We talked every day, and every night, for the next two weeks.
I woke up to good morning texts that made me squeal and thrash in my covers, they made me so happy. At night, it seemed we spent less and less time playing games and more time on the phone, talking for hours until our throats were hoarse.
The first time he sent me a picture, I dropped my phone. Literally. It was just a selfie of him after summer practice, his hair a sweaty, matted mess, his lips chapped, skin red. But his smile was wide and blinding and all for me.
I didn’t send a picture back, and he didn’t push.
I loved playing Xbox with him. I loved when he texted me some stupid meme or told me a funny story about his family. I loved when he asked me if we were ever going to hang out in real life and then let me change the subject.
But my favorite nights were the ones he’d call me and we’d just lie there and talk.
Most of the time we laughed. Sometimes, we got so deep that I confessed things to him I never had to anyone else, and he did the same. Like the night I admitted I was afraid of never being enough for my mom, or the one where he told me he couldn’t picture a life without football, and getting injured was his biggest fear.
Through it all, I drew for him.
“Are you ever going to show me what you’re drawing?” he teased me every chance he could. “I’m starting to think you’re a liar and you don’t draw at all.”
That’s when I sent him a picture for the first time — a pulled-back view of a page of doodles in my sketchbook.
He fawned over it for days, pestering me even more to show him what I was making for him.
“I’ll show you when it’s ready,” I kept promising.
The truth was, I was trying to work up the nerve to show him in person.
School started, and any balloons of hope I had that maybe this year would be different after what felt like a life-changing summer were popped immediately when I didn’t even make it through the first day without multiple insults and being tripped in the cafeteria. Sometimes, I wished I was the invisible type of loser, the one who could escape all the bullying.
No such luck.
The words didn’t hurt me — at least, not anymore. After years of enduring them, it was like being pierced through my skin with hundreds of needles until I was so used to the feeling that it felt normal. I’d become numb to all their insults — goth, loser, nerd, fatty, crater face — whatever they threw at me, it was easy to roll my eyes at.
But when they shoved me, tripped me, threw their food into the garbage and laughed as it splashed up on me… those things were harder to brush off.
I felt each attack chip away at my already-scarce confidence, making me want to hide like a turtle in a shell. When it came to high school, excitement was the furthest thing from how I felt.
I just wanted to survive.
I didn’t know when it happened, when I somehow went from a normal kid with a small but great group of friends to someone living life on the outside. I guess when my friends became more interested in boys than gaming, when they started wearing soft eye shadow and pink lip gloss and I opted for dramatic cat eyes and painting my smile burgundy, when they all slimmed down and I filled out — in every curve.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, I ostracized myself.
But this year would be different.
Because this year, I’d have Leo.
The first time I saw him at school, he was clowning around with some other players on the football team in the cafeteria before first period. I watched him with a smile before one of my only friends, Naya, elbowed me in the ribs.
“Why are you smiling at those assholes?”
I shrugged her off, frowning as I went back to doodling in my notebook. “I wasn’t.”
Naya loved anime and cosplay the way I loved video games and drawing. She also had a bearded dragon as a pet and an intolerance for jocks or anyone deemed popular in our school.
“Yes, you were.”
“Shut up,” I mumbled, and then I ignored her, focusing on my notebook until my phone buzzed with a text.
Leo: You’re right, school sucks. I miss summer days with you.
Every nerve in my body lit up as I read the text over and over, my eyes skirting to where Leo was across the cafeteria. He was laughing at something the quarterback had said, and then Lila White ran over and flopped down into his lap.
He wrapped his arms around her easily, but not in the way that made me feel even a little bit jealous. It was the way that said without words that he was uncomfortable, that he was just letting her sit there because he didn’t want to answer questions if he pushed her off.
I smiled.
I liked that I knew him like that, that I could see right through his façade.
Me: Call me tonight and we can pretend summer never ends.
As soon as I sent it, I watched him hastily dig his phone out of his pocket. He lit up with a smile as he read the text, and then he thumbed out a reply before tucking it away.
Later that night, I asked how his day was.
“Exhausting.”
“Practice?”
“No, football is my release. It’s the rest of it that wears me out.”
“Like, classes?”
“Kind of. I don’t know. It’s like…” He paused, and I wished I could see him, could watch his body mannerisms in that moment. “Sometimes, I’m hanging out with all these people, all my friends, and I just look around and realize that I don’t really know any of them at all, and they don’t know me. Aside from football, I mean.”
“You could tell them more about yourself,” I offer. “Ask them to be real with you, too.”
He laughed. “Yeah, right. The way they see me at my school, I’m just the class clown, you know? The jock who makes people laugh and has girls lining up at his locker.”
I swallowed. “A whole line, huh?”
“Don’t be jealous, Stig,” he said, humor etched in his voice. “None of them compare to you.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“I’m serious! They don’t.”
“Anyway,” I said playfully, but mostly because I needed to change the subject before I melted into a puddle on the floor. “So, you feel like you have a role to play?”
“I guess so. Or maybe, as tiring as it is to play the role, it feels even more exhausting to try to change it.”
“For what it’s worth, I like you best when you’re real, when you’re open. You’re funny, yeah, but… you’re more than that.”
Leo was silent for a long moment.
“I wish you’d tell me who you are,” he said softly.
I swallowed. “Soon.”
Another week passed with me living on the outskirts of Leo’s life, in his periphery — there, but never really seen. I was happiest when he texted or called me. I was the most miserable when I was close enough to touch him and still somehow invisible. And it was in that time that I somehow found the courage I’d been searching for. Anxiety and fear still niggled at the back of my brain, but they were drowned out by the glowing orb of hope that whispered two words continually into my ear.
What if?
And so, on a crisp fall afternoon, I carried a notebook full of drawings tucked under my arm as I walked across campus toward the football field.
Practice would be over in twenty minutes, and I decided I was finally ready to tell Leo who I was.
