It was the fall of senior year. My dorm was hosting a party loosely based around an Angels and Devils theme, but really—like a lot of college festivities—the theme was mostly centered on girls wearing slutted-out attire and screaming tournaments of beer pong.

I remember standing in the hall with one of my best friends since Freshmen year. We were pretending to have a conversation so I could stare over her shoulder at the snowboarding, dimpled love of my life. He didn’t know he was the love of my life, but somehow I was going to fix that. Somehow.

When I finally steered my gaze back to her face (the love of my life had fallen into a trashcan and was stuck in an adorable drunken stupor), I noticed she was looking at me strangely.

“Hey” she said, shifting her weight and pushing her long hair out of her face, “I need to tell you something.”

“Sure” I said, although I was hesitant to take my attention off my trashcan love. What if he got out and I wasn’t there?

“Let’s go into your room” she said, “it’s sort of…a weird thing.”

“Okay…” I followed her down the hall, a little nervous about her behavior. And a little nervous about leaving Mr. Adorable Snowboarder with a bunch of scantily clad angels who weren’t so much angels as girls dressed in tiny white swatches of cloth and an occasional tinfoil halo.

“So…wow.” She laughed as she shut the door. “This is so weird. Okay.” She laughed again, plopping herself down on my bed. “You have to promise…you won’t get mad. You can’t get mad!”

She was a little drunk, but still, the nervous laughter was making me anxious. Why would I be mad at her? What had she done? As I sat down at my desk across from her, I began to panic. Had she hooked up with Adorable Snowboarder? I knew they were friends. Had she HOOKED UP WITH HIM? Oh my GOD! I was going to KILL —

“I…I…” she laughed and fell backwards onto my bed. “I think I like girls!”

Her laughter died away and the thoughts in my head screeched to a halt and slammed together.

“I…I think I always have.” She stayed lying down, hiding her face. “I haven’t ever told anyone this. Ever.”

Then she stopped talking. And we sat in silence.

“Bonnie” I started, “are you serious? I…had no idea.”

“I know. No one does. Remember when I told you about being depressed for a long time?” She sat up, and even though she was still smiling broadly I could see tears in her eyes. “I think that’s why. Because I…I was this way and I didn’t want to admit it.”

I got up and sat next to her. “Why did you warn me not to get mad, Bonnie? Why the hell would I be mad about this?”

“I don’t know” she said, “just…because.”

“I thought you had hooked up with Sean!”

She laughed, her cheeks wet. “Sean! He’s too short for me. Plus…I mean, the girl thing”

“I’m so glad this is about you being a lesbian” I said, giving her a hug. “Because if you had hooked up with Sean I would have hated you forever.”

Since that conversation, Bonnie has been the happiest I’ve ever seen her. All her fears about her friends rejecting her or acting awkward were completely unfounded. Not one person walked away after she told them.

Nothing about my friendship with Bonnie changed after that day. Every once in a while I was conscious of the fact that I was changing in front of her in the locker room, or sitting close to her on my bed, but I’d let those thoughts slip away as quickly as they came. Bonnie was still the Bonnie I had known for four years, and when we were laughing together or drinking beers or studying for that weird hippy New England Forests class, we doing these things as friends, like we had always done.

Besides, I wasn’t her type anyway. She preferred blondes.

If your friend came out of the closet, would you be as accepting of her?

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