of her eighth-grade gym class. A mortified Lonnie had no choice but to tell the true story and reveal her feelings for the cute girl in her class, and she swore that no junior high make-out session had happened. She should’ve ratted out her pimple-faced cousin, who she’d seen kissing a boy – tongue and all – but Lonnie had been too busy worrying about her Grand-Penny’s reaction to her liking girls that way. She’d expected some tears and some, “Where did I go wrong in raising you,” but, to her surprise, her grandmother told her cousin off for sticking her nose in other people’s business.

“And I know damn well yo’ fast ass be out there with them little boys,” which had proven that Penny Knox was, in fact, a mutant fresh out of Xavier’s School of the Gifted – a reference Lonnie held dear because her crush had a thing for Storm.

Sometimes we come out of the closet.

Sometimes, there was never a closet to begin with.

And other times… we get an unwanted push.

Don’t be like Lonnie’s cousins.

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