Chapter 3 #2
Simone forced a smile. The promise of having free time to ski felt irrelevant compared to the magnitude of everything else.
Frankie was looking at her expectantly. She needed to give him an answer.
Nervous as she was to agree to the assignment, Simone wasn’t about to let her boss down on her first day of work.
She glanced over his shoulder, through the glass wall of the conference room, to the group of people who’d welcomed her so warmly this morning.
Maybe she didn’t want to let herself down, either.
She’d develop new career skills—lean in, or whatever it was that women were supposed to do in the corporate world.
And it would be her first Pride as an out bisexual!
Sure, she was nervous to put herself out there in such a big way, but her first morning at the Rainbow Museum had emboldened her.
She released her hands from between her legs and placed her palms on her knees.
“I’m in,” Simone declared, and as soon as she said it, she felt light and fizzy, like her body was filled with champagne. “When is it?”
“The end of January.”
“The end of this January? As in… the end of this month?”
“Is that gonna be okay, timing-wise? I’d go myself, but it’s the week before our grand opening, and I know I’ll have so much shit to do here.”
“That’s totally fine!” It was more than fine—it was ideal. Invigorating. A way to celebrate the massive step she’d taken by finally coming out.
“Okay, phew. You’re a lifesaver.” Frankie leapt to his feet and clapped her on the shoulder. “I’m so jealous you get to go! It’s, like, the queerest place on earth. You’re gonna love it.”
SIMONE CATEGORIZED HER FRIENDS INTO TWO distinct groups: the childhood friends she’d grown up with; and the friends she’d made in university.
She appreciated them all for different reasons, but there was no one she would have felt comfortable opening up to about her sexuality.
The people she’d grown up with were all straight, many of them already married or soon to be married.
In the past year, Laney and her husband had welcomed their first baby, and Mira and her fiancé had closed on a house in Pickering with a front lawn, a backyard, and a two-car garage.
Their conversations had shifted to mortgages and day care prices—not much room for Simone’s am-I-queer chaos.
She still met up with them for brunch. She liked baby photos.
But as time went on, she felt the disconnect more and more—even when they were together.
The relationships she’d forged in university were more surface-level and situational than they were deep.
The kind where once you’re no longer sharing a house in Guelph or seeing each other in class every day, you make brunch plans you never follow through on, send a few We should totally catch up!
texts, and then mutually ghost each other until the group chat dies of natural causes.
She knew part of that was on her. She’d always kept a piece of herself walled off, and it had left a quiet space between her and everyone else.
Needless to say, when Simone looked up from her laptop to find her new colleague Lucy LaFrance standing next to her desk asking her if she’d like to grab lunch with her, Simone was more than happy to oblige.
Lucy, a blond woman who looked to be around forty, worked in the finance department and had helped Simone get set up in the payroll system that morning.
She wore a fuzzy white turtleneck tucked into high-waisted orange pants, and a long wool coat with a button pinned to the lapel that said CHILDLESS CAT LADY.
“I love the button,” Simone said as she zipped up her parka.
“Thanks!” Lucy beamed. “I got it at this cute place around the corner. I can show you sometime.”
“Cool,” Simone replied, knowing she’d have to work up the courage to wear something like that herself.
She and Lucy walked north to a cozy café that served soup and sandwiches.
Lucy was bubbly and warm, and by the time they’d arrived, Simone knew all about her wife, Holly, and her three rescue cats: Cheddar, Gouda, and Blue.
She’d spent fifteen years working soul-crushing corporate jobs, until one day she came across a finance job at the Rainbow Museum, back when they’d just leased the building in the Village.
She’d jumped at the chance to work for a company that seemed more aligned with who she was.
After they placed their orders at the counter, Lucy fished around inside her tote bag. “This is my treat, by the way.”
“Really?”
“It’s your first day,” Lucy insisted. “Also, I heard you came out on Instagram this morning.” She extricated her wallet and looked inside.
“Oh shoot. Now, what did I do with my credit card? That is the question. Oh!” She shoved her wallet back into her tote bag, pulled out a paperback fantasy novel, and opened it to the middle, where her credit card was nestled in lieu of a bookmark.
“Don’t judge me! I was reading in line at the coffee shop this morning and it just happened. ”
Simone smiled. She usually shied away from chaos, but Lucy’s personal brand was endearing.
They carried their food to a table by the window. “So,” Lucy asked as they ate, “what have people been saying about your post? I hope you’re getting lots of nice messages.”
Simone intentionally hadn’t opened the app all morning, and she’d turned off every form of notification. She confessed all this to Lucy, then said, “I guess I should probably look, shouldn’t I? I’m going to have to do it at some point.”
“It’s up to you, but if you wanna do it, I’m here for moral support.”
With a deep breath, Simone reached into the pocket of her parka, dug out her phone, and braced herself. “Okay. I’m doing it.”
She tapped the Instagram icon—and almost dropped her phone into her tomato basil soup. “Oh my God.”
“What is it?”
“Four hundred and seventy-six people have liked my post.” Simone gazed up at her colleague in disbelief. “That’s like… more than double the number of followers I have.”
“Hell yeah!”
Simone turned back to the app, where she discovered that Seth had re-shared her post from the Rainbow Museum account.
Complete strangers had been liking the post and leaving comments, from thoughtful messages to strings of rainbow emojis.
She scanned the comments with that strange mix of relief and terror she’d felt after sharing the post. Each “congratulations” was a weight off her shoulders, but it also made her news more permanent.
She couldn’t go back into the closet now, even if she’d wanted to.
“Cheers to you.” Lucy raised her water bottle before taking a sip. “It sounds like things couldn’t have gone better today.”
Simone sighed and put her phone down. “Sadly, not quite.” She proceeded to tell Lucy about her mother’s ominous text: “Call me.” “I am dreading having to talk to her,” she said with a groan. “It’s gonna be awful.”
Lucy sighed and squeezed Simone’s hand. “You poor thing. I remember that feeling. I was so nervous to come out to my mom, I puked into my purse on the bus ride to her house.”
“Into your purse?”
“It was better than on my lap!”
“How did it end up going?”
“I put the bag in the wash. She lived.”
“I meant coming out to your mom.” She chuckled.
“Oh! That was a total nightmare,” Lucy replied.
Simone grimaced. “Is she super homophobic?”
“The opposite,” Lucy said. “She’s a sex therapist.” Simone clapped a hand over her mouth.
Lucy leaned across the table and lowered her voice to a whisper.
“When I told her I was into women, she went down to her office in the basement, came back with her female anatomy model, and literally started lecturing me on how to find the G-spot.”
Simone would have killed for a sex talk from Kathy instead of whatever verbal thrashing her mother had in store for her.
(This was saying something, given that in their actual “birds and the bees” conversation, Kathy had lectured a thirteen-year-old Simone on the dangers of being branded a “certain kind of girl” that no man would ever want to marry.)
The last thing Simone did before she left the office that evening was pop into the all-gender washroom. There were messages of affirmation stuck to the mirrors above the communal sink, and she read them under her breath as she lathered her hands with soap.
“I am a true work of art.”
“I am proud of who I am.”
“I am fierce and strong.”
She wanted desperately to believe these things, but the confidence she’d started to develop at work today was in shambles at the thought of calling her mother on the way home.
She dried her hands, zipped up her parka, and swung her tote bag over her shoulder.
Outside the Rainbow Museum, the sun had already gone down, and the air was even colder than it had been this morning.
Nevertheless, after taking the subway to Queen, Simone skipped the streetcar again and set off east on foot so she could make the dreaded phone call in relative solitude.
Simone was almost as nervous now as she’d been before posting her announcement this morning.
All she could feel was the thump of her heart slamming into her rib cage.
Panic zipped through her veins, numbing her hands and making her eyes feel too small for their sockets.
Summoning what little strength she had left, she pushed the call button.
The phone rang three times. She wanted and didn’t want to hear her mother’s voice. She’d be relieved to get this over with, but at the same time, she knew it was going to be awful. After another ring, Kathy picked up. Instead of hello, she just said: “Simone.”
Simone’s heart was about to burst through the front of her parka and flop onto the pavement. “Hey, Mom.”
Silence.
“You, um… you wanted me to give you a call? I’m assuming, um, that I know what it’s about…”
“Your… news,” Kathy said slowly.
The way she was stretching this out was somehow even worse than if she’d immediately launched into a disapproving tirade. Simone felt as if she were tied to a chair while her mother wound up gradually for one big knockout punch.
“It’s really not that big of a deal,” Simone blurted out, even though it had obviously been one of the biggest pieces of news she’d ever shared in her life.
“I mean, when you think about it, isn’t everyone a little bit bi?
There’s that country singer who came out last week, and that football player.
Also, people think Eleanor Roosevelt was bi.
” (She’d learned this by reading through the Rainbow Museum Slack channels today, but good lord, why was she dragging Eleanor Roosevelt into this?) “And, don’t worry, this doesn’t mean I’m never gonna date men again and only be with women for the rest of my life.
Not that it’s bad to be a lesbian, either!
I just meant that this isn’t going to be some big, dramatic change. ”
More silence. Simone racked her brain for what else she could say to soften the eventual blow. But then she heard something unexpected on the other end of the call.
“Mom?” she asked, concerned. “Are you… crying?”
Kathy’s answer came in the form of a loud sniff. “Oh, honey,” she choked out, “I just love you so much, and I don’t want you to have a hard life.”
Simone leapt into the role of comforting her mother. “Oh, Mom, it’s okay, I started a new job where everyone’s super queer—”
It had been the wrong thing to say. “You may not realize this in your little bubble, Simone, but there are hateful, homophobic people out there!” Kathy wailed.
“It’s better in some places than others,” Simone said gently, even as fear climbed up her chest. What if her mother had a point? “I probably won’t be moving to Florida anytime soon, but Toronto’s pretty accepting…”
Kathy let out a sob. “So now you’re done with coming down to the condo?”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant!” Simone’s voice wavered; she was on the verge of crying herself. “I’ll always come visit you and Dad.”
“Your father’s worried, too,” Kathy said. “You know how hard he worked to give you and your brothers a good life.”
“Oh, Mom, you both worked hard.”
“I appreciate that, darling.” Kathy sniffed. “Your father and I both—we never want to see you suffer.”
Tears ran hot and fast down Simone’s cheeks. Making her parents angry would have been awful, but disappointing them was downright unbearable. She didn’t know what to say except, “I’m sorry, Mom.” The more her mother cried, the more Simone did, too.
As Simone started over the bridge to Leslieville, where she lived, Kathy finally seemed to catch her breath. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing we can do about it now, is there?”
“No, I guess not,” Simone answered guiltily. She never should have come out. This had been the biggest mistake of her life.
Kathy sighed. “Simone, this’ll take some time for us to get used to, that’s for sure. You’ll have to be patient with us.”
Simone wiped her eyes. “I will. I promise.”
Another sigh. “Well, I need to go clean myself up before we head out to dinner, so I’ll let you go.”
“Okay.”
“Talk soon, darling.”
Simone stopped walking and stuffed her phone into her pocket.
She was halfway across the bridge, the towering trusses to her left and the Don River to her right.
She approached the edge, gripped the railing, and peered down at the black water.
The metal in her hands felt like ice, and the river would be even colder.
It would swallow her whole and she wouldn’t feel a thing.
No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than she let go of the railing, took a big step back, and folded her arms across her chest. She hurried across the rest of the bridge.
The relief she’d enjoyed at the Rainbow Museum was gone; the weight returned to her shoulders.
If coming out was supposed to have made her life easier, then maybe she’d done something terribly, horribly, wrong.