“Yeah.”
“Were you together for a long time?” Better to ask simple questions than push for the sequence of events that went from young love to cyberbullying.
“Seven months.”
“That’s a while.” For a fourteen-year-old, that would have felt like a lifetime.
“We didn’t tell anyone. Nobody knew.”
“That’s okay. You didn’t have to.”
“I know that, all right?” Hayden slammed a palm on the desk, but Oliver kept up his note-taking. A pound of carrots. Remove the pits from the mangoes. “His parents were super strict, and my family . . .” He laughed. “You’ve met my family.”
Oliver bit back the instinct to defend Nick. “Telling families can be hard.”
“And none of our friends knew. They would have said we were gross. Disgusting queers. They wouldn’t have understood.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t have anyone you thought you could tell.”
Hayden wiped at his nose again, tears starting once more. “Carson found us, after school one day.”
The name scratched at the back of Oliver’s brain, but he didn’t interrupt Hayden.
“He’s a loser. He’s supposed to be a year ahead of me, but he keeps failing so he was in a lot of my classes. We weren’t doing anything wrong, me and Chris. Just kissing and stuff. Boyfriend stuff. Nothing wrong.”
A sick feeling spread in Oliver’s stomach. He hadn’t had his first real boyfriend until he’d gone to college because nothing stayed a secret in the confines of a high school.
“Did Carson hurt you?”
Hayden wiped at his eyes and sniffled loudly. “He called us fags. Said we were dirty. Said he was going to tell everyone. I couldn’t—no one was supposed to know. Chris’s family. They’re super conservative. If they knew Chris was gay, they’d send him away.”
Nick had said that Chris was at a private school now, after the bullying. Whatever came next, Hayden had lost his boyfriend either way.
“You tried to protect him?” He shouldn’t put words in Hayden’s mouth, but the distress in his eyes was real, and he could panic and shut down at any minute, so Oliver needed to keep him talking.
Hayden nodded, using the collar of his T-shirt to scrub away the wet streaks on his face. “I told Carson not to say anything. I told him I’d do anything if he didn’t out Chris. His homework. I’d help him study. Anything he wanted.”
Carson. The name clicked into place. Hayden had asked to borrow Nick’s phone, the night Oliver had been there, to call Carson about homework. “When did all this happen?”
“Last February. When I was still in ninth grade.”
More than a year.
“So what did you do?”
Hayden’s face crumbled. He needed a tissue, but Oliver didn’t have any, and he wasn’t leaving to ask for one. Walking out would give Hayden time to build his defenses back up. Instead, he handed the kid the bright red pocket square from his jacket.
Hayden blew his nose loudly into it. “I broke up with him,” he rasped. “I told him I had been lying the whole time. That he was gross and I was fooling around to see what it was like, but that I was straight and I didn’t want to see him again.”
Oliver nodded. He’d figured as much. “And then what happened?”
“He didn’t believe me!” Hayden’s voice broke. “He said he loved me and that he knew I was protecting him. But Carson wouldn’t stop. He kept telling me...He said I had to...” Hayden was sobbing now, big, body-wracking shudders.
Oliver came around the table and put a hand on his shoulder. That was enough. He could piece together the rest. Carson’s threats had escalated, and with it, Hayden’s tactics to get Christian to give up on him, until it would look like bullying to the outside observer instead of desperation.
“Did Carson ask you to steal the tablets?”
Hayden shuddered under his hand, but he nodded. “He told me to call him. On Saturday.”
