Free Boy

Chapter I: To Be Xavier Achara

"Sometimes the world creates things you cannot seem to explain. Perpetuating the unknown as something horrifying even though how beautiful it actually is. It's always the pretty things that people hate. We lay across our beds like a field of endless flowers, like earth laying it in its ocean of vast emptiness. It surprises me how the people aren't tired of the things that bring out the worst in them. Isn't it exhausting to be someone they told you not to be, the ones they ask you to stay away from, like a cigarette away from your mouth and drugs afar from your veins? It feels like I am one of those things but here's what's funny, those things are the things people choose to accept. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those."

. . .

You would think for someone who has been through the struggles of being who I am, I would be a little more confident. Like an actor in his fifth film, a singer on his fourth world tour, or maybe a seasoned doctor on her seventieth surgery. Those are extreme similes and that is nowhere near how wrong you could have been. The irony that  "Salem" is the town's name never fails to crack me up, there's nothing peaceful about being me in a place like this. That's the mockery, to be a pariah in a place called Salem. At least it was peaceful when I was in the box of Asian heteronormativity.

This could be a stretch but I'd say it is easy to be Xavier Achara, in other words, hateful. I dread the long walks to school across tainted pavements. I hate the locker room smell of teenage male odour. I dislike the way I speak with the faintest Thai accent when I am irritated. It is not noticeable but it's there, like dirt under your fingernails, you pay no mind to it and it seems to not exist. I despise the beautiful faces of the friends Jeremy and Avery have, that's mostly because I'm barely half of that. It's easy to be hateful if you ask me. What's hard is keeping it to yourself; do it for so long that you can feel yourself turning into a champagne bottle with too much air pressurised in it. So most of the times I choose to hate myself instead of the things I do not have control over because a glass bottle can only take so much before it explodes upward. Up to the ceiling that my eyes are staring at.

Chapter One: To Be Xavier Achara

Waking up in the morning always feels like a chore. The extra effort of lifting those heavy eyes and breaking up the comfortable position your body was in for hours to have your feet touch the cold floors. It's always the same repeated cycle of a dull morning routine, taking the circle of life to a whole literal meaning. Sometimes the sound of some things brings me comfort. My phone sighs out a small ding indicating that the person on the other side of the satellite connection is also awake.

"Get ready, I'm picking you both up in twenty,".

Thomason Quinn is the one with the car, the money, the girls, the all American accent, the big house, the money, the privileges and the one who gets to experience Salem for what its name means. He shares those experiences with me, he is what Salem tries to be. All of those qualities that you'd bet would easily check the boxes of a fraternity application and yet he's far from what he looks like. In most stories, there's the protagonist and the antagonist, in some cases you have him.

A response from the other person in the group chat alerts my phone.

"Twenty? Come on, you know my dad needs me to have breakfast at home. Make it forty. Xavy, tell him you could use the extra time too,".

When Avery moved here from Scotland, his accent was like fire. It burns through the forest of American teens. His blue eyes stole all the attention like the land we stand on. He was another one of those people you try your hardest to forget. The good-looking stranger on the train that you've made eye contact with, that exceeded the time of comfortability. If those men in romance poetry were realised, you would have Avery Grant.