I wanna die. We just had our first football game yesterday, and now we have a contest? You gotta be freaking kidding me! I barely got a chance to sleep and they’re shoving us all back onto the bus!

I manage to catch a little more sleep on the bus trip, but I still kinda feel like crawling back into bed when the bus comes to a stop in the parking lot of some football stadium somewhere.

I turn to Anja, who sat next to me for the ride up. Her eyes are half-open.

“Good morning sunshine,” I say to her. “The Earth says fuck you.”

“Urgh,” she grunts indistinctly. “Nova? You wake?”

“Yep,” I say. “Unfortunately.”

She moans vaguely and her eyes close again. It’s kinda cute, ngl.

Ashley peeks over the back of her seat at us. “Well, one of you is awake, at any rate,” she remarks chipperly. “That’s good. Zoe is currently unresponsive.”

“How the fuck are you so awake?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “Music gets me excited,” she says simply.

There’s an awkward pause. We’re not getting off the bus just yet; Mr. Castro must be coordinating shit or something. There’s a bit of chatter on the bus, but it’s dampened considerably by everyone’s general sleepiness.

“So… did it all work out?” Ashley asks me.

“Huh? What did?” I ask stupidly.

“I mean with your parents,”

“Oh. Yeah, it did,”

“Good to hear it,” she says. She leans over the seat a little closer to me. “Now that you’ve… you know, accomplished your mission,” she begins, “It’s up to you whether you want to… continue on the path with us. What we did was part of a longer mission that Lucy gave us, which Anja and I will be continuing.”

“Oh. Right,” I respond, my brain feeling fuzzy. “Uh… I’ll think about it when it’s not 7 AM.”

“If you’d like to, I think that you’ll be useful to us,” she continues. “You were able to get a good grasp on your abilities in a pretty short span of time, and they were rather useful ones.”

“Oh. Thanks, I guess,” I reply awkwardly.

“I…” she stops herself, looking very awkward. She takes a deep breath, and then continues. “I feel as if I may have been… unnecessarily rude to you. I see now that you didn’t deserve that.”

“Oh. Uhh, okay.”

“I prematurely judged you based on your lack of commitment to school. But I see now that you have serious potential. All you need is to apply yourself.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking of doing that,” I reply, yawning. “But, you know. Shit sucks.”

“It sure does,” she replies.

“You think so?” I question her, finding this response to be odd.

She sighs and slumps over the back of the seat. “Let’s just say that I am coping with things which I like to keep quiet and leave it there. In that sense, we are alike in a way; though obviously the ways we chose to cope are opposite.”

“Well, I think it helps to talk about shit like that,” I suggest. “I mean, probably not to me, since we like just became friends. But you know. Whoever you trust the most.”

She doesn’t say anything to that. She just kinda looks off in the distance for a while.

If you’ve never been in a marching band contest before, there’s really no experience like it. It all started with us getting off the bus far too early. Before long, it was time to put on uniforms, grab our instruments, and traipse across the entire Earth like three times to get to our warmup spot. By that point, it was far too hot outside to be wearing those heavy-ass uniforms. We somehow had to practice while like, three other bands were right next to us and playing as loud as they could. Impressively, we somehow did it. There’s an intensity to the whole thing that is kind of incredible. It’s like, we all walked into this as like a hundred different people, and temporarily morphed into one entity. It’s easily the closest I’ve ever been to being part of a cult.

And then, the actual performance, which I found myself surprisingly nervous for. I think I did alright, though. As much as we all complain about having to do this back-to-back with a football game, it was pretty good mental preparation for us, I think. I made a point of asking each of my friends how it went. Nova just said that he wanted to go back to bed. Zoe was really anxious about whether or not we made finals. Ashley gave me a summation of every set in the entire show in which she was like a foot off her dot, and the exact measure of every single note she fracked (though it sounds like she messed up far less than I did…) Ashley… kinda scares me sometimes.

The best part is, we actually did make finals. Which means we have to do it all again…

In the meantime, I intend to spend all the time that I have sitting in the shade and performing my best impression of a vegetable. I am currently leaning against the tire of one of our school busses with my uniform off (except for my bibbers) and my trombone laying under the bus so that nobody will step on it. Nova is sitting with me, playing Pokémon. Ashley and Zoe are… somewhere.

“Hey Nova,” I ask. “Where do you think those two went?”

“Uh, I dunno,” he responds, sounding as tired as I feel. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Guess they snuck off somewhere,” I predict. “Probably making out… or maybe reaching second base.”

“Nah, those two? They’re probably talking about the Bible or something,” Nova counters. We both laugh at this thought.

“Yeah, true. They’re too goody-two-shoes to do that,” I observe.

“You wanna battle?” Nova asks.

“Uh… I left my 3DS on the bus,” I respond. “I would go get it, but… I don’t think I can walk right now.”

“Damn. Well, I’m getting StreetPasses. There must be someone around here I can play against.”

I put my hand up as a sun shield and look around to see if anyone has a 3DS.

“Hey, I think I see a dude playing,” I tell Nova. “Whoa, dude’s cute.”

“Really? Where is he?” Nova demands.

“Sitting right near the Claudia Taylor Johnson truck,” I explain, pointing.

“Oh damn. He is cute.”

“Yeah…”

A moment passes, and suddenly my slow brain processes what just happened. “Wait a minute, Nova. Are you…”?

“What?” he asks defensively.

A grin splits my face. What are the chances? “You’re into other guys,” I state.

“Oh. Yeah, I think so,” he says.

“Dude. That makes… four of us.”

“Four of us what?”

“Four of us are gay or bisexual.”

“Wait, are you?”

“Yeah! Don’t you remember when I said that the B2W2 girl is hot?”

“Oh yeah. I never thought about it.”

I chuckle slowly. “Oh, this is just too good.”

“What? Why’s that funny?” he asks defensively.

“Just because… all four of us.”

“Wait… so are you gay, or bi?” he asks me nervously.

“Bi, definitely,” I reply. “What about you?”

“Yeah, I’m… bi,” he says.

“How’d you find out?” I ask.

He blushes. “Um… I’ll tell you later.”

“Suit yourself,” I concede. If his story is anything like mine, I think I have a decent idea of why he doesn’t want to tell me while we’re in public.

“Where are you leading me?” I ask Ashley, who is currently dragging me around to the other side of the stadium we performed in.

“I dunno. Just somewhere where there’s less people,” she says.

We pass by a part of the stadium which shows a huge system of air vents. The rumbling of the vents is very audible, and almost kind of sounds… harmonic, in a way.

“Wait. Stop here,” Ashley orders. I stop.

She looks at the vents and starts sort of bobbing her head around and looking at them intensely. Eventually, she sits down and closes her eyes.

“What are you doing?” I ask her.

“If you position yourself just right… the different noises from the vents sound almost like a perfect B-flat chord,” she explains.

“Oh! Cool!” I sit down right next to her. From this position, the different rumbling noises do seem to come to a certain balance.

“Wait, how do you know what specific notes those are?” I question her.

“I have something called ‘perfect pitch,’” she explains. “They say only one in two-hundred people have it naturally. It means that I can identify exact pitches without any reference.”

“Wow, that’s really cool!” I say. “I bet you get it from having such musical parents.”

“Perhaps,” she says simply.

For a few minutes, we just sit there and listen to the miraculous harmony of the stadium’s air ducts. It’s a weird moment, but it’s really nice.

“Ashley, I’ve really enjoyed being able to spend today with you… as a girlfriend,” I tell her, breaking the silence.

“I’ve enjoyed it too,” Ashley replies.

“But still… I can’t stop myself from worrying about what I asked you last night,” I confess to her.

“Well, I promise you I was joking about the whole ‘being murdered’ thing. I don’t think that’s likely to happen whatsoever.”

I giggle a little bit. “Oh no, I don’t mean that. You already said that was a joke! No, I meant about whether or not we’re doing something wrong.”

“Oh right, that. Yes, let’s address that now.” Ashley leans backwards, lays herself flat across the pavement, and then looks up at the clouds. I do the same thing parallel to her. There’s something awe-inspiring about the sight of the dusk sky. All the different shades of pink and purple… and the strange shapes that the clouds make as they pass across my vision. I try and take a moment to appreciate natural beauties like this every now and then.

“Well, I can’t claim to have ultimate divine judgement, but I can tell you what my story has been,” Ashley begins. “One summer, back in middle school, I was re-watching some old movies from my childhood. When I watched the Little Mermaid, I felt the strangest rush when I watched them kissing at the end… Then, I realized that I was imagining myself in Eric’s place, not Ariel’s as I should have been…

“All of those types of feelings began spilling out of me at once. It was quite difficult for me to puzzle out why it was happening for a while. But I’m someone who doesn’t like just blindly bumbling into things; I wanted to come with a game plan right then and there for how I would handle it. Should I try and repress or ignore these feelings, or just accept them, I wondered?

“Since there is a prevailing attitude amongst Christians that feeling same-sex attraction is inherently a bad thing, I tried the repression tactic first. It didn’t work. You see, at the time, I had fallen in love with the girl who was my best friend back when I lived in California. Her name was Aiko. Any time I thought about her in a romantic way, I tried to redirect my thoughts away from it. Well, that just made those thoughts come at me twice as hard. Then, when I went to sleep at night, she appeared in my dreams, sometimes in rather… colorful ways. It was utterly unbearable, so I eventually gave up.

“One day, I decided I’d try and tell Aiko how I felt, and so I told her one day during lunch. Her reaction was basically to run away and tell everyone in the whole school I was a lesbian. I was harshly bullied for the remainder of the year.”

“Oh no!” I respond, feeling sadness well up in me at her experience. “I’m so sorry, Ashley.”

“It wasn’t your fault. And anyway, we moved away to Texas at the end of the year, so I got a second chance. I convinced myself that the treatment I received was my punishment for being gay, and that the only option I had to keep my faith intact was essentially to live as a loner. I decided not to tell my parents about any of this, since I had no idea how they would react and figured it wasn’t worth the risk. And in general, I became far less trusting of the people around me and trained myself to not show emotion around others.

“Still, this was a pretty miserable time for me. I was in a dark place and was not sure how I was going to find the will to continue living. And then, something happened… I met you.”

I gasp. “You met me?”

“Yes. There I was on my first day of church in our new home. And you just so sweetly came up to me and introduced yourself. You showed me genuine kindness, Zoe, in a time in which I didn’t think I deserved it.”

I think back to that day as well. The truth is, it was actually my mom who asked me to introduce myself to her. I found Ashley rather… intimidating, but I decided to do it anyway because I thought she’d be lonely, having just moved to a new place from halfway across the country. It was the same reason my friends and I had reached out to Yonca when she first moved, so it made sense to me.

“I began to question my theory that being ostracized was my punishment. Then, I began to question whether the prevailing attitude on homosexuality was correct in the first place. The more I looked into it, the more that the prevailing belief on the matter started to seem dubious at best. Via the internet, I learned that sexual orientation is considered by the scientific community to be fixed and immovable, which matched with my personal experience.”

Suddenly, I remember something that makes me feel excited. “Oh yeah! Anja told me that it’s supposed to be partially genetic!”

“Oh, she did? Well, Anja’s dad is a shrink, so she’s probably a decently reliable source of information when it comes to this stuff. And that brings me into my point; if God ‘stitched us all together in our mother’s wombs,’* and therefore knowingly creates a small portion of people to be gay; then why is being gay also sinful? Is this like, a complicated form of predestination? …Probably not.

“Well, maybe people who are made gay are supposed to just be abstinent. You know, it’s explicitly stated by Jesus that not everyone needs to have children, and in fact there are ‘natural-born eunuchs’** who are valid members of the kingdom of heaven. But then, the question is, if God meant for these people to live lives of solitude, why specifically make them gay? Why not make them all asexual/aromantic? The answer may be found in nature. There are many varieties of animals who are capable of being gay, and when this happens the purpose of these members of the species is generally to take care of orphaned babies.”

This makes me think about that strange dream I had almost a week ago, and I momentarily overflow with curiosity. “Hey Ashley. Do you think you ever want to adopt a child someday?”

“Well Zoe, since we just started dating yesterday, that’s very forward of you.”

I blush furiously as I realize how that must have come across. “Oh no! I didn’t mean like that! I just mean like… in general.”

“Relax Zoe, I’m just teasing you. And the answer is, maybe. We’ll see how I feel when I’m older.”

“Okay,” I reply. I find that I really like the idea, personally. I think about all those babies in China who get abandoned by their parents because they’re only allowed to have one kid…

“Anyways… I lost my train of thought,” Ashley says after a moment. “There’s more I could say about what’s written in the actual text; how the original meaning of the Levitical law against homosexuality uses Hebrew vocabulary that has been lost to time, and theologians actually have very varying opinions on what it was originally supposed to refer to; *** and a couple of other points, but… well, I feel like I’m probably boring you.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not boring me,” I assure her. “I find all of this really interesting, actually.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear you’re interested in it,” Ashley replies. “But I think the average person would be bored to tears right about now after listening to all this philosophical theological mumbo jumbo…”

She briefly peeks at her phone. “Alright, I think we should start making our way back to the rest of the band,” she states. “Still, it was really good talking to you like this. Nova was right, I do strangely feel better…”

“I can’t believe I never knew any of this about you,” I tell her. “I promise that I’ll never betray you like that. I truly love you.”

She looks touched by my statement. “Thank you, Zoe,” she tells me. “It means a lot to me.” She gives me a big hug, and then we get back on our feet to get ready for finals.

* Psalm 139:13

** Matthew 19:12

*** This is indeed a view that some theologians have. The book Unclobber by Colby Martin provides a decent overview of this perspective if anyone is interested in the topic.