Page 54 of Finding Delaware

He says it lightly, like a joke, but I still feel the sting.

“I’m all messed up,” I whisper, closing my eyes as our breaths mingle. His nose rubs against mine sweetly, causing my forehead to wrinkle, and he chuckles.

“We’re still young, babe. You’ve got plenty of time to get your head on straight.”

Except it feels like I don’t. Something in the pit of my stomach is telling me that a storm is brewing on the horizon, and I don’t know if it’s my intuition or the anxiety. I can’t trust myself anymore.

“How about a kiss goodbye?” Royce’s arms tighten around me, and despite my earlier convictions, I want to kiss him. Give him a piece of me to cherish when I’m gone for being kind to me when I didn’t deserve it.

So I pull him closer and press my mouth to his, savoring the feel of its softness. We breathe each other in, our lips moving together in a kiss that’s not as sexual as it is comfortable, full of understanding and friendship. If I had the time, I would have wanted to keep him. Maybe not as a romantic partner, but as a companion who shared his deepest secrets with me, and I with him. A close confidant. I think he would have liked that.

We hold each other for several moments, still pressed together, when I feel my stomach unexpectedly drop. It’s...quiet. Whatever music that had been playing through the gym speakers has stopped. And then comes that feeling skittering across my skin, hair rising in a way that tells you when eyes are watching. Or, in this case, hundreds.

Hundreds of eyes.

Royce and I part with asmack, turning in each other’s arms to see the curtain wide open. The entire senior class gapes at us as we stand tangled together on the stage. The blood drains from my face when I realize what they just saw—not only my fellow students but teachers and parents as well.

Myparent.

Frantically, my eyes dart around the crowd, praying and pleading that he isn’t among them, that he left early or stepped out to use the bathroom or something.

But my prayers go unanswered because I catch him standing close to the stage, staring at me with a reddened, unsettled expression behind his glasses. He’s uncomfortable.

My dad just saw me kissing another man, and he’s embarrassed. Sickened.

Behind him stands Logan, who looks just as shocked, his eyes taking me in as if I’m a stranger instead of the best friend he’s known for twelve fucking years.

No, no, no.

Bile rises in my throat, threatening to make this night worse than it already is by having me puke in front of everyone. Royce says my name, but I barely register him over the pounding in my ears as my heart tries to tear its way from my chest. There’s movement in my peripheral, off to the right, and my lungs seize as my eyes snap to the figure standing next to the edge.

Taylor drops his arm from the rope he used to pull open the curtain and slowly backs away, a dead look in his eyes as they meet mine.

Blood fills my mouth as I bite my tongue, betrayal so raw and hot burning through me that I feel myself cleave in two.

And my entire being fucking shatters.

It doesn’t take long for the silence to break, whispers from my peers battering my ears.

“Bishop Davis, did you know?”

“The running back is a fucking faggot.”

“I caught him checking me out once in the locker room!”

Over and over, the fears I’ve been running from riddle my body in the form of words aimed at me like bullets from the mouths of a community I’ve been nothing but kind to.

Faggot.

Queer.

Disgusting.

I don’t think. Don’t speak. Ignoring Royce calling my name, I just turn around and run without looking back. Run from the judgment, the snickers, the looks. Luckily, Logan gave me his keys to hold earlier in the night, and I gun it out of the school parking lot in his car toward home.

I don’t even remember the drive, don’t even remember unlocking the front door or going to my room—all I know is I’m standing in the bathroom gazing at myself in the mirror. A bottle of pills in my hand. I’ve been through so fucking many over the last six months that I couldn’t even tell you which medication it is, but I’m holding it in a death grip.

And I don’t recognize the person in the mirror, the stranger gazing back at me with haunted eyes, tears staining his stricken face. Short, shallow gasps leave his throat, chest heaving as he grips his hair and just fucking screams. This isn’t the Huckslee who stands up and sings every Sunday in church or the football player with a scholarship. Not even Huckslee the swimmer, or Huckslee the artist, or anything other than the real me underneath the mask that’s finally splintered into tiny pieces.

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