One. Deux. Tre.

  * * *

  Standing over Charlie, leaning in to kiss him again-and-again, Mitchell whispered to his best friend, “Who did this to you?” He kissed him one more time, then he rested his forehead against Charlie’s as the heart monitor chirped beside them both.

  “Show me.”

  Bethany

  Bethany sympathized for Charlie. She may not have known his name until that very day, but she knew him and could sympathize with his ostracized social inadequacy well enough. It hadn’t been that many years ago—or at least so it seemed to Bethany, even in her old age—that she had been outcast for being the school’s token queer. The difference between now and then was simply that it wasn’t considered polite conversation among company when Bethany had been a teenager. These sorts of things were kept quiet, despite the fact that everyone knew. Still, the hatred and the bigotry came—it always found a way.

  She thought about Charlie as she emptied the trashcans up and down the halls of Adkins High School, and wished there were something that she could do.

  Somewhere alongside her train of thought, she found Aaron and Erin traveling against it, as Erin flipped through an old magazine and popped a piece of gum in her mouth.

  “Ugh,” Erin muttered. “There’s a ton of cut out pieces in this magazine,” she complained as she tossed the magazine into Bethany’s trash cart in pass.