Relief

by Veronica Vo

I sat next to my mother in the passenger seat of her red SUV, the way I did every day after she picked me up from school. In the open rectangular compartment, in front of the cupholder, was a small silver statue of Mother Mary that was never moved. It was my first year of high school. I had harbored the longest crush of my life, almost an entire school year, and it had just come to a tragic end. The boy I shared a music stand with several times a week in the orchestra, who so carefully arranged my textbooks for me next to my violin case and sometimes even offered to carry them, was gay. I found out through a mutual friend. How could he be so nice to me the whole year if he had been gay this whole time? I felt betrayed.

It was a crisis. I wanted to tell my mother about a crush for the first time, to see what she had to say about all this. She always had a lot to say, and as long as she wasn’t mad and yelling at me, I liked hearing her talk. We were driving the five minutes between my school and house, the stretch of mountains and road as familiar to me as my own hand. Feeling my heart beat quickly in my chest, I started, “I have something to tell you. I had a crush.”

There was no response, which was odd, so I looked over at her in the driver’s seat. Her fingers were clenched and white around the steering wheel. My mother loved gossip and “girl talk.” While I never really had any to share with her, I had heard her talk to her friends often enough to know this. I expected her to get excited and launch into questioning. Instead, there was silence for a few deafening seconds, her face a lake frozen over. Then, her voice, unusually low and quiet. “A girl?”

I was still half-expecting a crack in tension or a change in tone. I had no idea why she was acting like this, why the conversation turned so serious all of a sudden. I was especially confused as to why she asked that, because I hadn’t mentioned anything about gender.

“No?” I said. Another second. She breathed a hard exhale of relief, though I hadn’t realized she was holding her breath. A smile. Finally.

She turned to look at me. “Well, who was it? What happened?”

When I told her, she launched into a spiel about how gay people can be very friendly, based on her experience with the ones she’d met. I was relieved the strange mood from earlier was gone, though something about it lingered in my mind. In the future, I would wonder how she knew, even then.

Veronica Vo is a Vietnamese American writer from Southern California. She earned her MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, The Offing, Tint Journal, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Disquiet International Prize in 2024, the Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Contest in 2025, and has been supported by Disquiet, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center.