Everything else happens so fast. The police call in Jason to watch a video of a blonde-haired girl murdering Mona, just dragging her clawing, screaming, fighting body all over the house. And he’s like, “It probably was my sister.” And the police are like, “Just to clarify, your sister Alison?” And he’s like, “I mean, sure. Why not.” So the police take off to arrest her.Emily gets a text informing her that this is going to happen so she agrees to go with the Liars to form a barrier around Ali’s house so she can’t escape. And I know everyone is like: OH MY GOD, ASSHOLE, TAKE PAIGE TO THE AIRPORT!” But I think it’s important to understand that Emily really seems to think Paige can stay in Rosewood if Alison goes to jail. She is shocked right down to her boots in a little while when she chases Paige down and tells her Ali has been arrested and Paige says she has to go anyway. Maybe Emily has spent too much time on Tumblr listening to people talk about how neither can live while the other survives or whatever shipping malarky.
Anyway, but so the Liars do barricade Alison into her own backyard, but she skirts right up against telling them the whole truth. She says if they don’t let her go, there will be no one left to keep them safe. And that’s for real. But the thing she doesn’t say is, “You are too afraid and too naive to look into the abyss and if you don’t know the depth of the abyss you cannot understand what you are fighting against and you are doomed.” I’m going to talk more about this later in the season because it’s the crux of Alison, I think, and it’s fascinating. For now, though: The Liars are like, “Nah, things are so simple and you are a bad guy and you have to go to jail.” Honestly, it’s the stupidest thing they have ever done.
Aria goes home and asks Mike to tell him the truth of Mona one day, and he says he will. He feels glad and surprised that she asked, because he’s pretty pissed off with the way people keep acting like Mona was just this nice, misunderstood girl. That’s not who she was at all. And there will never, ever, ever be anyone else like her.
Okay and here we go. Emily rushes to the airport and just about comes unspooled when she sees that no people are at Paige’s departure gate. She stares out the window for a minute before Paige appears behind her. Emily grabs her and holds on like a stray buoy in a shipwrecked sea.
Emily: You can stay, Paige! Alison was arrested for Mona’s murder and…
Paige: Emily…
Emily: …we’ll just talk to your parents and explain what happened and they’ll have no choice but to let you stay …
Paige: Emily…
Emily: …and we’ll go to prom together and walk together at graduation and it’ll be so good because we’ve already been through everything else and it’s at least 100 years until next Halloween, so we’ll have so much time to do the things I kept promising we’d do…
Paige: Emily.
Emily: Stop saying my name like that! Stop saying my name like whatever you’re going to say next is going to break my heart!
Paige: I have to go. Not just because my parents said I have to, but because — graduation is only the beginning of life, Em. It’s a launching pad. It’s not the finish line. And if I it takes everything I am to get to that point, what will be left for me after that? What will be left for my life?
Emily: It’s not fair that all my friends’ romances get to exist in this bubble of repercussion-less fantasy and we have to exist in the hard, cruel world where the rest of this show takes place.
Paige: Maybe not. But playing the game of What’s Fair will ruin your life. And anyway, that’s what makes our whole deal real. It’s what makes us matter. That we love in the dark places.
Emily: Stay the night.
Paige: It won’t be easier tomorrow.
Emily: I can’t stand to see you walk away from me.
Paige: [laughs quietly]
Emily: What?
Paige: I’ve been having this dream since the day I met you, but in reverse.
They kiss and they clutch at each other and Emily watches, in tears, as Paige goes. And for the first time in their whole relationship, she’s the one who doesn’t look away.
Whew. Okay. I am going to tell you some true things. Once upon a time, in a land across the oceans, the brightest story found its way out of the darkest night and lit up the heart parts and the mind parts of a whole generation of young gay women. It was the story of a meek, closeted lesbian who conjured the courage of a million armies in her enormous heart and burst out of the closet and fought for the surly, arrogant, insecure girl who she knew loved her. There were no other quality queer characters on TV at the time, not really, and especially none like these two. Their story was so real and so rare that the hard-won happy ending they shared became a beacon of hope for queer women in that land and in all the lands across the oceans.
I sat across from the man who was responsible for that story, after it ended, and I looked him right in the eyes and I opened up the fullness of my heart to him and I told him what that story meant, not just to me, but to a zillion women like me.
Most queer people being told queer stories aren’t just peeking around the corner at a storyteller, hoping to be entertained for a minute. Most queer people being told queer stories are looking for a lie of fiction that tells the truth of themselves. A mirror to hold up to their fears. A sword. A shield. A potion of healing. A whole new life. (“Lord! When you sell a man a book you don’t just sell him twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life.”) Human beings cannot make sense of the world without stories, we simply cannot do it, and there have been so few queer stories of substance in our lives, so the ones that resonate feel like mana from actual heaven. And I told this man those things.
A couple of years later this storyteller I trusted so deeply, he brought back those two lesbian characters for a TV movie, called me right up and told me how much I was going to love their story, had his co-creator chat me up and tell me how moved I was going to be — and then they killed off one of the lesbians. Brought back the characters, years after their show was done and their Happily Ever After carved in stone, to murder one of them. I was shocked. Hurt. Shocked some more. “If it costs you nothing to leave a little light in the world,” I asked the storyteller, “why on earth would you extinguish it?”
He called me petulant. He called me naive. He said, “Gay people die too, and it’s immature and foolish to pretend they don’t.” This straight man said to me that when it comes to telling stories about lesbian characters, I just don’t get it. He and his co-creator mocked the heartbroken, angry outcry of the people whose lives had been changed by their story. “These characters never belonged to you, to your community,” they said, “They have always belonged to us, and we’ll do with them whatever we want.” The words they wrote to me would make you sick in your heart and in your gut if you saw them with your own eyes, they really would.
