out on her own
by Harmony Trevino
It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was something. It was Friday night and Michelle Morales was coming to the end of her shift at her uncle’s restaurant, where she served as a waitress. Her blue apron was smeared with food stains, her hair wrapped up in a messy pony tail, her forehead, dripping with sweat. She was tired and ready to go home. Celia walked into the restaurant as one of her last customers for the night.
She recognized Michelle immediately.
“You’re Valerie’s sister, right? Do you remember me?”
“Yeah,” Michelle replied, smiling.
Celia was Michelle’s younger sister Valerie’s closest friend at John F. Kennedy High School until Valerie left her senior year after becoming pregnant.
Michelle sat down at one of the tables to talk with Celia.
“Here’s my number,” she said, passing Michelle a piece of paper with her cell phone number written on it. “Give
it to your sister, so she and I can catch up.”
Michelle shoved the piece of paper in the front pocket of her dirty apron.
As they sat there, talking about whom they still kept in contact with from high school, Michelle noticed how pretty Celia looked sitting there across from her in the booth.
After a couple minutes of conversation, Celia stood up to leave.
“Listen,” Celia said, hesitating. “You have my number now. You should call me. Maybe we could get together.”
“OK,” Michelle said, smiling shyly.
“I’ll see you around,” Celia said, walking toward the door.
Michelle turned back to the counter. A smile spread across her face. She wasn’t sure what was happening, butthe cook took notice.
“You should call her,” the cook said.
She stood back with a puzzled look on her face.
“Whatever,” she said, laughing nervously.
The cooks at the restaurant had always asked her, teasing, if she was a lesbian, but she never answered that she was. She never denied it either.
Michelle took out her cell phone from her apron pocket and the crumpled paper with Celia’s phone number. She punched in the seven digits and debated whether she should press the ‘talk’ button and make the call.
“She just left,”she told the cook as she stood there staring at the screen.
“I’ll call her some other time.”
The cook snatched her cell phone from her hand and pressed the button to make the call. Her face was flushed. She quickly grabbed the phone away. But it was too late.
“Hello?” Celia’s voice rang in her ears at the other end of the line. Michelle, still flustered, answered demurely.
“Hello.”
- - - - - - - - - -
It was the summer of 2004. Michelle had just been baptized at Grace Church in Brea.
She was hoping she could drown her homosexuality in the water and resurrect herself as a straight woman. To her disappointment, she had emerged feeling the same.
Michelle had always shoved the gay issue aside. Many times she tried telling her friends, but she never found the courage. If people questioned her sexuality because of her aggressive personality, she shrugged it off, never giving afirm yes or no. She didn’t know anyone who was gay and felt no one would understand.
But now she had met someone. She had met Celia, someone who wasn’t Danny, the man she had been dating from her church for six months. Now, through no fault of her own, the secret was out, and everything she ever feared was about to come true.
Michelle and Celia had been dating for three months when Michelle decided to tell her sister that she was gay.
Michelle sat in her sister’s living room. Toys were strewn all over the dirty carpet, and the room stunk of her husband’s pet iguana.
Michelle danced around the truth, trying to find a way to tell her little sister that she was gay.
“I knew it!” Valerie jumped up and shouted as Michelle sat on the couch. Michelle still hadn’t said it out loud.
“I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!”
After a brief silence, Valerie sat back down next to Michelle.
“You need to tell mom. You need to be happy. You need to be yourself,” Valerie said.
Michelle refused.
“No way. She’ll disown me,” Michelle said, half hoping that it was an exaggeration.
“You know what? I’ll call her and tell her,” Valerie said, standing up to get the cordless phone in her bedroom.
Michelle couldn’t hear the muffled words being yelled over the phone in the next room, but she knew Valerie had told their mother.
Valerie came back to the living room.
“You should go talk to mom,” she said.
Michelle hesitated, but prepared herself to go back home and talk to her mom in person.
As she stepped through the side door of their house, her mother wasted no time.
“I would rather you be a whore like your sister and come home knocked up than be gay!” she screamed. “What did I do to deserve this?”
Michelle anticipated her mother would react like this. She wasn’t going to be accepted by her mother, a mother she was so close to and so protective of. A mother who, just a month earlier, knocked gently on Michelle’s door, telling Michelle she was there if she needed to talk about anything.
Michelle was a good daughter. She had always been there for her mother and sister. She had never hurt her mother as Valerie had hurt her. Valerie had been the disappointment, the one who had a child out of wedlock and stole jewelry from her mother to sell for cash.
Michelle’s father had been verbally abusive toward her mother when Michelle was growing up. Michelle found it her duty, even as a child, to protect her mother from her dad’s verbal abuse. Michelle’s dad left the family when she was four years old, and she officially took on the role of protector. She knew she didn’t have to, but she did it instinctively because that was the kind of child she was. Her mother, weak after the divorce, started drinking and smoking. Michelle took care of her when she was drunk, putting cold towels on her head and giving her water. When Michelle asked her mother to quit drinking, she listened.
Michelle was the guardian of the family, the pillar they rested on. She had helped her mother and her sister with all of their problems, but she knew they couldn’t and wouldn’t help with hers.
Hurt and distressed from her mother’s betrayal, she spent the night at her sister’s house. After a night of no sleep, Michelle made her way home for the last night she would spend in her room for months.
She stood in her room, anxious about the truth she had known as long as she could remember. She had lost 20 pounds in the last few months and had resorted to mutilating her skin with a small razor, making tiny incisions all over her arms and legs, to deal with the stress of coming out.
This moment was no different.
Michelle sat on her bed, making small cuts on her arm as she heard her mother cry in the next room. She had grown up protecting her mother from any pain. Now she had become the source of her mother’s tears.
Michelle walked into her mother’s bedroom to somehow try to comfort her. Her mother didn’t look at her.
“If you’re going to be gay, I want you out of my house,” she said through tears.
Michelle didn’t hesitate. She grabbed some clothes and went to stay with Valerie.
Michelle stayed there for a couple of weeks until Celia, adding to the pain, decided to break off their relationship because of Celia’s own fear of getting too close to another woman. It had been the first same-sex relationship for both of them.
Michelle had no one to turn to anymore. Celia hadcome and gone from her life, Michelle had broken up with Danny, and her friends had turned their backs on her. She had dropped out of college and left her job as a waitress at her uncle’s restaurant. Frustrated, scared and alone, Michelle decided to turn to someone she barely knew for help: Marisa. She was a stranger, someone Michelle met at a club only a few weeks earlier. She offered Michelle a place to stay. It wasn’t where Michelle wanted to go, but Marisa was all she had left.
Michelle’s hair was matted from walking home from work in the rain. Her clothes were soaked. She shivered from the cold with no umbrella or coat to shield her. She had no car but had to earn money to make it on her own.
As she opened the door to her apartment, she saw a familiar scene; Marisa’s friends were lying on the couch, stoned.
She wasn’t sure if they were stoned from pot or from crystal meth. All she knew was that she didn’t belong with them.
A girl who Michelle recognized as Marisa’s drug dealer stirred from her stoned state and reached over for a glass pipe that lay on the table next to her. She ignored Michelle as she dropped crystal meth rocks into the bowl of the pipe. She pulled out her lighter to melt the rocks. Holding the flame under the bowl, she turned the pipe slowly so the rocks would melt evenly. It was a common sight for Michelle. It had been a couple months since she had been kicked out of her house. Marisa had accepted her into her apartment, and they steadily began to date, even though they often got into physically and verbally abusive fights.
But it was the only home Michelle had.
Michelle dragged herself to the kitchen. Instead of reaching into the refrigerator for food, she reached for a bottle of alcohol. Somehow they seemed to always have enough money for booze but never for food. As she raised the bottle to her lips, she knew she would get drunk. She always did. Sometimes she would be drunk for three days in a row and not eat for several days. But she wasn’t them; she swore to herself. She was better than the strungout, stoned people who lay in the living room. She had two jobs: one as night time security guard at a hotel and one as a cashier at a cheap clothing store in Buena Park. Both were to pay for rent, and
it was more than the people around her were doing.
She grabbed the bottle and walked to the living room. She slunk to the floor and drank the alcohol until the bottle was empty.
Michelle wasn’t sure what she said, but Marisa was on top of her, slapping her face. Michelle threw Marisa off of her, getting up and slamming her against the wall. Marisa pushed Michelle onto the couch and started punching her in the face and chest.
“Get the fuck off of me!” Michelle screamed.
“Bitch! You stupid bitch!” Marisa cried.
The beatings and the fighting had become part of their short relationship. Michelle balled her hand up into a fist and started punching back. Marisa, tired from the fistfight, rolled off of Michelle and onto the floor.
“I’m out of here!” Michelle yelled.
She flew out of the door and ran to the nearest gas station.She found a pay phone and called up her old friend, Celeste. She hadn’t talked to her in years.
“Celeste, please, can you pick me up? I can’t live here anymore,” Michelle said through tears.
Celeste drove up to the gas station in an old Mustang, searching for Michelle. Michelle waved her arms to flag her down.
“Hey,” Michelle said, opening the door to the passenger side.
“Woah,” Celeste said, seeing Michelle for the first time after the fight.
Michelle’s shirt was torn open, and she had blood all over her face and hands. She had a black eye and bruises on her neck from Marisa’s punches.
“Michelle,” Celeste said. “I think it’s time you went home.”
Michelle knew she was right. Michelle had to leave the drug-infested apartment and her abusive relationship. She knew she had unfinished business at home as well. She had to make things right with her mom.
“Take me home,” she said.
Back at home, Michelle stood in her own bedroom for the first time in seven months. Her mom was barely talking to her, but she let her move back on one condition: they had to get counseling together. Michelle didn’t hesitate to say yes. She wanted things to get better between them.
It was a start, and Michelle had hope.
Michelle slipped on her boxer shorts and a shirt to sleep in. She turned off the light and climbed into bed. Lying on her back, she clasped her hands together across her stomach and started to pray.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil ...” she paused.
“God get me through this. Please let my mom come around. You know what I’m thinking. You know my struggles. Just keep me strong. Amen.”
Michelle rolled to her side and cried herself to sleep.