“CAN’T you just stop this nonsense?” Sloane’s mother asked, half angry and half plain upset.
“Yes, your mother is right,” his father stated, getting up from his armchair and going to the bar in the corner of his study. “This needs to stop, Sloane. As if it wasn’t enough to spend all your time with that queer boy ever since you were a little girl, you just had to go and come up with this crap about being trans—” He was clearly struggling to find the term.
“Transgendered,” Sloane’s stepmother said from where she was perched on the arm of the loveseat Sloane was fidgeting on.
“Yes, that!” His father turned around and leveled a stare at Sloane. “So now you’re saying you’re not only male, but also a homosexual?” The man Sloane had loved and adored when he was still a little girl looked at him with disgust.
“Yes,” Sloane said with quiet conviction in his tone.
He could tell his stepmother, Erica, wanted to comfort him and that his mother, Dianne, wanted to break down completely and kick Erica’s ass for being there.
“I can’t have this, you know that,” his father said sternly, took a healthy sip of his extremely expensive scotch, and seemed to think about something. “So we’ll cut you a deal: you go to college as planned, but you go somewhere far enough to not be associated with me in any way. And I’ll pay you for housing, if you’re going with that... that boy, and you’ll get your trust at twenty-five as planned. That way we don’t have to have anything to do with each other.”
Sloane listened to him talk, wondering if he was dreaming, but the next words, which he barely heard over the sobbing of his mother, convinced him that no nightmare would be this cruel.
“Unless you decide to be my heterosexual daughter again, I don’t want to see you after you move out once school is over.”
