Other Worlds - The Wilds

Chapter 34

  She heard Toni choke back a sob but she had to finish. She had to say this out loud. "And that would be her life, until her dutiful and equally repressed children put her in a nursing home to live out her final days. Visiting once a month to pray for her memory to come back. She would probably be thankful and wonder who those nice kids were and why they talked about a husband named Andrew because she only remembered that pretty girl from school. She would grow up, live, and die completely in her head."

  She exhaled heavily; her darkest thoughts flowing out and filling the car with the heaviness that she had been holding in for years. The atmosphere was palpable.

  Toni was silent for a while. Shelby was beginning to think that she still didn't understand. "Say something." Nothing. "Please?" she nudged.

  "I'm scared," Toni finally offered.

  "Of what?"

  "That it will work."

  Shelby had thought that herself. She wasn't naive enough to think she was 'strong enough to resist' or anything like that. If anything, she already had the foundation of shame ingrained in her so theoretically it shouldn't take much to push her back into that headspace.

  What she did have, though, was a God that she was no longer scared of. She knew that conversion course and she knew that it had been build on the key principle of scaring people straight by using God against them.

  It might not be enough, but it was something.

  She had something else too. "Toni, I will be fine. It is only 2 months. And I'll just choose one of my '50 personalities and stick with it'" Shelby teased, remembering a fight from a long time ago.

  Toni laughed, too upset to really laugh but just enough make Shelby relax a little bit. "Oh God did I really say that?"

  Shelby chuckled. "Yeah. It was enlightening actually. But seriously, I can pretend, I've been doing it my whole life. I just need to be careful. I will say all the right things and engage in all the classes but I won't let it sink in. I know that being gay isn't a sin and God isn't going to send me to hell for loving and being loved."

  Toni looked out of the window and sighed. "I really hate this. All I want is for you to be happy but there is an obstacle at every single turn."

  It was poetic really. In a twisted way. That they had to let each other suffer at the hands of awful, vindictive people in order to save each other from themselves in the future.

  "Shelby... I will talk to Marty tomorrow. I have forever to do that, I only have a few hours with you."

  Shelby smiled and turned turned the key, the car humming to life. She didn't push Toni to talk to Martha. If she had to do it then she would have. Toni had had a difficult enough day already and Shelby... Well, she wanted to enjoy her life and her freedom before she was plunged back into the world that she had tried so hard to scramble out of. "Okay, but lets just be us. No doom and gloom; there is enough of that coming up for both of us."

  Toni literally shook her head in some misguided bid to shake off the heavy atmosphere. "Yep, I can do that!" Toni grinned.

  Her hair was a mess, her cheeks were red from crying and the cold and there were faint, yellowish bruises on her face but somehow, she was still the most perfect person that Shelby had ever seen or known. Shelby hoped that there wouldn't be a day where those words were no longer true.

  "You were right by the way," Toni said, her voice just loud enough to carry over the sound of the engine. "I didn't react before. But you were right about how I loved pageant competing, Jesus club Shelby. I loved her then and I love her now. I just wanted you to know that before you go. I love you. In case those words mean something else to you when you get back, I want you to remember them as they are now." The words tumbled out of Toni, rushed and sincere, as though she had been holding onto them for a long time.