It's a hot day in May in a geometry classroom in North Carolina. I finish my final, turn it in, and open up my book of classic science fiction stories.
The narrator's wife is driving fast down a country road, one of their daughters asleep in the back seat. Their drive is disrupted by the arrival of men. “Real Earth men.” The narrator introduces her daughter to them: “Yuriko Janetson. We use the patronymic. You would say matronymic.”
Huh. Patronymic would be from the father's name, matronymic would be the mother's – but either way I guess the narrator must be Janet. A man named Janet? Well, it's science fiction after all.
“Where are all your people?” the Earth man asks, and Janet begins to explain the history of Whileaway, and the plague that killed half their population.
And still, it takes me a beat to realize ... that Janet is a woman. That everyone in this world – until the sudden arrival of men, from another planet – is a woman.
I remember feeling that the ground had shifted under my feet. I remember flipping back, starting from the beginning, trying to align the story I had been reading with the story it had just turned into. The story was by Joanna Russ. Its title was “When It Changed,” and that's what it was for me – a current of wind that knocked me around and left me facing a different direction. This was the mid-90s, not the dark ages. Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet and I watched gay marriage being debated on CNN. But that story, published in 1972 when my own mother was just a teenager, gave me my first real glimpse of a world where a woman would be able to say “My wife.”
I wasn't attracted to girls. I didn't particularly identify as anything, though I kept wondering if I should, though I kept poking at myself trying to take the temperature of my heart. But I knew I lived in a small, small world. Girls were like this, and boys were like that, and if you didn't quite fit in one of those boxes the best you could hope for was to be looked at with suspicion.
By the time the bell rang to send me to my next exam, the walls of that small, small world had broken open. Outside there was an acre of grass, blue sky, fresh air, horizon stretching far into the distance. There wasn't any problem with me not being small enough to fit into my world– all I needed was a world big enough for me. And if my suburban high school wasn't big enough for me, then I stuck books on to every corner like hastily-built additions on a too-small house, and I built a world that had space for me.
In my first book, A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, Cass is riding her bike across the country, still trying to figure out her sexual identity, still struggling with her feelings for her dead best friend. And maybe it's fitting that only by riding her bike a thousand miles down long ribbon highways with wide skies and wide horizons can she discover a world that's big enough for her.
In my books I want to build a world that has space for everybody. Space to roll around on the grass and do cartwheels and jump off a rope swing into a swimming hole. Space to take in deep breaths of fresh air. Of course I want that for teens who are LGBT, who are questioning, who are asexual, who are something that doesn't fit into our alphabet soup. But ultimately I want that for everybody, because that's the world we all deserve, and everyone gets hurt when we put up walls and put people in boxes – or in closets. I think everyone deserves to hear, the world is bigger than you think it is, and it's got room for you too.
Emily Horner is the author of A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (Dial Books for Young Readers, 201), her debut novel. Emily was born in Ottawa, Ontario and now resides in New York. She loves musicals, bicycles and Japanese movies, so it's no surprise that her first novel included those. You can find more information about Emily and her novel, A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend at her website.