AUTHOR'S NOTE

Hi everyone, I owe you all an apology, I have not updated in nearly a year, but if you would allow me to explain I would be beyond thankful.

A week after the last chapter of this series was posted, one of my closest friends died by suicide. I will spare you the details, but his death absolutely destroyed me. I spiraled into a severe depression, and entered a state of psychosis. I did not get out of bed for months, out of fear that I would cause other loved ones to pass away. I have struggled with anorexia for years, nearly a decade now, and I am not sure what it was that his passing triggered within me, but it most definitely triggered something, anorexia soon took a complete and utter hold of me, and landed me in the hospital.

I was hospitalized for 3 months in total, in those three months I was out of touch with the world, I did not see friends, family, anyone. I was not me. As you can imagine, I have struggled a lot with writing, especially writing about the things that this story entails, such as self-harm, suicide, and such. I never thought I would come back to this story, but writing, that's what I do, that is what I was meant to do, and I am hopeful that by revisiting this I will find the person I was before everything came crashing down on me.

I apologize for going MIA on all of you, life has a funny way of getting in the way of everything when you least expect it to, but I am back, and I truly hope that I am better than I was last time. As you can probably understand, this chapter will be somewhat shorter than the previous batches, but I hope that as I get into the swing of things again, I will be able to produce more extended chapters again. Now, with all of that said, welcome to the 4th chapter of The Young and the Hopeless.

And in that moment, a shaking mess, with tears and snot running down his face, Shawn feels the physical ache for human contact dissipate, and he understands that a hug is truly hope in disguise.

They remained in that position for a while, and Shawn suddenly recalled being very small and being embraced by his father, back when he was still his father. He would try and put his arms around Chet's waist, hug him back. He could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body, he was that much larger than life. But one day, those hugs turned into shoves, embraces turned into slaps across the face, and soft smiles turned into beatings. "Beat him until he softens," that was Chet's motto, way of life per-say, "lift his ragged body and raise him with your whiskey breath." Get him out alive, then watch from your grave as he beats his own child, because you beat him, because yours beat you, because his beat his, because his beat his. The matter of fact is, Shawn thought, the man who begot me, does not want me. In his eyes, Shawn should have never been born, and perhaps that would have been best. As it was, his existence had proven to be nothing but a nuisance for everyone. He infuriated his father, he chased away his mother, irritated his teachers, and annoyed all the other kids who had the displeasure of interacting with him at school. I even drive Cory mad, of that he was sure. No one had ever wanted him. And for some reason, he longer wanted himself either. All he wished for was to step out of his body and toss it back to where it had come from, like one does with a shirt that doesn't fit properly any longer. I mean that is what people do with things that serve them no purpose any more, right? Throw them away? Burn them, kill them. He had never heard of anyone who kept garbage around simply for the sake of it. That was the dilemma of it all, when you are despised simply for being, when your worth seems diminished to the trash one finds at the very bottom of a filing cabinet, then you are not truly loved, and when you are not loved, you are nothing but a broken heart that is somehow still beating. It's funny, No one ever tells you that when your heart breaks you can feel it, but you can, Shawn could. Day in and day out. It was as if something crumbled inside of him and the pieces were falling into his stomach. It hurt more than any beating ever could, there's nothing more complicated than this, because at the end of the day, you either learn to live with the hurt, or you don't. And perhaps, Shawn thought, I haven't learned well enough.

At this thought, he stops breathing, and for a while he cannot recall how, and when he finally does, his throat closes up, and he is left trying to suck air in through an imaginary straw as his mind spirals, and soon enough his attention turns to the present moment, him, Turner, the classroom, and all of the words that had involuntarily left his body.

Everything he had just admitted to.

With that realization Shawn rips away from Turner's close embrace, eye's wild, like prey trying to escape its captor. How could I have been so stupid, he thinks in a frenzy, why did I say that? The truth was nasty, that he understood. But when truth is more dominant than your mind, far stronger than the trillions of cells in your body urging you to contain it, you can't help but look around in horror, and that he did. To give truth a voice, he found, was to give it a vessel, a body, his body. To give truth a voice is to fight with certainty, fight and lose, it is to be left with nothing but the uncomfortable feeling that the human soul is far more at home with illusion than it is with reality.

Everything he had just admitted to.

That was reality, yet he would have given anything for it to be a delusion, a psychosis, a sick fantasy, anything but. Reality had a sickening way of revealing itself. One would like to think that in all of its undeniable and omnipresent power, it would always be obvious. But one would be wrong. Reality can be unmasked in one of two ways, either in golden, glorious beams that parts the cloudy skies and leads the way, or totally hideous, a nasty pit that opens up in the earth, defined by its indistinctive darkness with the exception of the sharp teeth and blazing eyes of the forsaken creatures that call voids their home. But reality, it can be sneakier than these. Truth can be pernicious. It can creep in like smoke, like an unforeseen fog, slowly but unwavering, until all that is left is that blackness that one would expect in the pit, but instead of the monsters, it's the truth itself that begins to kill you, only this time, it kills you from the inside out. And just as he had before, Shawn begun to feel the overwhelming jolt of mankind's ancient fight-or-flight response, a mechanism that once would have allowed him to survive a saber-toothed tiger's attack, only in this case, he was both the tiger, and the boy trying to avoid becoming its lunch. His body screams at him, every bone, cartilage, every fiber within him urging him to collapse right then and there. His organs rebelling against him, like he's on a swing ride in an amusement park. At first, he waits for anything to happen, for gravity to have its way with him. Then, it starts working, and slowly he's reaching a frightening height. Finally, it's swinging, and all he wants to do us jump, but all he can manage to do is sit there, tied, thinking that there is no way he will ever reach solid ground again.

"Hey Hunter, you're alright," Turner chimed, noticing the increasingly frantic state the boy was falling into, "just keep breathing."

In that moment Turner came to the realization that he, in fact, did not know what the fuck he was doing. If you asked him, this was the reason he became a high school teacher instead of continuing his career at an elementary school, because teenagers did not often break into inconsolable sobbing. If he were anyone else he'd think, this is way above my pay grade, or, this is not in my job description, and while that may be a matter of fact, he is not anyone else, he's Jonathan Turner, and Shawn had grown to be more than just his student, more than just a kid he mindlessly lectures at for forty-five minutes a day, Shawn was his friend, and god help him if he ever witnessed a friend hurting and did nothing about it. At the end of the day, what's the point of being a friend, being a human being, if you don't do what you can to make things better for someone else. There's not much of a point at all, is there?

Shawn looked up at him tearfully, finally gathering the strength to utter what he had been meaning to get out since the inception of this fiasco, "I'm sorry."

I'm sorry for all of this, he thought pitifully, I'm sorry for being such a mess, for coming to you crying when you should probably be prepping for you next class. I'm sorry for falling apart, for forcing you to carry the burden that is my life. I'm sorry for worrying you, scaring you. I'm sorry I don't listen often enough, that I fall asleep in class, that I'm always late. I'm sorry I don't turn in homework, and fail tests. I'm sorry for ruining you shirt with my tears. I'm sorry I'm difficult, stubborned. I'm sorry for being who I am, he thinks, I promise I'll do better.

Jon felt something deep inside of him shatter, this was not the first time that Shawn had apologized needlessly, and it made him wonder. Perhaps he had gotten used to apologizing for being too weak to carry his own burdens, and perhaps no one had ever apologized to him for how heavy they were, even if they could not do anything to lighten the load.

"No Shawn," he begun cautiously, "I'm sorry."

He looked up at his student, and he felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought about Shawn, and what his life was like behind closed doors: despair, you could call it. But it was not the kind of despair that is coated in pity, it was not sadness, nor pity, it was larger than that, one that encompassed all of the millions of people that suffered in silence, the billions he did not know and would never know. All living their lives. A sadness that was interlaced with awe at how hard humans all over the world fought to live, even when their days were unlivable, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so unfair, he would think in those moments. It's so unfair, so sad, and yet we all still got up every morning of every day to continue living it. The more he entertained these thoughts, the more did his insides turn, creating an all too known nauseating feeling. Betrayal would be too kind of a word, he thought, and he was correct. Betrayal was too kind of a word to describe a situation in which a father claims to love his son but then inflicts horrors upon him in order to make him a stronger person.

All Shawn knew were those horrors. All he felt was desperation. And whenever he did try to cry for help, no one seemed to listen. No matter how loud he cried, begged, screamed, he could never stop what was happening. No matter what he did, the pain never went away, even when the beatings ended, even when the bruises healed, even when the bleeding stopped and his tears dried, the pain always lingered. Chet tells him he needs discipline, or that he deserved it for misbehaving, and at times he believes it, but in spite of it all: betrayal was too kind of a word to describe the overwhelming pain, the overwhelming desperation, overwhelming loneliness and isolation that was inflicted upon him. And as if his father's treatment was not enough, no one ever seems to notice this pain, this betrayal, even when it is right under their noses, and so with the days, Shawn begun to feel more and more like he did not know what was real. He stopped trusting his own feelings, his own experiences, because no one else seemed to acknowledge the ever growing bruises, the teary eyes, the broken ribs, the limps, and wavering lips. But soon the pain became too much to bear. He learned not to feel at all. This lonely, desperate child, learned to give up the sense that made all people, everywhere, from all corners of the world, feel alive, and so, he begins to feel dead.

Dead, in all senses of the word. He is convinced he is going to die, and yet, all he can bear to do is apologize for bleeding on the floor.

"I'm sorry," Jon says again, this time with more earnest after receiving no reply from Hunter, although, who was he kidding, he was not going to get one. "I'm sorry you're going through all of this, and I'm sorry I did not approach you before, I had no idea kid." And it was true, he had never been very fond of Chet Hunter, but never in a million years would he have guessed that he was the type to beat a kid. "But Shawn," he continued, taking a moment to prepare himself for the reaction he was likely about to get from the boy sitting just a couple of inches away from him, "you need help, and-"

"No I don't," Shawn quickly argued, cutting Turner off mid-sentence, "I promise Mr. Turner, it's nothing, I was just overreacting."

"See," he says, lightly brushing his fingers against the bruise that is forming on his face, trying, but failing to hide his wince, "it barely even hurts anymore, I bet that by next week it'll be all healed up. I'll be good as new, back to sleeping in your class like always, so how about we just forget that any of this happened, and I'll leave you to finish whatever it is that you teachers do, huh?"

With that he stood from his seat, tingling to get as far away from Turner as possible, and wishing he could take back the last 20 minutes of his life, but as he went to take his first step towards the door he felt someone grip at his arm, pulling him back into place. Turner.

"I'm sorry Shawn," he sighed, "but I can't let you go."

"Really Mr. Turner, I appreciate the concern and all, and I know you care and stuff, but it's fine. Plus I need to go meet Cory, so I'll just be-"

"Shawn, you're not listening," Turner said, this time in a tone that sent shivers down Shawn's spine, "I can't allow you to walk out of this room."

"Why not?"

"Because I am a mandated reporter kid," he sighs, never once loosening his grip on Shawn's arm, "I cannot let you leave after everything you just told me, we have to go speak with Feeny."

Feeny..

Feeny?

FEENY?

If Shawn did not feel regret for spilling his guts to his English teacher before, now he most definitely did. He can't be serious, he thought, Turner is already involved, I can't drag Feeny into this mess too. Shawn had never been religious, but on the occasion, he did wonder if perhaps there was someone up there just sitting around thinking of ways to make his life a living hell. Seriously, there had to be an angel, or, more likely, a demon, assigned just to him. And every day, he or she, though he put his bets on it being a "he," gets up and asks itself what it can do to further ruin his life, and today, well today it was doing an excellent job. Really, it is like whoever sits up there, in heaven or whatever, carrying around a giant satchel of really terrible things, and once or twice a day it reaches in and sprinkles a little bit over Shawn's head, making everything go crazy, like magic dust that is a million years past its expiration date. Shawn did not know a lot of things, he did not know if his theory about the magic dust was true, he did not know if something like heaven or hell really existed, but he did know something, under no circumstances could he get Feeny, of all people, involved.

"What do you mean you're a mandated reporter," he starts frantically, "what the hell does that even mean?"

Turner stood defeated, did he really not know that all faculty members are mandated reporters? For a moment, he felt as if he had betrayed Shawn for not starting off the conversation by explicitly mentioning that fact, but he had assumed the kid knew, don't all kids know? No, not all kids. Would he have confided in me had he known? The answer? Probably not. But it was too late to backtrack, Hunter had said too much, he knew too much, he had no choice. Not that I would have gone about this any differently, he thinks. And it's true, he would have reported it either way, mandated or not mandated, because how do you just go about your life and do nothing after learning something like this? You can't. At least, Turner couldn't.

"Shawn, a mandated reporter is someone who is legally," he emphasizes, "required to report instances of abuse."

Silence.

"Shawn?"

Silence.

Shawn looked down, trying to hide the tears that had begun pooling in his eyes again, and with a whisper, "I'm not being abused." The words tasted bitter in his mouth, he supposed that's what happened when you lied: your body refuses to digest its own absurdities.

Turner sighs as he begins rubbing circles on Shawn's hand, hoping, praying, it offered some kind of comfort. "Kid, I'm sorry, we have to," he simply states, ignoring Shawn's final attempt to convince him.

Silence. And then..

"What will happen when we do?" He asks, barely above a whisper. Turner hated how vulnerable Shawn looked, how small, fragile. It felt unnatural, and in that moment, he wondered where that careless boy with the crooked smile and glimmering eyes had gone.

"I don't know," Turner says as he pulls his student in close for a final hug, "but whatever happens, I promise I won't let you go through it alone." Turner prayed he was saying the correct things, and he was. Because at the end of the day, is that not what everyone wants to hear? That they are not alone in hitting rock bottom? That it is possible to come out of that place courageously, beautiful and strong? That they are capable of enduring even the darkest of nights and dullest of days? That they won't come out of it alone? That they are never truly alone, not even in solitude? He liked to think so, because at times, just knowing you are not alone is enough to kindle hope amid the most tragic of circumstances. That was certainly the case for him, and he had the inkling that perhaps it was the case for Shawn as well.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, Shawn, I promise."

He meant it, and with that, Shawn let out a final shuddering breath, soaking in the words he desperately wanted to believe.

He means it.