Authors: Jodi Picoult
Where You Are (3:22)
ZOE
F
or the first five seconds after I wake up, the day is as crisp as a new dollar bill—spotless, full of possibility.
And then I remember.
That there is a lawsuit.
That there are three embryos.
That today, I am testifying.
That for the rest of my life, Vanessa and I will have to jump twice as high and run twice as fast to cover the same ground as a heterosexual couple. Love is never easy, but it seems that, for gay couples, it’s an obstacle course.
I feel her arm steal around me from behind. “Stop thinking,” she says.
“How do you know I’m thinking?”
Vanessa smiles against my shoulder blade. “Because your eyes are open.”
I roll over to face her. “How did you do it? How does
anyone
ever come out when they’re younger? I mean, I can barely handle what’s being said about me in that courtroom, and I’m forty-one years old. If I were fourteen, I wouldn’t just be in the closet—I’d be gluing myself to its inside wall.”
Vanessa rolls onto her back and stares up at the ceiling. “I would have rather died than come out in high school. Even though I knew, deep down, who I was. There are a million reasons to not come out when you’re a teenager—because adolescence is about matching everyone else, not standing out; because you don’t know what your parents are going to say; because you’re terrified your best friend will think you’re making the moves on her—seriously, I’ve been there.” She glances at me. “At my school now, there are five teens who are openly gay and lesbian, and about fifteen more who don’t want to realize they’re gay and lesbian yet. I can tell them a hundred million times that what they’re feeling is perfectly normal, and then they go home and turn on the news and they see that the military won’t let gay people serve. They watch another gay marriage referendum bite the dust. One thing kids
aren’t
is stupid.”
“How many people have to say there’s something wrong with you before you start believing it?” I muse out loud.
“You tell me,” Vanessa says. “You’re a late bloomer, Zo, but you’re just as brave as the rest of us. Gays and lesbians are like cockroaches, I guess. Resilient as all hell.”
I laugh. “Clearly that would be Pastor Clive’s worst nightmare. Cockroaches have been around since the dinosaurs were walking the earth.”
“But then Pastor Clive would have to believe in evolution,” Vanessa says.
Thinking of Pastor Clive makes me think about the gauntlet we had to run yesterday to get into court. Last night, Wade Preston had been on the Hannity show. Today there will be twice as much media. Twice as much attention focused on me.
I’m used to it; I’m a performer after all. But there’s an enormous difference between an audience that’s watching you because they can’t wait to see what comes next and an audience that’s watching you because they’re waiting for you to fail.
Suddenly nothing about Pastor Clive seems funny at all.
I roll onto my side, staring at the buttery light on the wood floor, wondering what would happen if I phoned Angela and told her I had the flu. Hives. The Black Plague.
Vanessa curves her body around mine, tangles our ankles together. “Stop thinking,” she says again. “You’re going to be fine.”
One of the hidden costs of a courtroom trial is the amount of time that your real life is entirely interrupted by something you’d much rather keep secret. Maybe you’re a little ashamed; maybe you just don’t think it’s anyone’s business. You have to take personal time off work; you have to assume that everything else is on hold and this takes precedence.
In this, a lawsuit is not much different from in vitro.
Because of this—and because Vanessa’s taking off just as much time as I am—we decide that we will spend an hour at the high school before we have to go to court for the day. Vanessa can clear her desk and put out whatever fires have sprung up since yesterday; I will meet with Lucy.
Or so we think, until we turn the corner from the school parking lot and find a mob of picketers, holding signs and chanting.
FEAR GOD, NOT GAYS
JUDGMENT IS COMING
NO QUEERS HERE
3 GAY RIGHTS: 1. STDS 2. AIDS 3. HELL
Two cops are standing by, warily watching the protest. Clive Lincoln is standing smack in the middle of this fiasco, wearing yet another white suit—this one double-breasted. “We are here to protect our children,” he bellows. “The future of this great country—and those at greatest risk to becoming the prey of homosexuals—homosexuals who work in this very school!”
“Vanessa.” I gasp. “What if he outs you?”
“After all this media coverage, I hardly think that’s possible,” Vanessa says. “Besides, the people I care about already know. The people I don’t care about—well, they’ll have to just deal with it. They can’t fire me because I’m gay.” She stands a little taller. “Angela would
drool
to take that case.”
A school bus pulls up, and as the baffled kids stream out of it, the church members yell at them, or shove signs in their faces. One small, delicate boy, wearing a hooded sweatshirt that has been yanked tight around his face, turns bright red when he sees the signs.
Vanessa leans closer to me. “Remember what we were talking about this morning? He’s one of the other fifteen.”
The boy ducks his head, trying to become invisible.
“I’m going to run interference,” Vanessa says. “You okay on your own here?” She doesn’t wait to hear my answer but barrels through the crowd—shoving with a linebacker’s force until she reaches the boy and carefully steers him through this forcefield of hate. “Why don’t you get a life?” Vanessa yells at Pastor Clive.
“Why don’t you get a
man
?” he replies.
Suddenly Vanessa’s face is just as red as the boy’s. I watch her disappear into the school doors, still trying to refocus the student’s attention.
“Homosexuals are teaching our children—trying to convert them to their lifestyle,” Pastor Clive says. “What irony is it that
guidance
is being provided to these impressionable youth by those who live in sin?”
I grab the sleeve of a policeman. “This is a school. Surely they shouldn’t be protesting here. Can’t you get rid of them?”
“Not unless they actually do something violent. You can blame the liberals for the flip side of democracy, lady. Guys like this get to blow their horn; terrorists move in the neighborhood. God bless the U.S.A.,” he says sarcastically. He looks at me, cracks his gum.
“I have nothing against homosexuals,” Pastor Clive says. “But I do not like what they do. Gays already have equal rights. What they want are special rights. Rights that will slowly but surely take away from your own freedoms. In places where they have prevailed, speaking my mind, like I am right now, could land me in jail for hate speech. In Canada and England and Sweden, pastors and ministers and cardinals and bishops have been sued or sentenced to prison for preaching against homosexuality. In Pennsylvania, an evangelical group carrying signs like you were arrested for ethnic intimidation.”
Another busload of students walks by. One of them throws a spitball at Pastor Clive. “Dickhead,” the kid says.
The pastor wipes it calmly off his face. “They have already been brainwashed,” he says. “The school systems now teach even babies in kindergarten that having two mommies is normal. If your child says differently, he’ll be humiliated in front of his peers. But it doesn’t stop in schools. You could wind up like Chris Kempling—a Canadian teacher who was suspended for writing a letter to the editor stating that gay sex poses health risks and that many religions find homosexuality immoral. He was just stating the facts, friends, and yet he was suspended without pay for a month. Or Annie Coffey-Montes, a Bell Atlantic employee who was fired for asking to be removed from the e-mail list of gays and lesbians in her company that advertised parties and dances. Or Richard Peterson, who posted Bible verses about homosexuality on his office cubicle at Hewlett-Packard and found himself out of a job.”
He is a cheerleader for the cheerless, I realize. Someone who doesn’t gather people to his cause as much as drive them there with paranoia.
There is a rumble of disturbance at the edges of the crowd, an undulation like a puppy under a quilt. I am elbowed by a woman who has a large gold cross hanging between her breasts.
“Your right as a Christian to embrace your own beliefs is being curtailed by the homosexual agenda,” Pastor Clive continues. “We must fight back now, before our religious and civil freedoms are a casualty, trampled by these—”
All of a sudden, he is knocked over by a blur of black. Immediately, three of his suited thugs pull him to his feet, at the same time that the two cops grab the attacker. I think he’s just as shocked as I am to see who it is. “Lucy!” he cries. “What on earth are you doing!”
I can’t figure out how he knows her name at first. Then I remember that she goes to his church.
Apparently under duress.
Shoving through the crowd, I step between Clive and the policemen, who are totally going for overkill with Lucy. Each of them has one of her arms twisted behind her back, and she weighs all of a hundred pounds. “I’ll take this from here,” I say, my voice brimming with so much authority that they actually let her go.
“You and I aren’t finished,” Clive says, but I shoot him a look over my shoulder as I lead Lucy into the school.
“Take it up with me in court,” I tell him.
I bet Lucy’s never been so glad to have the doors of the school close behind her. Her face is flushed and mottled. “Take a deep breath,” I tell her. “It’s going to be all right.”
Vanessa comes out of the main office and looks at us both. “What happened?”
“Lucy and I need a place to calm down,” I say, keeping my voice as even as possible, when what I really want to do is call the ACLU or Angela or a proctologist, anyone who has experience in dealing with assholes like Clive Lincoln.
Vanessa doesn’t even hesitate. “My office. Take as long as you need.”
I march Lucy into the main office—a place where she’s spent far too much time, being disciplined by the assistant principal—and into Vanessa’s cozy space. I close the door behind us. “Are you all right?”
She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “I just wanted him to shut up,” Lucy murmurs.
She must know, by now, that I am the center of this storm. There have been articles in the papers about the trial. Last night when I was brushing my teeth, there was my face, on the local late-night news. And now, there’s picketing on the steps of the school. I may initially have tried to keep my private life from her because of our therapy relationship, but now, doing so would be like trying to sandbag the ocean.
It makes sense that Lucy’s heard about all this. That people at her church are bad-mouthing me, and that she feels torn.
Torn enough to tackle Clive Lincoln.
I pull out a chair so she can sit down. “Do you believe him?” she asks.
“Frankly, no,” I admit. “He’s like something out of a circus sideshow.”
“No.” Lucy shakes her head. “I mean . . . do you
believe
him?”
At first I am shocked. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who can listen to Pastor Clive and not take his words as utter lies. But then again, Lucy is only a teenager. Lucy goes to an evangelical church. She’s been spoon-fed this rhetoric all her life.
“No, I don’t believe him,” I say softly. “Do you?”
Lucy picks at the unraveling black threads of her leggings. “There was this kid who went to school here last year. Jeremy. He was in my homeroom. We all knew he was gay even though he never said it. He didn’t have to. I mean, everyone
else
called him a faggot often enough.” She looks up at me. “He hanged himself in his basement just before Christmas. His stupid fucking parents blamed it on a D he got in Civics.” Lucy’s eyes glint, hard as diamonds. “I was so jealous of him. Because he got to check out of this place for good. He left, and no matter how many times I try, I can’t.”
I taste copper on my tongue; it takes a moment for me to realize this is fear. “Lucy, are you thinking of hurting yourself?” When she doesn’t answer, I stare at her forearms, to see if she’s cutting again, but even in this mild weather she’s wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt.
“What I want to know is where the fuck is Jesus,” Lucy says. “Where is He when there’s so much hate it feels like concrete drying up around you? Well, fuck you, God. Fuck you for going when the going gets tough.”
“Lucy. Talk to me. Do you have a plan?” It is basic suicide counseling—get someone to talk about her intentions, and it’s possible to diffuse them. I need to know if she’s got pills in her purse, a rope in her closet, a gun under her mattress.
“Can someone stop loving you because you’re not who they want you to be?”
Her question stops me cold. I find myself thinking of Max. “I guess so,” I admit. Has Lucy had her heart broken? It could certainly account for her latest downslide; if I know anything about this girl, it’s that she expects people to leave her, and blames herself when they do. “Did something happen with a boy?”
She turns to me, her face as open as a wound. “Sing,” Lucy begs. “Make this all go away.”
I don’t have my guitar. I’ve left everything for music therapy in the car—the crowd that had gathered outside commanded my attention. The only instrument I have is my voice.
So I sing, slowly, a cappella. “Hallelujah,” the old Leonard Cohen song from before Lucy was born.
With my eyes closed, with every word a brushstroke, I do the kind of praying people do when they don’t know if there is a God. I hope, for Lucy. For me and Vanessa. For all the misfits in the world who don’t necessarily want to fit in. We just don’t want to always be blamed, either.
When I finish, I have tears in my eyes. But Lucy doesn’t. Her features might as well be stone.
“Again,” she commands.
I sing the song twice. Three times.