Chapter 2 — It actually looks like…‘Cum.’

Trevor's POV

I found Max's words so insulting that something in me just snapped. And I knew better… I knew from experience that snapping back in this school never ended well for me. But backing down had never fetched me anything good either. Not for once and not in the entire time I had been a student at Hartwell.

So I didn't.

"Well, yours is so tiny that no one notices when you get hard." I retorted, holding up two fingers and pinching them together to show exactly how tiny I meant.

The half-second of silence that followed was the most satisfying thing that had happened to me all day.

"Oh shit!" Sean's head swung toward Max, and for just that one moment, something in his expression looked genuinely caught off guard. Which, coming from Sean Pierre, was basically a standing ovation.

Max's face had gone tight. Not the performative kind of tight he wore when he was playing to the class and when I seemed to him like something he could actually joke around with. This was the real kind. Or let's say, the kind that meant I had actually landed something and he hadn't seen it coming. He pushed up from his seat and crossed to mine in about three steps, and the classroom got very quiet very fast.

I held his gaze and I wasn't going to be the first one to look away.

"Look who has got a backbone now that he is student body president." His voice was controlled but his jaw wasn't. He pulled his fist back slightly… not all the way, just enough — and my body reacted before my brain could stop it. I flinched, although it was small yet fast but it happened, and the moment it did, I knew he had gotten exactly what he came for.

He hadn't even touched me.

The satisfied look that spread across his face made my stomach turn and I felt stupid instantly. I mean, genuinely and completely stupid, because I had fallen for the oldest move in the book and given him the reaction he had been fishing for the whole time.

"You are nothing more than the class fairy." He said it slowly, holding eye contact with me the whole time while the class laughed around us like background noise. Then he dropped his hand onto Sean's shoulder and squatted down slightly so they were at the same level. "Better watch your ass. ‘GAY-den’ here has the hots for you."

That one landed differently. I could feel it settle in my chest in a way I didn't want to examine too closely. And to make it worse, the laughter around it didn't help. I couldn't find a single word to throw back and that silence, right there was worse than anything Max had actually said.

"Is that true, Trevor?" Sean asked. His tone was light and rhetorical and he already knew I wasn't going to answer. I think that was exactly the point… which was to ask the question I couldn't respond to and let it sit in the air for everyone to enjoy. "You got the hots for me?"

I said nothing and then, I kept my face as straight as I could manage and stared at a fixed point just past his shoulder.

He didn't let it go. He shifted from his seat to the edge of mine, leaning in just enough to be in my space without fully crossing any line that a teacher could write him up for. His fingers brushed the edge of the bag I was still holding against myself — the bag I had not put down since the moment I grabbed it, which everyone in the room was absolutely aware of.

"You are trying to convert me to the dark side?" He tilted his head, eyes bright with the specific kind of amusement that meant he was having a genuinely good time at my expense. "Darth GAY-der?"

The class lost it, to the extent that someone actually wheezed.

"Don't flatter yourself." I snapped.

It came out sharper than I planned and I meant every syllable of it. But before I could follow it with anything and before I could pull any kind of composure back together, something cold and thick hit my lap.

I looked down.

Max had a small container in his hand that I hadn't even registered him picking up. He had tipped it forward and the contents, which was something kinda white or better still milk color and creamy, had landed directly on my trousers. Exactly the spot where I did not need anything landing right now- my crouch region. He shook the last of it out with zero hesitation and zero apology.

The room erupted.

"Oh my God!" Sean's laugh came out full and loud and completely unfiltered, and the rest of the class piled on immediately.

I sat there and could not move and I couldn't think either. I couldn't even begin to figure out what my next move was supposed to be because I genuinely had not seen that coming. I was just sitting there, dumbfounded, with what looked like a very specific kind of stain spreading across the front of my trousers while twenty people laughed hard enough to cry.

"GAY-den is coming for you, Sean." Max said it with pure sarcasm and not a single trace of guilt anywhere on his face.

Sean looked down at my lap, then back up at my face, still grinning. "Dude, it actually looks like… cum. For real."

I opened my mouth but couldn't say a word because of how terrible I already felt.

"That is enough."

Ms. Jenny Presto, our dean of students administration, walked through the door and the energy in the room shifted immediately as chairs scraped and phones disappeared. Max was back in his seat before I even processed that she had entered. I shifted in my seat as carefully and quickly as I could, angling myself so that the 'cum-like it was tagged' stain wasn't the first thing at eye level if she looked my way.

The room went from chaos to performance in about four seconds flat. Everyone sitting straight, everyone looking forward and everyone suddenly very interested in whatever was written on the board.

"Trevor." She didn't even fully settle at the front before she said my name. "You will be in detention."

"What? Why?" I couldn't keep the shock off my face. "I didn't do anything."

She looked at me the way teachers look at students they have already made a decision about. "Of course, you did many things. First of all, for causing so much nuisance. I noticed the way everyone had their eyes on you when I walked in, and I didn't need anyone to tell me that the chaos was centered around you." She paused just long enough to make it feel deliberate. "Again, for harassing our star quarterback. Boys like him don't need that kind of attention from other boys like you."

I sat with that for a second.

‘Boys like him.’ Like Sean Pierre came with some kind of protected status that I was too beneath to understand. Like the guy who had just called me Darth GAY-der to a laughing audience needed protection from me.

This was the most textbook injustice I had ever sat through and it was happening in broad daylight in front of a classroom full of witnesses, none of whom were going to say a word because not one of them had anything to gain by defending me.

This was how it always went. The moment I opened my mouth back…the moment I stopped absorbing it quietly, I became the problem. They got to throw whatever they wanted and I had to just take it, because the second I threw anything back, I was the one harassing people. I was the nuisance and I was the one sitting in detention.

I pressed my lips together and said nothing else.

But the thing that sat heaviest wasn't even the detention. It was the fact that this was the part that never changed…and I had a feeling, deep down in the part of me that was still rational underneath all of this that today was only the beginning of something much worse.