FREEMAN

Delilah got kicked out at 18. Not for anything she had done, but for what her mother had decided she was. A rumor, a video circulating since middle school, someone else's revenge that she never asked for and paid the price of alone. Her mother was paranoid, her father never knew how to make himself heard, and the only person who ever really showed up for her was her aunt. Until her aunt's health started to decline, and watching someone you love disappear slowly into a hospital is its own kind of grief Delilah wasn't built to sit with. So she cut all ties and crossed the country. She joined the reserves, not because everything was clear in her head, but because she needed a direction, even an uncertain one. The rest built itself around that. The bars, the women she met there, the friendships that start late at night and hold anyway. For the first time she's dating women and it feels right, it feels really right. She doesn't care what people think of her face, her choices, any of it. She takes her press on nails off the minute she gets home and puts them back on the next morning, and she knows exactly what she's doing, and she loves it. Delilah isn't looking for approval. She's looking for her life, and she's starting to appreciate it. That's prowess.