Acqua’s Reviews > If I Was Your Girl > Status Update

For as long as I could remember, I had been apologizing for existing, for trying to be who I was, to live the life I was meant to lead. Maybe this would be the last conversation I would ever have with Grant. Maybe not. Either way, I realized, I wasn’t sorry I existed anymore. I deserved to live. I deserved to find love. I knew now—I believed, now—that I deserved to be loved.

ohh no

“You ain’t sick, hon,” Mom said. She kissed my cheek and hugged me so tight I thought I might break a rib. “That’s joy.”

Oh, spero di no

Virginia smiled at me, warm and wise. “You can have anything,” she said, “once you admit you deserve it.”

“[...] queer people in the South are addicted to the closet,” she said, furrowing her brow and digging in her camera bag for a different lens. “Hell, even the straight people have enough skeletons in their closet to fill a tomb. Everybody’s too afraid of going to hell or getting made fun of to be honest about what they want and who they are, so they can’t even really admit what they want to themselves. It’s sad.”

flannel shirt, Chloe!

“You’re right, I know. The world’s waiting,” Chloe said, parting the final wall of corn to reveal the concessions area at the end of the maze.

“See,” I said. “We found our way.”

Chloe smiled wanly. “Somehow.”

I remembered how angry he had sounded when he told me that lives like mine weren’t good, couldn’t possibly be good. I felt the scar above my ear and thought about how warm and tingly my lips still felt from Grant’s kisses. I prayed that Dad had been wrong.