At the End of the Rainbow by Nia Jacobsen

Author:Nia Jacobsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2020-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

***

“What is that?” I ask. Ken leans over to see out the passenger side window.

“Where?”

“Up there. That ‘no’ written in the sky.”

“How much do you wanna bet that’s about the postal vote?” Ken asks grimly. A car behind us toots. The light has turned green.

I text Will and the girls so they have a heads up. Ken is in a bad mood for the rest of the day. He walks out when people bring it up at morning tea.

“How much do you think they spent on skywriting?” he asks, as we drive home.

“Think about something else,” I suggest.

“I’ve been trying to all day.”

It’s on the news when I turn on the TV. I turn it off immediately, but Ken already heard them talking about it.

“I’m going for a run,” he tells me.

I call Will once he’s gone.

“How are you holding up?” he asks.

“I’m fine. More worried about Ken than anything. How’re the girls?”

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to Nita all day, but Holly told me she’s fine.”

“When I texted her about the skywriting, she just sent me ‘are you kidding’. She okay?”

“Yeah. She’s been really on board with people wilfully misinterpreting it, and that’s taken a lot of the sting of it out for her.”

“Maybe I should try that with Ken.”

“I thought your apartment was a postal vote-free zone.”

“I might need to get creative. This stuff has been really affecting him.”

“I know.”

“It’s just hard, because I don’t want to talk about it either, but I feel like we have to. We can’t just pretend it isn’t happening, because it’s everywhere. It’s during the ad breaks on TV, and on Facebook, and the news, and on the radio while we’re driving, and in the tea-room at work… I wish I could just turn it off or something. Fast-forward to the results day—anything.”

“I wish I was old enough to vote,” Will mumbles glumly. “It’s driving me nuts. This is literally a glorified opinion poll on whether my brother should have the same rights as me, y’know? Whether or not my girlfriends should be able to get married one day. I just…” He sighs in frustration.

“I know.” Tater Tot jumps up into my lap and I rub her ears. “I feel bad for all the people who haven’t come out yet.”

“It must be awful.”

“The debate is just empowering homophobes to talk shit about us and pretend it’s okay to think that way. This shouldn’t be a rational fucking debate. And I just keep thinking about kids who are too scared to come out, hearing how the people in their lives think; how the people on TV don’t think they deserve the same rights as other people; how politicians think their warped understanding of religion is more important than people just trying to live their lives. It just breaks my heart. I wanna reach out to all the questioning and closeted kids and give them a big hug and tell them that there’s nothing wrong with them.”

“I know. Dad and I were talking about this yesterday and he said basically the same thing.

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