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I headed back to my room to throw on some real clothes and calm the fuck down before Zach got home. Thankfully when I heard the front door opening five minutes later, my incessant hard-on had gone away.
I was walking down the hall when the front door slammed hard. Zach appeared at the end of the hall, scowling, his backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Hey, kiddo,” I said.
He didn’t respond, instead just barreling past me toward his bedroom while staring at the ground. He disappeared into the room and then slammed his bedroom door.
“Whoa, whoa, buddy,” I said, turning around and following. I knocked lightly before opening the door.
“Go away,” he said. He’d tossed his backpack into the center of the floor and collapsed face-down onto his bed.
“What the hell is going on? Are you okay? I thought you were excited to go to Chicago—”
“Fuck off!” Zach shouted, picking up his head long enough to shoot me a fierce glare.
“Hey,” I said sternly, taking a step over to the side of his bed. “You don’t talk to me like that. Ever.”
That’s when I saw that Zach’s eyes were bloodshot and watering at the edges.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly, sitting up and curling into a ball while clutching his pillow. “I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted, just don’t do that again,” I said. I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, turning to look at him. “Talk to me, Zachie. What’s going on?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbled into his pillow, staring off into the middle distance. His hair was even messier than normal, and his glasses were lopsided.
I just sat there next to him for a moment, trying to stay calm. I remembered well that when I was a teenager and my mom wanted to chat, I’d always wanted to clam up. Zach was probably doing the same.
“Well, I’ll be here,” I said after a few minutes. “Talk to me when you’re ready—”
“It was so bad,” he blurted out, burying his face in the pillow.
“What was bad?”
He swallowed hard, looking up at me, his face wrecked. “After last period I was walking by the art room and Sophia came out. She was holding the painting she’d been working on and I… I wanted to talk to her so badly, I always want to talk to her, but I never have anything to say.”
I nodded. “Okay, sounds normal to me…”
“It’s not normal,” Zach protested. “I’m always too scared to do what I want to do.”
“It’s a… well, it’s a lifelong process learning to overcome those fears,” I said.
He frowned. “I was all awkward and I said ‘that’s nice,’ right as I was walking by her. She was confused, so I said the painting was beautiful. And then Andy Benson came down the hall and slapped me on the ass, and he—shit—”
Zach broke off into a sob in his pillow, and I reached over to run my palm along his back. “He didn’t hurt you, did he, Zach?”
“No,” he said. “Worse. He started… talking about some stuff I’ve written.”
“What have you written?”
Zach’s eyes snapped up to mine. “Stuff…”
“What kind of stuff?” I asked.
Zach looked like he was going to be sick. “I wrote stupid, shitty poetry about Sophia, and I think Andy must have seen one while we were in third period, because he started talking about it. In… one of them I said that the promise of her smile is what gets me through my days. Andy told her about it, called me a psycho stalker, and then Sophia blushed and ran off.”
My heart was soaring at the same time it was breaking a little bit for my son.
“I had no idea you wrote any poetry,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “I didn’t, until… recently,” he said. “We were learning about it in English and I… I don’t know. It makes me feel better to write about things that are in my head. Obviously I’m never going to do it again.”
“No,” I said. “No. You can’t let this one bad experience ruin something you love.”
“I don’t even love poetry, I love her,” he muttered, leaning back onto the bed. Fuck, that was so sweet. “And now she hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you, I guarantee it,” I said. “Sometimes… sometimes people run away just because they’re scared. They don’t know how to act, either.”
All I could think about was how I’d run away from Evan at the end of high school. I’d been the one who was afraid, even though I’d loved Evan more than I’d ever loved another human being on Earth.
Running away didn’t mean a damned thing about what was in someone’s heart.
“I’m screwed,” Zach said.
“I’ll bet Sophia was really flattered that you wrote anything about her, actually.”
“No,” Zach said, shouting into his pillow again. “I don’t even want to be back here. I just want to be in Chicago.”
