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234 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1982
Ms. Widmer, who taught English at Foster Academy, always said that the best way to begin a story is to start with the first important or exciting incident and then fill in the background. So I’m going to start with the rainy Sunday last November when I met Annie Kenyon.
“It’s the one thing we don’t know about each other, the one thing we aren’t letting each other know—as if we’re blocking the channels, because—because we’re so scared of it, Liza. The real question still is why.”
“And here we are,” she said. “Liza and Annie, suspended in between.”
“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can’t understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?”
“But what really is immorality? And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?”Being a teenager is already painful enough, with identity still often fragile enough to need nurturing and support and understanding. It’s sobering and heartbreaking when even your family’s support seems contingent on pretending that your love and nature is a mistake, a misunderstanding, a nothing. When society views you as an aberration because of who you love, the wrongness of that society should be obvious.
“If you two remember nothing else from all this,” Ms. Widmer said, “remember that. Please. Don’t – don’t punish yourselves for people’s ignorant reactions to what we all are.”
“Don’t let ignorance win,” said Ms. Stevenson. “Let love.”
"What struck me most, though, was that, in that whole long article, the word 'love' wasn't used even once. That made me mad; it was as if whoever wrote the article didn't know that gay people actually love each other. The encyclopedia writers ought to talk to me, I thought as I went back to bed; I could tell them something about love."
¿Alguna vez te has sentido muy cerca de alguien? ¿Tanto que no entiendes por qué esa persona y tú tenéis dos cuerpos separados, dos pieles separadas?
La directora Poindexter, sin embargo, no era capaz de contemplar nada que no fuera el escándalo que había causado el embarazo de la chica.