Daphne said nothing as the boat moved through the water. She stayed prone at the bottom, her soaked dress growing cold on her skin, watching as the crab blurred across the sky.
“You know, Elena is why I even know anything about my signs,” she said, eyes still on the stars. April stayed silent, the paddle pulling through the water the only sound. “Did she learn all of that from you?”
April sighed. “Probably.”
“My family wasn’t into astrology at all.” She laughed, a sort of exhausted giddiness filling her chest. “Actually, that’s an understatement. They thought it wasevil. Divination. The Devil with a capital D.”
“Jesus.”
“Exactly.”
April huffed a tiny laugh, which somehow worked to settle the swirling feelings around Daphne’s heart.
“So you grew up Christian?” April asked.
“Also an understatement,” Daphne said, eyes blurring on the pinpricks of light now. “My dad was the pastor of the Baptist church in our town.”
“What town was that?”
“Crestwater, Tennessee.”
“How did you end up in Boston?”
Daphne released a breath and squeezed her eyes closed, Elena and April and the last three years washing over her like a wave in a storm. And then she started talking. Because talking was the only way to quiet her thoughts, and maybe, just maybe, if she laid everything out for April, she’d figure out how she got here too, howshe ended up in this canoe with the person whose heart she unknowingly helped break.
“I was fifteen when my mom found my sketchbook,” she said.
April sucked in a breath but said nothing as she paddled them closer to shore, so Daphne kept talking.
It had been ten years, but the day she walked into her room to find her mom sitting on her bed, her posture impossibly straight, flipping through the pages slowly, methodically, still felt viscerally recent. Pages that held drawings and journal entries of all of Daphne’s secrets. Secrets she had to tell someone, something, and the god her parents worshipped wasn’t listening. She didn’t even have a best friend to trust, to whisper to, because all her friends went to her family’s church, and they all loved church, felt right at home lifting their hands and singing in the choir, while Daphne just felt invisible.
“This isn’t who we raised you to be,” her mother had said then. “This isn’t what a daughter of God should be.”
And that was it—two sentences that broke Daphne’s heart in two, the truth of what her parents thought about her after so many years of fearing exactly that.
That she was wrong.
That she was only lovable if she fell in line, fit a certain mold.
And so she tried. She tried and tried and tried, for the next two years. Her mother took the sketchbook, and Daphne didn’t start a new one. She painted, but only innocuous images like flowers and cats, oceans she’d never seen and cityscapes she wasn’t sure even existed. She went to church, and she prayed and prayed and prayed. She didn’t look twice at cute girls, and she even stopped talking to Gabe, her only other gay friend at school, whose parents supported him and loved him and championed him.
She fell in line.
She stuffed herself into a mold.
And she withered and dried, like a butterfly caught in a net, then pinned down for display.
“Daphne,” April said when Daphne paused. “That’s…that’s awful. I’m sorry.”
Daphne just shrugged. “Homophobia in a small town is nothing new, I know. Clover Lake is pretty small.”
April sighed. “It is. Though I definitely didn’t have Baptist parents and a whole conservative church community watching my every move. Still, I was one of three out queer kids in my high school. We stuck together, to say the least. Sounds like you didn’t have even that.”
“No,” Daphne said.
April nodded. “How did you…well…”
“Escape?”
