Gone Home✔️

Chapter 14: Making Progress

The stairs led me up to a bunch of white brick.

There was no door at the top, so I stepped through and looked around. A room that almost looked like a backstage area was off to the right, and there was another doorless doorway to the left that seemed as though it led to another one of those 'behind-the-scenes', unfinished sections hidden behind the walls of my new house. I decided to leave it alone for now and opted to go right, since there was light and stuff over there.

The first thing I noticed was a little endtable immediately to my right that was home to some scraps of paper and one of those green glass-covered lamps. It was still on. I checked out the papers and found that they seemed to be rough drafts of some of the journals Sam had written me. Well, nothing new there. Getting out of the basement had renewed my appetite for information. Well, that and not wanting to think about what might have gone down between my father and Oscar decades and decades ago in this very house.

Dead ahead was another table with a knocked over, turned on table lamp, the kind with the bendy neck, that was pointed at the wall, another cork-board, and a box with the top off. There was a comic on the table. I checked out the table, righting the lamp and then flipping through the comic book I'd found. It was definitely the kind of thing Sam would be into. It was called Women Outlaws and featured a badass babe kicking ass and taking names.

Definitely a Sam comic.

The cork-board had some drawings pinned to it, a little pin that said Wipers on it and strips of paper that had HAD ENOUGH? written on them. I didn't know what they meant until I checked out the box, which was packed with what looked like magazines. But when I picked one of them up and began to study it, I thought these magazines were of pretty shoddy quality...and then it hit me. Sam and Lonnie had made these!

The title was GRRRL JUSTICE NOW and featured KICKING AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY and THE GREAT GOODFELLOW RIOT OF '95 on the cover. The back had a kickass drawing of Captain Allegra and the First Mate. I couldn't believe there were so many of these. The box was packed with them. How much time had the pair invested in this project?! I marveled over it for a bit longer, then turned around to the final table in the room. Moving over to it, I pulled on a drawstring in passing, turning on an overhead light.

This table had an empty pizza box, a vacant tape player, some office supplies and...two pieces of paper on it. The first was a sternly-worded letter to Sam directly from the freaking principle. Basically, it was a response to a letter Sam must have written her about Lonnie. I slowly pieced it together. It sounded like someone had written something on Sam's locker...and Lonnie had written on her own locker as well in retaliation, and she was being punished for it. Thus prompting Sam to write the letter, trying to get Lonnie off the hook.

The principle pretty much said that Lonnie was in trouble for defacing her own locker and no one else was in trouble for defacing Sam's locker because they hadn't found the one who'd done it and she should let the matter drop.

For a moment, I didn't get it.

Why would Lonnie write something on her own locker in retaliation for something someone wrote on Sam's locker...

Then, suddenly, I figured it out.

Word must have been going around that Sam and Lonnie were more than just good friends. If someone had written something like Lesbian on Sam's locker, then it would make sense that Lonnie would angrily write the same thing on her own locker...throwing her lot in with Sam's and proudly declaring that 'yeah, we're lesbians...SO WHAT?!' Jeez that took guts. I wouldn't be able to do it. I set the letter down and turned to the next paper.