M had moved to my school district in 7th grade. I had known on some level that I was a lesbian since 3rd, but that's beside the point, really. When she moved I wasn't attracted to her—actually, I was secretly coveting my best friend at the time, who, incidentally, was the first girl in our grade to be called a slut because of how many boys she went down on. But, I was the first person to be friendly to M, a fact that she would often attest to years later. M just seemed like a cool girl.

Well, M and I were never best friends, but from that point on we never weren't friends. We had this odd relationship in which we wouldn't hang out on the weekends that often but we would talk on the phone for hours and disclose a lot of the more personal details of our lives to one another.

Well, I don't know whether this is shallow or not, but fuck it, I started liking her when her hair changed color. I remember perfectly the day I noticed a difference. We were sitting in Spanish class in 10th grade, and she came in with her hair dyed black. I remember the butterflies coming so suddenly, and feeling so strange. I had always known it was incredibly difficult for me to get crushes, but incredibly easy for me to feel too strongly. I had never known it could happen that quickly.

I remember the day she told me she and N were officially dating. She had been talking about him for a while but I had hoped he was just another one of her random hook-ups. They ended up dating for a long time—incidentally, I found out they're still dating, 6 years later. I started getting used to their being together after a while, secretly nursing some small hope that when she found out about my feelings, he would become less significant. I remember the day she told me she lost her virginity to him, saying, “I told you first because I trust you and want you to be the first to share in one of the most beautiful moments of my life.” I tried to twist and turn that sentence around in my head, turning it into code for, “I wish I was sleeping with you.”

I decided to tell her towards the end of 11th grade, almost on a whim. During another one of those nights of talking to her on AIM and sighing a lot, I finally couldn't hold it in anymore, any of it. It wasn't just my feelings for her that pushed me, it was all the years of hiding, of intense, secret crushes on friends, camp counselors, classmates. It was all the hidden, unfulfilled desire, only intensified by constantly hearing other girls talk freely about boys, about crushes. It was all that that pushed me to ask her if I could call her and tell her something.

I was shaking when I told her and it all seemed like such a big deal to me, but it didn't seem to phase her at all. She just kept saying that it didn't weird her out or make her uncomfortable, that I was a good friend and that she was flattered someone as cool as I was liked her so much. At one point—and I'll always remember this—she said, “I'm quite fond of you too, so no worries.”

We remained friends for months, and things, surprisingly, didn't seem even the slightest bit different. I told a few of my other friends about the whole thing, but still wasn't nearly ready for any big coming-out party or anything.

One day, after having heard through some grapevine that M actually was uncomfortable about my feelings, I started a fight with her. I guess part of me wanted to elicit some kind of strong emotion from her, even if that emotion was anger.

Well, as kind and caring as M was on a regular basis, she was also a very spiteful, angry person when provoked. I said some mean things, and clearly offended her. She warned me to worry about coming back to school the next day, and I did, though I didn't know exactly what to expect.

Well, the next day, just about anyone who had ever been acquainted with M would scream “Dyke!” whenever I walked by. Sometimes there were herds of them. “Dyke!” “Dyke!” I wanted to shush them, to say, “Okay, it's fine that you guys know I'm gay, but if you scream it, the entire school will, too.” Well, this fiasco went on for weeks, at a small, gossip-y school. Needless to say, at the end of those few weeks, almost the entire school did know. No one ever threatened me or did anything violent, so in comparison with what other people face, I guess I was pretty lucky.

I think it's really important for people who have had to hide a part of themselves their entire lives to feel empowered, to be able to come out and say “This is who I am, this is what I want, and I'm not afraid of it,” but I do take some issue with the whole idea of “coming out” in the first place, like it's some shameful secret we have to conceal and then divulge. That being said, I would have been grateful for the ability to empower myself, rather than to hear my secret reverberating through the halls of my high school.