Page 9 of Ancient History

Excuse me,what?

I got that sexuality lived on a spectrum, but this was some Kinsey-six bullshit.

Even now, I had to shake my head, still unable to comprehend the 180 he did. How could he flirt and kiss and have all the sex with me for two years and then suddenly realize he was actually into women?

He and the average-breasted cheerleader were crowned Prom King and Queen. I spent prom night in my room, watching videos posted on social media of them getting crowned and slow dancing. He gazed at her just like he did with me.

Was he a good faker?

Was I a total chump?

It didn’t matter because either way, my heart was broken. Ripped, smashed, put in a blender on the highest setting. Wrecked, in the worst way possible.

There was inherent loneliness in being gay. You had to face the world by yourself and slowly find allies. Hutch rescued me from that loneliness, until he ditched me, and left me feeling more alone than ever. I had to come out alone. I had to suffer in heartbreak alone. Even though I was furious with Hutch, I didn’t want to out him, so I couldn’t even tell my friends at the time what happened.

I promised myself I’d scrub him from my memory. No looking him up online. No asking about him. I’d tried landing a teaching job somewhere else, but it wasn’t like there was a dire shortage of history teachers. It was tough at first, working in the space with my past memories.

Yet it actually wound up helping me get over him. With each year I taught at South Rock, I made new friends and built new memories, pushing out the old high school experiences until they were distant memories.

I sat on my bedroom floor, the final lingering buzz of happy hour leaving my system. I clapped my yearbook shut, finding a tiny bit of solace in the satisfying sound.

No, I would not be meeting him for a drink. No, I did not want to talk about what happened. I was there. So was he.

Hutch Hawkins broke my heart once. I wasn’t going to let him do it again.

3

HUTCH

It was a strange feeling waking up in my childhood bedroom. Same cracks on the ceiling. Same furniture. Same twin-sized bed. Same sense of panic about being late to school.

It was also an eerily perfect metaphor for my life that, ten years on from high school, I was in the same bedroom and going to the same school. Full circle had never felt like such a kick in the pants.

At least one thing had changed: I had officially outgrown my bed. In my old apartment, I slept on a queen-sized bed. Now I had to slum it on a twin bed. Every time I turned, I nearly fell off. I debated whether I should get myself a new one. On the one hand, my body could no longer fit. But doing so would mean that I was for sure staying here. And that was majorly TBD.

The familiar beeps of my alarm clock blared, sharp knives in my ears. Fortunately, I remembered where the off button was and could reach it without having to open my eyes.

Old posters of bands and athletes lined my walls. Back then, it’d been hard to track down posters for professional soccer players who weren’t named David Beckham. I was pumped when they’d come in the mail. I used to stare at them every night and pray that’d be me one day.

Now they stared back at me, taunting me, reminding me of a dream that I watched slip through my fingers in real time. I peeled one of them off the wall, flecks of paint coming off with the tape. I rolled it up and shoved it in my closet, which was stuffed with random shit from the past.

“Hutch, you up?” Pop rapped his fist at my door. Some things never changed. “You’re gonna be late for your first day of school.”

“It’s not school. It’s work,” I called back, rubbing sleep from my eyes.

“Youworkatschool.”

“But I’m not going to school. I’m going to work. It’s different.”

I could practically hear him scratching his head, putting on that twisted face of confusion like I was talking gibberish. I saw that face a lot as a teenager.

“You’re going to be late for your first day of work at school.”

I fell back on my bed and threw a pillow over my face.

Technically, he was right, but also ughhhh. I was a twenty-eight-year-old guy living at home and working at my old high school. WTF didn’t even cover it. I’d worked so hard to get out of this town and make something of myself. That backfired, to say the least.

I pulled up some high school jams on my phone. If I was going to be stuck in the past, then I might as well make it a party. Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie” pulsed through my speakers. I rapped along, remembering more of the lyrics than I expected.

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