Chapter Text
It shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone that April keeps herself shoved so far within the proverbial lesbian closet that it becomes suffocating amongst the dust and clothes and forgotten about belongings littering the space. She’s suppressed her emotions and desires since second grade. She hopes, one day, someday, that she will be able to break free of the shackles around her ankles and wrists that have been there her entire life, to be the perfect daughter, the perfect Christian, and eventually the perfect wife and mother.
April no longer believes that one page of the bible, one verse, or even a few verses, should dictate specific aspects of her life… especially not when she believes that the true verbiage has been altered from its original intent. Not that her parents, her family, care about that. Their hate runs deep. It runs deep for their own daughter, though they don’t even know it. Their bigotry, their racism, their homophobia, their transphobia, their intolerance is stifling, and its coils wrap almost tenderly around April’s throat, squeezing tighter with every spoken word of distaste for those who do not live or believe as the Stevens’ do. Slurs thrown around flippantly by April’s parents feel like a knife to the chest. But she doesn’t say a word, she can’t, it isn’t safe to do so. She buries it in one of the overflowing boxes within her neatly arranged thoughts.
It is life or death, for April, as she grows more confident in her feelings, it pushes her head deeper under the water as she keeps her true self hidden. She can only imagine what would happen, the violence, of all kinds, that would no doubt be bestowed upon her from her oh-so-loving father. Or even one of her uncles, who would no doubt show up upon John’s request to help ‘straighten out’ his daughter. April is sure she would lose at least one grandparent from a heart attack from the news that she was a young, lost sinner, an abomination, a stain on the family line for loving differently.
Therein lies the problem. She doesn’t have a support system. She doesn’t have anyone she can confide in, no one she can run to, nowhere she can survive or hide for any amount of time. She doesn’t have a village of love surrounding her like the warm embrace she suspects she could feel if she had loving parents.
The closest she has to a village of support is Ezequiel, Hannah B, Sterling, and… Blair, kind of. None of whom can protect her from her own family. Just a bunch of teenagers reliant on adults who may or may not agree with the ideals of her own parents.
So she dreams of a day where she can break free of the grasp of her parents. Dreams when she can fly free, without shame, without the blanket of hatred she’d been covered in by her parents since birth.
She can see it, so clearly, when she dreams of acceptance and support. Sterling is always there for it, and although there is absolutely no guarantee that there could even, feasibly, be something between them in any long term kind of way, her heart puts her there and April doesn’t fight it. Even Mr. and Mrs. Wesley, in her undetermined future, are there, embracing her as one of their own. Their love for their children illuminates April’s own life through her love of the Wesley’s daughter. Parents by proxy. It is more than she has, and in her dreams, their support and love is infinite. Not surprising to April, her family is nowhere to be seen in these aspirations for the future.
While there has always been something wrong with her own family, her own village, April knows, without a doubt, that she will build her own, one day. She just has to fight to stay alive, fight to live, and eventually… fight to love.