Boys' POVs

All I Ask of You (River)

After Delilah found out about my secret, I didn't know how I was supposed to face her. She was the only person that knew, and I didn't know how to handle that.

I hated not talking to her. When she wasn't around, something just felt like it was... missing. I didn't feel complete. And I hated that feeling.

I would still tutor her, but that was it. That was the only interaction we had, and we only ever talked about French. Nothing else. Our meetings were very brief and awkward, which I could tell made both of us unhappy.

She tried to talk to me, but I didn't want to. I just couldn't face her.

"What's your problem?" Seth demanded when he finally noticed that Delilah and I were not talking to each other. "Did you two get into a fight or something? You're obviously avoiding each other and it's annoying."

I didn't know what I was supposed to say, so I just chose to keep quiet. This only made Seth even more suspicious, but he stopped asking me because he knew I wasn't going to give him any answers.

I couldn't be around Seth and Rex without them asking me questions I did not want to answer, so I even started to avoid them. It would have just been easier to just stop being around all three of them... even though Seth was my roommate.

I still couldn't help but look at her every now and then during class. Whenever she wasn't paying attention, which seemed to be a lot now a days, she'd doodle on her notebook. When I was close enough to see what she was drawing, I blanched when I saw that it was all about Avery.

I felt a deep pain in my chest when I thought about her with him. He didn't deserve her. He wasn't a good person, but she couldn't see that. She thought he was this polite little preppy boy when he was really one of the rudest people I have ever met in my entire life. And I grew up with my parents.

Lunch was always the worst time of the day, because there weren't any teachers around. And when there weren't any teachers around, the guys around me could say whatever they wanted without being reprimanded.

They never should have left us alone. We were a school full of delinquents with one girl that just so happened to be in the middle of it all. There was one monitor by the door, but they only stopped guys from getting into fights, not yelling insults at each other.

I decided that I didn't want to deal with the usual harassment that day, so I made my way toward the only exit that would let me into the hallway to get back to my dorm. Seth and Rex didn't even question me when I just got up from our table and left. Delilah hadn't gotten there yet.

I wasn't looking where I was going. I just wanted to get out of there. If I took too long, I'd get someone's attention and that was not something I wanted.

When I ended up ramming into someone, I felt their lunch splatter all over me, and I knew there was no way I could get out of here without being noticed now.

When I saw that the person I had run into was actually Delilah, I wanted to go hide myself under a rock. Why did I have to run into her?

"I—I'm so sorr—" she began nervously. This wasn't the first time she had spilled food on me, and obviously she didn't know how to talk to me when we hadn't spoken in weeks.

There goes that feeling in my chest. The sinking, painful one.

The cafeteria was silent. Had the collision really been that loud?

"Nice going, queer!" one guy shouted at me, breaking the eerie silence. The guys all around then began to laugh and yell, calling me names like freak or emo. Things I was used to hearing.