I am Spencer Carlin.

The second semester of my junior year was, in short, Hell. The number of people involved is too high for me to try to remember right now and I’m pretty sure the count is still growing.  What I do know, however, is that I am probably the only person who can tell the story accurately and fully.

I am not really sure when it all started. There are too many beginnings to count, but I guess I’ll skip to the most recent: January.

I’d finally allowed myself to accept that I was gay.  I had spent about two years fighting it as hard as I could.  Two years of random emotional breakdowns during which I would cry for hours while my parents begged me to tell them what was wrong.  All I could offer was a vague "I don’t know" and a continuation of the cycle.  Two years of fierce praying every night that it would just go away so that I could be normal.  Two years of denying who I was.  But I was past all of that. I was finally okay with who I was. 

I had only told three people that I was gay:  my mother, my best friend, and her girlfriend.  It wasn’t something I was ready to tell the world yet, and I made sure that the three of them were aware of that. 

Around the middle of the month, conditioning for my school’s softball team had started.  I’d payed special attention to one of the freshmen, who we had all been told was, more or less, a prodigy of the sport.  Either I stood out to her, or she caught on to me watching her, but she tracked me down and began to talk to me at school and online.  I remember in particular her immaturity — a freshman quality she refused to own up to.   According to her, she wasn’t like "those other immature assholes." 

Regardless, our conversations continued, and I’ll admit they were often deep.  One night she began talking about her relationship problems.  According to her there was this girl who she was falling for, but she was sure that her feelings weren’t returned because the girl she liked was straight.  After endless prodding and assurance that I wouldn’t think any differently of her, she confessed that the object of her affections was me.