A Knight to Remember Read Online Free PDF Page A

world and have adventures.  
    “But you can’t, because you’re a girl,” her brothers, all knights, taunted her.  
    This girl’s name was Miranda, and this is how her story began:   with a wish, and a will.
    I remember, as I always do, when I read the first page, the first time that I read it.   I was fifteen, standing in the first row of shelves at my school’s library, having just come from the bathroom where I’d tried really very hard with makeup and a lot of cold water, to make it look like I hadn’t been crying.   These hadn’t been a few sad salty tears I’d shed.   I’d been sobbing in the bathroom stall, heart-aching, gut-wrenching sobs, for twenty minutes.   I had, of course, failed miserably to mask my red, blotchy face and puffy eyes.  
    I came out in high school.   In the nineties.   It was not a pretty picture by any stretch of the imagination.   I wanted to be out and proud when, really, not that many people were out in high school then, and the ones who were lead terrible, miserable lives full of homophobia.   I don’t know what I was thinking, but I really believed it’d be okay.   Yes, even then, I was pretty idealistic.   I’d had this idea that coming out would make my life better , not worse.   That, if I came out, I might even be able to find the girl of my dreams and have some sort of wonderful teen romance.   But my coming out didn’t result in anything more than non-stop bullying that made my life a perfect replica of hell.
    That day, like most days of my teen years, I was imagining my life as being lived anywhere but there, in that stupid little town with all of its stupid, little, narrow-minded people.
    In short, I needed escape like I’d never needed it before.
    And, somehow, I’d wandered into the fantasy section of the library.
    “Hey,” said Miss T, our school librarian, as she wandered by and happened to take note of me crumpling my face into a tissue.   “Are you all right, dear?”
    “No,” I told her truthfully.   It was a small school.   She knew what I was, and why I’d been crying.   But—strangely unlike the other teachers—she came up to me and offered me another tissue without flinching, staring down the row of books with a thoughtful turn of her head and its super-perm.
    “You know,” she said, tapping a finger to her mauve lips, “I have a book I think might interest you.   If you’d like a recommendation.”
    “Sure,” I muttered, and like some sort of magical creature, she darted forward and pulled down a slight volume with a worn, blue cover from the nearest shelf.   Emblazoned on the book’s spine were the words The Knight of the Rose .
    “Everyone needs a heroine like them,” she said with a smile, handing me the book.   “Tell me what you think of it.”
    I’d had no idea, that weird, distant afternoon, what she was talking about.   But I took the book home, because she’d given it to me.   And I read it.  
    So, The Knight of the Rose ?   It’s about a girl named Miranda who becomes a knight, who has a bunch of really wonderful adventures…who falls in love with a princess, and marries her at the end of the book.  
    A girl knight.   Marries a princess.   And is the heroine of the book.
    Everyone does need a heroine like them.   I’d never realized how much, until I read that story.   And it saved my life.   It changed me, in a way that only books can.   It gave me a sense of strength, of place in the world, because I was no longer “Holly the homo” (as charmingly unoriginal as it was), what they chanted at me in the hallways of my stupid little school.   I was just me.   Just Holly.   And I could do or be anything , because there was a story about someone like me .   And hey, the heroine of that story had done pretty all right for herself.   So maybe I could, too.
    I turn the page now, sinking deeper in the water as I take a sip of tea.   It burns the roof of my mouth, but I don’t even notice