Rachel snapped, in a moment she would both regret and not regret afterwards. She hadn't intended to give them the news like this, it was meant to be a private and intimate affair and instead they forced her hand, she couldn’t take any more.
She silenced the table with a bold and unwavering statement as loud as her vocal cords would allow, “I'm gay!”
The reception to her announcement perhaps would have been less frosty if she exposed herself instead. Shocked faces and complete overbearing silence besides the metal of cutlery hitting ceramic plates. So tense was the silence that she could have cut through it with a butter knife and it was another minute or two - a minute or two that could have lasted an eternity - before her aunty attempted to restart conversation with the clearing of her thought and a passive reply of, “Well… erm… what a turn of events”.
Despite her aunt's attempt to alleviate the heavy atmosphere, her mother seemed less interested in restoring the calm and more interested in entertaining the shocking revelation.
“What?”
“I said I’m gay, mum, homosexual, call it what you will, so you can stop the crap about guys and settling down”.
“She's joking everyone, she's always been a comedian. Tell them you are joking, darling, otherwise they'll take you seriously”.
“I'm not joking, I'm being as serious as it gets”.
“Of course you are, darling”, her mother replied patronisingly.
“Mum! For fuck sake, get a clue”, Rachel snapped, receiving a round of gasps, “not everything pans out the way you want it to”.
“Rachel!” Her aunty had heard enough.
“Don't speak to your mother that way, young lady!” Her father leapt in, probably more so to create the illusion of responsibility, something severely lacking in his department the past few years.
“Well when she doesn't want to listen, I'll put it as blunt as it gets”.
“You're not gay!” Her mother snapped.
“I am! I planned to tell you both in private, but you just couldn't keep your mouths shut until then could you. Just like every other aspect of my life you always feel the need to flaunt. Well since my love life is the interstitial of conversation, I'm fucking gay, take it or leave it!”.
“Language! Children at the table”, her uncle cried, but he was drowned out by her mother.
“You are not some perverted faggot! It's that Terri girl, she got you mixed up in this delusional rubbish didn't she? Or maybe it's from that disgusting bar? Or was it university? Or that boarding school?”
“Clearly it doesn’t matter to you either way since I'm not the perfect little girl you expected me to be, so why bother explaining, especially to someone still using the word faggot? I mean seriously mum, fucking seriously? And perverted? That's rich coming from you!”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“I think… I think we should call it a night”, her aunt chimed in, beginning to clear the table whilst her other aunt hurried the children away from it.
“You know what? I knew you'd be like this, mum, I fucking knew it, I was right on the money. You just can't escape being a royal ignorant bitch at times”.
Her mother stood up, launched over at her and slapped her across the face. The scene happened so fast and so out of the blue, that Rachel was left stunned. Never had her mother struck her, so where had that unhinged attack come from?
Rachel wasn't sure how to react, it took her a moment just to process the whole situation and it was only the stinging of her cheek that brought her back to reality.
Her mother seemed just as surprised by her own actions as she was and realising what she had done, made a weak attempt to apologise.
Unsure of what to do next, Rachel did the only thing that came naturally, she retaliated, forcing her father to intervene, splitting the two up.
Needless to say, that altercation didn't aid matters and a heated argument only became more aggressive, resulting in her mother demanding that she find somewhere else to live, since she wanted to live a life of perversion rather than a respectable Christian one the way she was raised. Rachel happily obliged, so there she was just after eight in the evening, an emotional wreck, making her way back to the house by cab to clear out her things and wondering if she could have delivered that without losing her cool so easily.
She always suspected this would ultimately be the conclusion, her moving out after revealing the truth, but she never thought it would be so soon, nor was she of the belief that it would be so dramatic and she had to admit that a part of her had always clung to the hope that her parents would accept her for who she was, she’d have even settled for them needing time to process.
This was inconvenient, it was only by stroke of fortune that Terri had room in her shared flat for her to stay a while, but without her landlord knowing an extra person was living there, it was only a short term solution.
To describe her state of mind at the time, disarray was a good one, the perfect definition to describe the concoction of different feelings she was experiencing, from overwhelming anger and immense sorrow, to suffocating dread and surprisingly even some sense of relief.
It was only reasonable to imagine every possible scenario in her head, whether or not
