Heartsville 03 - Another Shot (J.H. Knight) Read Free

gym. “That’s great, Mom. But… I like to socialize there too.”
    Mandy smirked at him but thankfully didn’t comment.
    “Oh,” his mother answered with a shrug. “I hadn’t thought about that. Could you still come by and show your father and me how to use everything?”
    Aaron couldn’t help but smile. “Sure, of course.” He’d probably have to look up a tutorial on his phone since the only equipment he used was a treadmill and a rowing machine.
    Later that evening, he and Mandy stood in the garage opening dusty boxes, sorting things into piles as they decided what they wanted to keep and what they needed to get rid of.
    “This one is yours,” Mandy said, passing a small box to Aaron. The words “Freshman and Sophomore Year” were written across the top.
    Aaron didn’t want to open it. Freshman year had been fine, pleasant even. He had a lot of friends and, that summer, got his first “let’s keep this a secret, my mom doesn’t know I’m gay” boyfriend. His sophomore year, though…. That could’ve ended better.
    He started to toss the entire box on the garbage pile, but Mandy stopped him. “Hey, I know it sucked. But… it’s part of you, ya know? Your history. At least keep the yearbooks.”
    She was probably right. Not that he would admit it. But he opened the box and pulled out his old yearbooks. He flipped through the first one, looked at some of the signatures, laughed softly to himself. Aaron set it aside in a “keep” pile and then thumbed through the pages of his sophomore annual. There weren’t nearly as many messages in that one. He’d only managed to keep two friends by the end of that year. It took him a moment to find his own picture, somewhere in the middle of the entire sophomore class—nearly two hundred other students with him. He’d changed a lot since then: filled out, gained the ability to grow facial hair if he wanted, grown several inches. When he was fifteen, his body was still clinging to boyhood, still scrawny and awkward, with pimples on his face. Grunge was nearing its end, Kurt Cobain had already died, but when the school pictures were taken, back in September of ’95, sophomore-Aaron—along with half of his class—still sported a ratty flannel over some band T-shirt. His greasy hair, bleached and then dyed blue, hung limply over his forehead. “I was a real catch back then,” he said with another laugh, shaking his head.
    Mandy leaned over his shoulder. “You looked like a pissed-off baby bird.”
    “I wasn’t pissed off at this point. I was just… hormonal.”
    “Oh, the angst. Back before we knew there were things to be angsty about.”
    “Well, I mean. I was still in the closet then, so I had a little bit to be angsty about.”
    “True.”
    Aaron set the yearbook aside and looked into the box again. He sifted through a few stray reports he’d written and stuff that seemed to be garbage, old receipts that had somehow found their way into the box. Crumpled at the bottom, he found a piece of paper. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he must have known what it was because his hands shook slightly as he picked it open, pulling the corners free until he had it unfolded.
    The black-and-white image, even twenty years later, still made his heart race as he looked at it. A photocopy of a picture, him making out with a guy—the secret boyfriend who was luckier than Aaron because his face didn’t show. The word faggot was scribbled across the bottom in bold red letters. He’d found it taped to his locker one morning. There had been about a hundred more like it all over the halls in the school.
    He turned it around so Mandy could see it. “Should I keep this too?”
    Mandy’s lips curved downward into a tight frown. “You could donate it to a museum. Maybe we could put together a ‘Before Cyberbullying Was a Thing’ collection.”
    Aaron laughed, maybe a little bitterly, but he dropped the picture into the recycle can. “I should donate this with