“Oh yes, absolutely right,” Helen said immediately. “I, par exemple, was born in a shit-stain of a town in rural Texas because my parents make bad choices. Was it nightmare fuel? Yes! Did I leave the second I turned sixteen? Also yes. Because of course in Texas, we’re allowed to get married at sixteen—nope, that’s definitely not still a child—and leave our families, thank fuck.”

They passed a hand over their face in a phew gesture.

“So my queer ass married this random, left town, made him divorce me, and now I wouldn’t cross the state line if all Louisiana were on fire, thank you very much.”

“Well, there’s the water right there, so,” Veronica said.

“Exactly. I’d wade into gator-infested waters before stepping a toe into Tex-ass.”

“Are you from here?” Greta asked Veronica.

“I’m from St. Bernard Parish, yeah. But I’m a different person than I ever was when I lived there. Might as well be a thousand miles away.”

Helen high-fived her.

“Classic tale of quote unquote ‘boy’ realizes she’s a girl, girl tells parents, parents care more about preconceived notions and egos than about girl, girl leaves, and shit gets a million times better for her.”

Sitting there, surrounded by three people who all had families far worse than her own, Greta wondered if she was just ungrateful.

“How do you know if you’d be better off without your family?” she asked.

Helen refilled her cup, and Carys slid a warm hand on her thigh.

“I don’t think it’s so cut and dried,” Helen said. “Like, I still talk to my parents. They love me. They just have lives that aren’t the one I want. If they wanted to come visit me here, I’d be down. I just won’t go back there.”

“Yeah, it’s about choosing how you want the people in your life to make you feel,” Carys said. “You can decide you only want people in your life who make you feel respected, cared for, listened to. Then you communicate that to them, and if they repeatedly make you feel disrespected, neglected, or ignored instead, you stop giving them your time or energy.”

“Family’s hard because it’s rarely all bad,” Veronica said. “There’s all those pretty memories of good times too. Times y’all baked cookies or picked flowers or whatever shit white people do in Maine.”

Greta snorted, remembering times she really had baked cookies and picked flowers with her family.

“And it feels like if you cut those people off from your future, then you lose the folks who knew that part of your past,” Carys said. “But it’s not true. You keep those memories no matter what, because they’re yours. They don’t belong to the people you shared them with.”