Seventeen year old Steven Jinks fiddled with his black bow tie, standing on the doorstep of Melody Jamison's house, rocking nervously on his toes.
The front door opened, and he smiled his signature half-smile, offering her his arm.
His blond fringe fell over his eyes, and he brushed it away with his other hand, sighing quietly; he really was going to have to have it cut soon.
Maybe he'd shave it all off, maybe he'd make himself look like a marine, maybe he'd dye it brown.
He shook those thoughts from his mind, looking across at his prom date - the most popular girl in the year by a wide margin.
Jinks the Jock was what he'd been called throughout his Senior year, though he was less of a jock and more of some twisted form of social pariah with no clear bandwagon with which to jump on.
Still, if he was going to prom with Melody Jamison, he supposed he couldn't be doing things that wrong.
The night went quickly, the two of them talking nervously in the corner over an empty table, holding hands in that awkward way only high-school Seniors know how.
At the end of the night, he'd leant across to kiss her on the cheek and mumbled. "I love you,"
And all he could hear was lie.
Eighteen year old Steven Jinks sat at his desk with his eyes closed, humming to himself quietly, his palms resting face down with fingers splayed out across the notched wood.
A lone tear dribbled from the corner of his closed eye and followed the lines down his face before splashing into his lap.
He half expected another to follow; it didn't.
His life; his world had ended with the pull of a trigger, and he couldn't even get upset enough to cry about it?
Steve had always wondered what heartbreak felt like, since he'd been one of those kinds of kids growing up. He'd always assumed, for some reason, that it would be sharp, and stinging, like a slap to the face or a splash of icy water on an already cold day.
He was surprised to find that actually, it burned, like when you drank strong vodka really quickly and felt it trickle down your esophagus like thick tar.
He didn't open his eyes, but he began to speak, the words low and dangerous. "It's all my fault. It's my fault. I'm the worst little brother in the universe. It's my fault she's dead. I could have done something; I should have done something."
And in the back of his head, pinging like it did on an almost constant basis was the one word he so often longed to hear.
Lie, lie, lie.
And the more he tried to blame himself, the louder and louder it became, until it faded to a dull throbbing in the back of his mind.
Lie, lie, lie.
Nineteen year old Steven Jinks stood in front of his mirror in his college dorm room, watching his every move with blue tear-filled eyes.
He took a deep breath, running his fingers up and down the sleeve cuff of his purple button-down shirt.
He opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed thickly and opened it again.
The words, which should have been easy to say, got stuck on his tongue and clogged his throat, pulsating in time to the rhythm of his heart.
Eventually they exploded from between his clamped lips in a breathless torrent. "I'm not gay."
And then, before he had time to process anything else. "I'm not gay. I'm not gay. I'm not gay." The trick, he'd decided, was to speak so quickly he didn't have time to determine whether or not it was a lie.
But in the end his body won out, and he was forced to stop and take a breath, to gulp in a huge lungful of air and prepare to try again, but before he could, his brain beat him to it.
Lie. Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.
He shook his head, refusing to believe it.
"I'm not gay. I am not gay. I'm not!"
It had to be wrong; there had to be a mistake.
He was still registering the conversations from earlier, that's what it was.
Yeah, yeah, that was it.
Still, only one way to find out.
He stood in front of his mirror with clenched fists, gritting his teeth together, before spitting out the two quick words as if they were physically painful to say.
"I'm gay."
Silence.