I was torn between my love for him and a family history that was ingrained in me from before I could remember.

The after prom plan was the last straw for my parents. I was on the dance floor with Billy, my bare shoulders pressed against the stiff fabric of his uniform, when the chaperone pulled me aside.

My father was on the phone, screaming. His every fear was being channeled into anger about this one small thing, this thing that should not have mattered, and his words were more hurtful than they might otherwise have been.

I, too, had been holding back my own anger and I unleashed it into the receiver, then left it hanging as I grabbed Billy and told him we needed to run.

We got to his house

half an hour later to find his parents waiting with a police officer.

My father had called ahead and told Billy’s parents he was coming after me, and they were scared of what might happen.

When my father arrived, there was little discussion. Thinking I had called the police, he was beside himself. He gave me two choices: come home with him now, or be forever disowned by the family.

But it was not a choice I could make. Between his anger, my anger, Billy upstairs and my entire life unraveling before my eyes, I could not get in that car.

And so it came to be that I was disowned. I moved into an open dorm room at my school, where I was a day student, and they let me finish my last three weeks without charge for room and board.

I am, to this day, forever grateful. Billy went back to his base in Mississippi, and I graduated without my parents in attendance. I spent the rest of the summer living with Billy’s kind and generous parents. — beliefnet.com