AMERICAN BOYFRIEND

seventeen

WARNING: single usage of the f-slur. 

it has not always been like this. there was a time pre-geo, when kai had the capacity to like people who weren't him, who didn't craze him to the point throttling himself off the side of a building.

in his sophomore year of high school, kai met max james. tall, exclusively found on the basketball court, curly blonde hair permanently held back by athletic headband—he was a beautiful, seraphic, white-passing teenage savior to a small, godless town. kai was the manager of the varsity basketball team, handservant to the verona vipers–meaning, he drank the sweat, bled the blood, and cried the bitter and joyful tears shed by max and everyone other player on the team, except for during a game. it was a strange, gray existence. to be and not to be.

his fall from grace happened swiftly and dramatically. max shattered his shin four days before the championship. kai had found out at their last practice for the season, though he had drawn up a general picture from school-wide gossip: crunch time. max reaches for the hoop, his body in perfect lay-up formation, fingertips caressing the net and his feet levitating inches above the ground—and a. opponent calls him a faggot. max elbows him in the eyeball, sharply, precisely, and st. jeremiah high school's power forward cracks his tibia in two places. max had screamed and screamed and most people believed it was out of pain, from the acute agony that comes with splitting a bone—but the whispers that circled below this held an equal weight: he was screaming because he was angry. because he has been exposed. because it was true. not that it was true — he wasn't that. it was a silent sickness that possessed people to call max or anyone else such a thing. but other rumors lingered, remained.  

following the accident, coach victor had appointed kai as something near max's personal assistant — he walked him to classes, retrieved his lunch, followed him outside to hotbox in his car during free periods. geo came too, sometimes, whenever kai asked, and sat solemnly on a bench on the curb, keeping lookout for teachers nearby.

it was geo that proposed the whole thing. the idea that kai could like max — and max liking him back, too.

"i watch you guys when you're together. always talking, doing stuff for each other. it's like you're married, sometimes," he explained, after kai had dropped max off at his car. he waved at kai, smiling his crooked smile, before zooming out of the school parking lot. kai smiles maybe twice as wide, a fluttering, aching feeling stretching out its wings in his chest, and turns his attention back to geo standing by on the sidewalk, a smug expression on his face. he regains his composure immediately.

"you don't make any sense, gee," kai replied. "i have to do all that stuff for him. i'm getting paid thirty bucks a week to do a this for him."

"really?" geo asked, looking skeptically at him. "you're paid to laugh at all his jokes, and compliment his new fancy shoes, and buy him stuff that you think he'll like when you go cool places, and request songs for him when they play music at lunch?"

kai turns his face away in embarrassment. "we're friends, geo. max and i are friends. that's what friends do. you'd do all that for me, wouldn't you?"

"yes, but that's different," geo said, grinning. "we actually are married."

kai rolled his eyes and punched  geo's shoulder, before becoming silent.

"what are you thinking about it in that big head you got?" geo asked him, stopping their walk. "talk to me, man."

"what if," he begins, swallowing thickly, "i do like him? does that — what does that mean?"

"it means i was fucking right," geo says triumphantly. kai frowns and his expression changes.

"it doesn't have to mean anything. or it can mean something. it could mean you have a date to junior prom, because it's coming up in a few months and I'm ninety-nine percent sure i know who max james is asking to go with him."