Four months after I came out to my middle school guidance counselor, she was arrested for sexual misconduct.
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Christina Lu for BuzzFeed
The first person I told about the girls I wanted to kiss was my middle school counselor. I'd been seeing her without my mother's permission. I knew better than to ask my mother. But I spent most nights curled up in the bottom of my closet, thinking I'd die if I couldn't stop crying about the way I felt my body was betraying me, how it had been for a long time.
It was this fear that led me to the eighth-grade counselor's office on a Friday. I stood in her doorway, three minutes after the final bell, and told her I needed to talk. Without looking up from what she was writing, she pointed me to the permission slips pinned to her door. I looked at the slips, then back at her.
"I can't tell my mama I'm talking to you." She looked up then. Her jaw was set in a severe line, her light-blonde hair sat unmoving on her shoulders. My classmates always had jokes about her "man-jaw" and her "state fair hair." She'd always seemed hard to me, but "hard" didn't mean she couldn't help. She softened when she removed her glasses and considered me.
"I can't see you until you get the permission slip signed, sweetie. I could get in a lot of trouble." I looked at my feet, still standing in her doorway.
"I'm already in trouble." She sighed, replaced her glasses, and went back to writing. I turned to leave.
"Come back on Monday. After school. You'll have about 30 minutes."
The following Monday, I sat on the floor of her office and wrote down all my secrets, in green crayon, on a big piece of white paper. She turned in her seat while I wrote, arranging folders behind her desk that hadn't looked like they needed arranging 20 seconds ago. When I was done, I laid the paper on her desk.
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Christina Lu for BuzzFeed
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Christina Lu for BuzzFeed
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