Matthew's Reckoning

When you're small and weird and in high school, it's best not to call any extra attention to yourself. That's the rule I had lived by for years. But next year I would be in the eleventh grade, which meant I only had a couple years left to make some kind of name for myself. So far, the only name I had earned my was Matt-the-fag. Despite its lack of originality, the name had stuck since my first day at J.P. Allen high school.

I was out to change all that.

But what started with good intentions ended with me with broken, battered and humiliated on the bathroom floor. Once I picked myself up off that floor things changed.

Would it be better to end it all, to take myself out of the equation? Maybe. But I had a better idea.