Learn How to Love (Boy x Boy)

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐎𝐧𝐞

My grandmother liked to say "hate" was a strong word. But I hated myself, and even more than that I hated Luke Salazar.

Rain drummed on the treehouse roof. I was curled up in my beanbag, staring blankly out the small circle window. I had a timer on my phone, one of those tracker apps. Three days, eighteen hours, forty-seven minutes, and approximately three seconds since my mom recieved a call while she was doing lord knows what in a dark alleyway that her mother had been in a fatal car accident. And it was all my fault.

Tears streamed down my face, angry and hot, but I barely felt it. I glanced down at my phone as it started to buzz. Sadie was calling me for the twentieth time that day. She spammed with texts asking if I was okay, or if I wanted to talk. I couldn't be bothered to reply- I just sent her a thumbs-up emoji. Of course, she knew that was total bullshit.

It all started in that stupid baking class. Sadie and I spent the whole class goofing off, so we had to make up on lost time in study hall. Sadie had a huge phobia when it came to food- she couldn't stand it being on her fingers. Sticky, greasy, wet, it all made her freak out. She said it made her feel like she wanted to tear her own eyeballs out. So I was left making the balls and putting them on the metal pan to stick in the oven. Sadie got distracted by a bit of drama and wandered off, and in her absence Luke decided to pay me a visit after having a couple of his friends keep Sadie busy upstairs. Luke was so annoying. He kept stealing licks out of the bowl, flicking me in the back of the head, and making jokes about how it was pretty feminine that I was baking. Even though the cookies looked like they had been made by a blind rhinoceros. He pissed me off and I messed up on the cookies, but while I was trying to put some in a plastic baggy to take home he threw a stray pencil at my head and I accidentally touched the pan trying to steady myself. The burn on my hand still stung like hell, and when I complained to my grandmother about it she was furious. She said Luke needed to learn some manners. We didn't have anything, so we just put on a cold compress. The next day, after my mother called me at school, I found a note at my grandmother's house she had written me for when I got home.

Went out to get some burn medication- be back soon mijo! Love, Grandma

A fresh flood of tears overwhelmed me. My parents didn't even care. I could hear them blasting rock music inside. If I looked out the door I could probably see the clouds of smoke wafting out of one of the upstairs windows. The only thing keeping their marriage together was drugs- they never hugged, or kissed, or even had sex. They bonded over rolling blunts in dark alleyways. I couldn't remember the last time they were sober, probably when I was three or four. Since then they were always smoking some shit. At least my grandmother cared about me. She fed me, she clothed me, she signed my permission slips for school. I had no one anymore, and the thought was like a set of sharp claws digging into my chest and ripping out my heart.

The phone rang again. Sadie's picture popped up. It was a photo of the both of us at a pride parade my grandma had taken us to when we both came out in eighth grade. Sadie and I had known we were both attracted to the same gender way back in third or fourth grade. We'd spend hours scrolling through videos, articles, and even a couple reality TV shows to try and understand what exactly we were feeling. Eventually we just learned to live with it. Sadie liked boobs, I liked hot, muscular men. My grandmother was so proud of us- (my parents were too stoned to care, but I think they assumed already) so she drove us five hours to another state to attend a pride festival. I still have a tiny flag from the festival, it stuck out of a little holder above my circle window- kind of like a mini emblem.

"Hey-" I tried to speak when I picked up the phone.

"OHMYFREAKINGGODKYKYAREYOUALRIGHTAREYOUDEADAREYOUHURT?!" she shrieked into the reciever. Her voice crackled and fizzled out as she yelled too loudly for the phone to actually pick up. I could just barely comprehend what she said.

"Relax," I said. "I'm fine-"

"You are not fine Kylar Anderson," Sadie hissed. "You know damn well that your grandmother was the best fucking thing in your life, and now she's gone. So you're going to sit on this fucking phone with me and bawl your eyes out until your face goes numb, do you hear me?"

I shook my head, even though she couldn't see it. "You're being really dramatic."

"You're not being dramatic enough! Feel something. Anger, regret, pain! And talk to me about it!" Sadie cried.

I did feel something, now that I thought about it. I felt hopeless. What was I going to do? I should've known my grandmother didn't have long left- maybe a part of me wished that her witchy obsessions would somehow save her. My grandmother liked to say she was a witch. She had magic books, wax candles, and a bunch of animal skulls and bones. Her attic was filled with all sorts of strange ingredients she said she used to use to make spells and curses. She said she was a changed woman now, and that curses were a thing of the past. I always heard the neighbors whispering about her in the grocery store, but as a kid I had never felt prouder. The kids at my school were merciless. They found it hilarious. Eventually, my grandma got much frailer and stopped going out. She got everything delivered, or I picked it up for her. The first time she drove in months was to go get me burn cream, and she got into an accident. I didn't even know how or who had caused it. My mom wouldn't tell me, or she couldn't remember it through her drug-induced haze.

"Kyky?"

"Don't call me that," I said instinctively.

Sadie sighed on her end of the phone. "Kyky, this is serious. You can't just bottle up these emotions-"

"I'm not."

"You are!" she insisted. Sadie's mom was a therapist, and it seemed to make Sadie think that she was an expert in mental health and trauma. She was definitely more in tune to my emotions than even I was, but that didn't mean I wanted her butting her head in. I wasn't hurting anyone by being upset. "Kyky."

"What?"

"I've got a few questions to ask you. These questions accompany a lot of guilt, and like mourning. I read about it in one of mom's books. Ready?" She chirped. I grunted in reply. "Who do you blame for her death? And before you answer that, I want you to come up with a reason why."

I was going to answer quickly. Me, of course. I was stupid and touched the pan, and she went out to get medicine. But... there was always more to the story, wasn't there? I could blame stupid Luke, who threw the pencil at my head and made my grab the fiery pan- or I could blame Sadie for leaving me in the classroom by myself. I could blame Ms. Shank, the Home Ec teacher, for not paying better attention to us when we were supposed to be working. Hell, I could blame the government for making us go to school. I frowned in frustration. I had spent the last couple hours in a turmoil of self-hate, but now I wasn't sure who to be mad at. What was I supposed to do with all this pent-up anger? No one else deserved to be yelled at.

"Luke," I said.

Sadie's gasp crackled on the other end. "What?! How?!"

"He hit me with a pencil and I touched the pan. She was driving to get stuff for the burn. It's Luke's fault," I growled.

Sadie inhaled. "Oof. You know, I really only had an answer if you said yourself. Do you still want to hear what I was going to say?"

"No," I said, and then I hung up.