Kylee: A Cautionary Gay Tale

Kylee had always liked Bay. From the first moment she saw her holding a clipboard with rainbow stickers and looking like she’d had four existential crises before lunch, Kylee was charmed. Bay was chaotic, brilliant, weird in the best way. She had this way of talking about queer history and obscure baked goods in the same sentence, and Kylee—well, Kylee had fallen into something that looked a lot like love.

Or she thought she had.

The truth, the real truth, the one Kylee only admitted to herself on nights when the silence was too loud, was that she was never gay. Not really. Not completely. Not in the way Bay deserved.

She’d grown up in a house where queerness wasn’t just taboo—it was a punchline, a threat, a sermon topic. She’d kissed girls in secret and cried in public bathrooms. She’d told herself she was bi, maybe pan, something fluid enough to allow the parts of her that didn’t want to be rejected by her family to keep quiet.