Emily knew that it had been a mistake to empty out those last few boxes of junk. She had ignored them for close to three years, forgotten their existence almost as soon as she had packed them up. It would have been so simple just to leave them hidden in one of the basement vaults where they had rested undisturbed, but some demon of mischief had urged her to go through her stored possessions.

Actually, now that she had gone through it thoroughly, it wasn't just her stuff, but a collection of things that belonged to the entire West Coast Brigade. They'd lived in buses and vans for weeks on end, making their escape to New York, the last safe haven for radicals like them. Almost everything they owned had been left behind or sold, and almost everything they had brought with them had stayed tightly stored in its cartons, and almost everything that they had had to use on the road had been given out to its proper owner at the end of the trip, but there were a few things that had just kicked around the vehicles until they had to clean out. That was the box at the bottom of the pile, the one most abandoned because no one had any use forit any longer. She would bet half her salary that no one remembered that they'd even brought these things along, having assumed them lost forever. There was a strange solace in exploring her friends' lives, if only to avoid exploring her own. She laid aside the few items of hers that she recognized, then sorted through everything else.

The olive green tank top was Carisa's; Amanda had unpacked it somewhere in Nebraska when they needed the boost that came from a combination karaoke/dance competition, and since Carisa had left it in Phoenix back in 2004 when she made a trip to visit friends, she wasn't around to complain about it. The trashy romance novel was Anna's; from the California border well into Utah, Laura and Carolyn had teased her to the point where she had to change vehicles to finish it in peace. A check with Barry's old address in the corner was made out to Gina Stewart for forty-two dollars; with a corrected date in 2017 and an original date in 2005, the debt was an old enough and important enough matter that it had been the first thing he planned to do when he got to New York, although more serious concerns had taken precedence, and now it was too late. A worn composition notebook contained a round-robin story; Emily remembered starting it in central Nevada with Nikki, Pam, Laura, Amanda, and Sharon, only finishing it as they crossed the bridge into Manhattan, and Amanda's tearstains blurred the ink of the last few words that Sharon had never gotten to see.

She couldn't put aside her own painful past anymore, not when Amanda lived with her loss every day. It was so easy to forget- but no. It wasn't easy to forget at all. It took special effort for the memories burned into her brain not to hurt. What was easy was taking those steps that would give her blessed forgetfulness and obscure the bad times. What was easy was letting the drugs have her mind, letting them change who she was and had been. Like everyone else around her, she had to make the hard choices now.

The map had cued her, really. Their route from San Francisco to New York was mapped out in purple marker, but the part that cut her to the quick was the thin red line that she had drawn to mark her personal odyssey, the one that had taken up so many years of her life. She put her hands on the map to conquer her fear, reading it as if blind, imagining the topography like Braille sharp against the sensitive skin of her fingertips. She reached for the past and claimed it as her own.

Her journey had started forty years ago, in the southernmost reaches of the American map; the memories she had of the foothills were soft aganst her fingertips, and as she traced the path of the sleepy river valley where she and her friends had gone swimming so many times, she thought she felt water, but it was only sweat. Here she had been born and raised, first as a pawn in the power games of a broken home, then as the younger daughter of a mentally troubled mother, though it had taken two relocations for her to realize what her mother was going through. Here, she had first learned to hate, taught by a narrow-minded church that had forgotten the meaning of its faith and willfully misappropriated the Bible to spread its chosen message. She could remember how her own hatred had felt in her stomach, coiled up and exuding vileness from its pores so that she could never be at ease. She had been devoted and devout then. She had believed the dogma- worse, she had preached it herself, working in the church; she had taught others to believe as she had believed, narrowed the minds of who knew how many impressionable young people, spat out the epithets that she now knew described her. The preacher said that gays were destined for eternal hellfire, but it had been the preacher's daughter who aroused her and made her want to sin. No amount of penance, no determination to only stare at men, could change that.

Confused and panicky, she had fled north, following the river valley to the biggest college the state had to offer. Though half her graduating class went with her, she had never felt so alone in her life. Even though she had escaped the stultifying effects that a sleepy Southern town could have on her, she had yet to get out of that world. Absently, she tapped her finger on the tiny dot on the map, so small even when compared to the entire state, much less the country she had now traversed. There, she still encountered the same mindset, but she also found something else she'd never had a chance to fully explore: the Internet. In her hometown, only the library had had access to the World Wide Web, so she hd only been able to use it for those few research projects her high school had demanded of her. Things were different in college. Not only did she have to use the computer more often, but there were so many more of them around, and they were far better equipped than the slow Commodores she had become accustomed to. There, she discovered chat, and people who came from California and New York, and conversations that made her blush all the way to her ears and made her realize who she really was. She had originally signed on as herself, telling the truth as she knew it, but now she reinvented herself online: her avatar was now tall and blonde, skeptical of religion and as flamboyantly lesbian as she knew how to be. Girls hit on her, and she hit back. To her surprise, no one treated "Monique" any differently from Emily- if anything, "Monique" was more welcome in communities than Emily who came with a Bible under her arm.

In the dorm room that faced north into the artist's light, she had come to terms with herself and been reborn. There would be no more denial. There would be no more pretending to swoon over a guy that her straight friends thought was cute. There would only be truth, and acceptance of that truth. Once she knew that, she knew that she could no longer stay in the South. California was calling her, and the thought of that freedom was enough for her to leave behind everything she had ever known and move out to the West Coast.

But the Promised Land was never what anyone had expected it to be, and as Emily traced the red line on the map, she could only conclude that she had had the same experience. There were too many chances to slip up and ruin her life, and she took as many of them as she could fit into her schedule. Drugs, alcohol, sex, partying: all this and more took her grades into a terminal tailspin and sent her into a series of mood swings that almost put her into an institution. But that wasn't even the worst of her self-destructive behavior. All too clearly, she remembered the night that had changed her life forever, when all the pride, all the tattered remnants of faith, all the screaming in the world couldn't save her, when only sheer dumb luck had saved her honor and her life. She tilted her head to regard the ceiling and wondered what had ever happened to her assailant. A rueful bubble of laughter escaped her. Knowing the way the world worked, he had probably ended up a decorated police officer.

Her credits had transferred well, and she had graduated in only seven semesters. Free of the tightly controlled academic life, she was lost, confused, and tempted to go home. But she knew that she could never go home unless she denied who she was again; it had taken too much for her to make that admission, so she would never be able to go home. So she did the opposite, wandering when she had wanted to plant roots. The red line on the map lurched crazily through the western half of the United States, as if she'd been drunk when she drew it. It finally came to rest in Nebraska, and she remembered who had stopped her in her tracks: beautiful dark-eyed Lindsey, whose raven hair fell around her heart-shaped face, whose lithe body was constantly in motion, who taught Emily how to appreciate women who had empowered themselves. It was the first time Emily had ever allowed herself to love someone who wasn't a family member. It felt stunningly good for five years, until Lindsey found a position in Italy and took off like a thief in the night. She realized now that Lindsey had seen what was coming and gotten out of the way, but back then she had felt betrayed and abandoned, terribly alone.

She had started lurking on basketball message boards at that point, desperate to cling to anything that would remind her of Lindsey, and they had given her inspiration. Remarkable, complex people populated this world, people who fired her imagination and made her laugh for hours on end. She discovered a talent for poetry, then a knack for writing about awkward emotions and romantic situations. More importantly, she made friends, good friends, the kind of people she could turn to when she was in need, people who remembered her birthday and gave her a shoulder to cry on whenever she needed it. Even though she only knew what they looked like from e-mailed photos and what they sounded like from her imagination, they were more real to her than the co-workers who distanced themselves from her more and more as time went on. It didn't take Emily long to understand that her life was rapidly becoming involved with Phoenix and New York instead of Nebraska, but she had become comfortable in Omaha. The last thing she wanted to do was pick up and move again.

Then the White Widow mess had started, and the city had very quickly become very hostile. She'd been living quietly on her own, but enough people remembered when Lindsey had lived with her to taunt her. Not a day went by without a ream of hate mail shoved in her mailbox; every weekend saw at least one brick or rock thrown through her window and new homophobic graffiti scrawled on the walls of her house. She tried to take the matter to the police, but they mumbled and shuffled papers and made it clear that they thought she'd brought it upon herself. She got advice from her friends and tried to apply it, but what worked in blue states and blue cities wasn't as effective in the heart of the red states. She lost her secretarial job for no reason that she could see other than her sexuality; she seriously considered bringing a discrimination suit against the company, but she knew that no court would take it. Life was becoming more and more intolerable, but part of her refused to surrender. Only when one of her friends in Phoenix had an open position in his office did she finally decide to leave. The red line on the map was as straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler, deeply ingrained by the force of her hand on the pen.

Phoenix, surrounded by her friends, deeply immersed in the culture she had only experienced from a distance, was heaven on Earth. She had forgotten how much she enjoyed people's company; it had been a long time since Lindsey, longer since she'd had friends she could go out for a drink with. She'd been on the outside looking in for too long. It wasn't a healthy condition. She thought she had finally found the place where she would spend the rest of her life. She thought her wandering was over. But neither she nor anyone else knew what would happen next, about the machinations and schemes that would lead to the rise of Britney. The first thing they noticed was that somehow, a radical, evangelical, racist conservative had become president of the United States, despite their work on the Democratic candidate's behalf. Many of them quickly concluded that a red state was not a good place to be and fled to more liberal strong holds. Emily and her friends thought they knew better, or were too stubborn to leave, or just didn't want to go. They held on even as their city descended into madness, even as they were no longer welcome in the chambers of power, even as those who had respected and cared for them slipped away. Four years after the inauguration, when the war began and all eyes were truly blind, enough was enough; more hospitable climes and old friends awaited them on the West Coast, in the City by the Bay.

Again, for a while, she was happy. It'd been a good few years since she'd seen her friends from the Northwest, engaged them in drinking and dancing contests, shared stories of good times when sanity had been easier to come by and more fun to deny. Emily, looking back from 2020, remembered the shadow that had haunted all of them, left them staring over their shoulders, kept them from truly enjoying the company of good lovers and better friends. Laws got more and more restrictive, neighbors more concerned with stamping out vice and iniquity instead of participating in it, the atmosphere more and more suffocating. Then there was the fateful morning that cemented their need to leave, when gunshots had split the peaceful morning air, aimed at two women who just wanted to walk their dog. A week later, the self-proclaimed West Coast Brigade had sold about three-quarters of their worldly goods, bought or rented any number of buses and vans, packed up whatever was left of their gear, and taken off across the country at high speed. Years of making friends over the Internet had given them a network of places that might be safe for them to stay for a night or a refueling stop.

Emily's face tightened slightly as she traced the meandering purple line. It shot straight east for a good distance, only starting to waver when they hit the trackless plains of Kansas and Nebraska. There, they had cut south, picking up friends in Texas who had been too scared to leave when they first should have. Then they'd swung north through Tennessee-- Emily pressed her lips together so tightly that they turned white and disappeared. No. She would not let herself think about what had happened that night in Tennessee. Coolly, she traced the line through Kentucky, stopping a moment outside Lexington to mourn Sharon; there'd been a shootout as they stopped at a gas station to refill some empty tanks, and Sharon, poor innocent Sharon who had been playing cards when the whole mess started, had taken two bullets- one to her brain, one through her lung- and slumped over an eight-high flush before anyone could say a word. Fate hadn't even allowed her lover to hold her as she died, denying her that one comfort before the end came. They made quick stops in Indianapolis and Columbus before gunning the gas and going straight to New York City, last safe haven for those who dared to be different.

Emily leaned back in her chair and smiled. It hadn't been hard to fall in love with the City at all. It had the joie de vivre that she remembered from the early days of San Francisco, the no-nonsense manner of Phoenix, the quiet familiarity of Omaha, and even some of the small-town closeness she remembered from her birthplace. While New Yorkers as a whole tended to ignore strangers, neighbors did not. She had an address on a scrap of paper, and it led her to the Amazons, to people she had known for years and people who had only been legends to her. If Gina and Alaine, the figures known to ordinary Americans as Slash Stewart and the Wraith, were surprised or angry that she had taken so long to take them up on their invitation, they never let on. They were a family of sorts, two dozen strong, occupying half a floor of apartments in Midtown. Their doors were never locked to each other; what belonged to one Amazon belonged to all of them, except for lovers, and even that could be negotiated among the involved parties. It was a strange kind of home, but it was home more than anything else she'd ever known. With Gina, Christián, or even Alaine to guide her, Emily soon knew the City better than any of the other places she had lived. Best of all, she was able to pick up her writing where she had left off, and use it for a serious, important purpose. She chose her pen name carefully, taking it half out of a sense of irony and half from the mocking nickname that the original four Amazons had given her. It didn't take long for "the Baby's" works to become some of the most popular on the street, combining a lively wit with wonderfully steamy love scenes.

But as much as she would have loved for the apartment building on the corner of 57th and 7th to be her last stop, it wasn't. The full bloom of spring still reminded her of the May morning when Alaine had rousted the late risers out of bed, screaming that the feds were coming and they needed to move as fast as they could, to leave everything and just take themselves out of htat place. She'd been halfway to Columbus Circle before getting up the nerve to ask where Gina was, and Alaine's curt answer had sent chills down her spine. She couldn't believe that Gina would lay down her life to protect her friends- not that she didn't think the native New Yorker had it in her, but that she never thought the situation would come up. It shamed her to admit that she hadn't realized Christián had also stayed back until they'd emerged at 73rd and Broadway, and by then she had to be more concerned with making contact with the Disciples. Carisa and Barry had welcomed her and the Amazons with open arms (literally, in her fellow redhead's case). Some last shred of her innnocence, the part that she thought she could nuture back to a healthy level, had finally died. What use was it to keep her pen name now? What use was it to even keep writing? She put her pen and paper aside to focus on rebellion, and became so good at it that Carisa stepped down to return to the bar and handed her what reins of power there were.

That led her to where she was now, and as she looked back, she realized it had been a long and strange ride. More importantly, she wouldn't change a single thing that had happened to her. The bad things had made her stronger; getting over them had given her the courage to get on with her life. The good things had given her reasons to go on through the bad times. The friends she'd made had supported her whenever she needed it; the others had been a reality check whenever she got too comfortable. She had learned how to adapt to whatever was thrown at her. She had learned that there were things worth fighting- and things worth fighting for. For better or worse, this was the story of her life, the series of events that made her who she was and had to be.