If you fool everyone into believing a lie, it makes their reality. If everyone believes something, how could one possibly tell it isn't real?
Nicklas Bellows wasn't popular, even though he was the school's sport team's goal keeper - he just didn't want to have to do with those imbeciles.
Besides, there was a lot of other things to do. Improving, dwelling in thoughts, pretending to be someone he wasn't.
There really was a lot occupying his mind - his future with his favorite sport, science stuff, the boy he had met at the gym when training. . .
Zane was eighteen. And yes, the boy surely gave Nick a lot to think about, and with this interest in figuring out all the stuff the older boy gave him to contemplate on, he suddenly found himself making another friend. And this friendship slowly started to change everything. His whole reality - starting from his opinion about people to his perception of himself. And, at one point, the way he felt for Zane.
But nobody knew about their friendship. Nobody knew about anything, too personal was a line easily crossed, a line he preferred to be respected.
Some things were simply better off as secrets.
At first glance, nobody would be able to tell that Nathaniel Jean had a problem. Or second glance, or third, or fourth.
After all, he had everything. He was a captain of his school's soccer team and one of the top players in the state. He had a big house and money to spend. He had family, he had friends, he had fun, he had faith.
He never meant for it to happen. He never wanted to look at another man in the way he should have been looking at a woman. The idea had disgusted him for most of his life - living in a heavily Catholic town with heavily Catholic parents, homophobia was the only response he knew. That didn't change when he first realized that he didn't like girls.
No, Nathaniel Jean was still homophobic. He hated the idea of a man sleeping with another man. He was raised on the notion that all gays went to hell, and he believed it. He despised them, and so he despised himself.
Nathaniel Jean was more fortunate than most, because help did arrive for him. Help by the name of Lucas Morgan, they boy he'd always known but never known. The boy with big dreams and bigger talent.
The boy that changed Nathaniel's life over the course of their thirty-six week long senior year.