Chapter Text
When Rachel was a little girl, she loved to go to the state fairs. All along the walls of her family home are pictures of her, small and sticky-cheeked, with the blur of carnival rides and LED lights behind her. Her memories of the actual events are fuzzy at best, as memories from that far back tend to be, but one thing she does remember is riding on the carousels. What makes the memory stand out to her is how afraid she remembers being—of the strange looking wooden horses, how fast they went around, and the ominous creaking. The pictures of her riding the carousels are all sequestered safely away in the family photo albums, because she's clearly teary-eyed and on the verge of throwing a fit. The only thing ever slightly able to dampen her fear was her father standing by her side, his big hands holding her securely on top of the horse, and the shelter of his body shielding her from the view of the world spinning out of control around her.
As she grew older, she realized that the carousel which seemed to spin too fast for the eye to track moved at an almost glacial pace. Just another embarrassing childhood memory to be tucked away until her mother was laughing over the family album with her aunts at Thanksgiving. As the years passed, her father became more successful, which meant her father became busier, which meant they rarely were able to make the trip to upstate for the fair anymore. As she grew older and begun to drift away from her parents as teenagers often did, this mattered less and less to her. Yet the fear of the world spinning out of control always remained with her.
It wasn't until she was 16, when her eyes refused to stray from the sight of Sandra Moffett reapplying her pineapple scented lip-gloss in third period calculus, that she realized there was more than one way for the world to spin out of her control. She didn't want to accept it at first; she would force herself to try looking at guys the same way she looked at Sandra—trying to imagine kissing them the way she did Sandra, or holding their hand, or pushing her fingers through their hair. The most she could ever imagine was stomaching it, but for a while that was enough, because at home her mother started asking her about boys, her father huffing out that Rachel should hold off on dating until she could find a nice young man at Harvard. They never tried to sit her down like Maddie Barber's parents did to tell her it was okay if she liked girls—not suspicious or accusing, but just to let her know that they loved her no matter what.
She couldn't imagine her parents outright rejecting her or kicking her out like she sometimes heard about. She could, however, imagine the disappointment and the cajoling. Her parents had her life planned out for her already. She was going to get into a good undergrad school, she was going to pass the LSAT and get into Harvard, then she would get married, and she would give them grandkids. When she was 14, she told her dad she wanted to be a chef so she could make all kinds of delicious food; he didn't tell her that she couldn't, but he said, "Chefs don't make a lot of money unless they open up a chain of restaurants, sweetie."
Then, he asked her to try cooking him something, laughing when it came out a disaster, instead of encouraging her to try again. She set it aside. Her mother was much the same, pushing and prodding at Rachel until she got what she wanted, which was why there were dozens of pictures of her sitting on top of a wooden horse in the family photo albums
So, maybe her parents wouldn't hate her or reject her for wanting to spend the rest of her life with Sandra Moffett, but they would let her know how much easier—how much better it would be if only she liked men. She kept her feelings to herself and, when her mother asked if there were any boys at school she was interested in, she looked to her father and said, "None of the boys at my school are gonna end up at Harvard, mom." He smiled. For that moment, it was enough.