Read Afire: Entire Blinded Series for Free Online Page B

wants. Again. Easier that way. Anything for a quiet life.
    My phone beeps, and I take it out of my pocket and look at the screen. Laughter rumbles in my chest. Ryan's asking if this is my first trip to the shop or the second. I reply, and he comes back with the message that he'll meet me when I come out again. He's on the bus on his way home from work. Home to his own place, one that his parents helped him find, and they paid the first month's rent too. Nice couple, Jan and Derek, and I've wished they were my parents on more than one occasion.
    Smiling, I keep walking and think on times past. Times spent at Ryan's house when we were kids, rough and tumbling in the back garden or playing computer games in his room. It seems like he's always been there, but there used to be a time when he wasn't. He arrived in school the new kid aged seven, the teacher clasping his shoulders and pressing him into the seat beside me. He'd been crying, that much was evident, his eyelashes wet and his red cheeks streaked with fresh tears. My stomach had contracted, I remember it as clear as day, and from that moment on I wanted to protect him, be by his side so no one could bully him like I was—at home and at school.
    Shit, when I think about it, if Ryan hadn't been in my life I'd have had one sorrier motherfucker of a childhood. A loner before he walked into my class, I'd kept myself on the outskirts of life, there yet not, participating yet having nothing to do with it at all. I reckon the other kids knew I was different even back then, taunting me for my out-of-fashion clothes and embarrassing hairstyle. Kids, they can be so cruel, and some of them remained so even after we left school. Bastards.
    I look ahead at the sky. A peachy-orange slash of pastel floats on the horizon, the blue of earlier dissipating as darkness makes itself at home. What I wouldn't give to be up there now, on a plane to anywhere, landing in a place where no one cares who or what I am, free to express myself. I'm stagnating, I know that, and risk going mouldy if I don't get the hell away. Ryan suggested I move in with him, but I declined, thinking it'd add fuel to the fire, the blokes from school getting confirmation that we're ‘bent'. I am fucking bent! I'm proud of it but can't admit it out loud.
    A sigh gusts out of me, one that burns my lungs through lack of air, and I breathe in, wishing for the millionth time that things were different, that I'd grow a set of balls and tell them all, finishing off with “And fuck you if you don't like it!” But it isn't that easy. Not when you've grown up in the same town your whole life and everyone knows your shit before you even know it yourself. Fuck, I hate it here.
    The swoosh of tyres brings me out of my thoughts, my attention now on the road. I wait for a space to cross, but the cars are coming thick and fast, bumper to bumper, and I'm mad if I think someone will stop and let me go. Still, hope's always there, isn't it, and I wait, knowing no fucker will slow down, knowing she's at home counting the minutes. It'll give her something to rant at me for once I get back. Never happier when she's got a bee in her bonnet, that one.
    The line of cars thin out, and I take a chance, running across the road between two. A horn blares, and I fight the urge to give them the middle finger, instead reaching the other side and walking on, head down again. Ryan pointed out once that I always walk like that. Reckons I should hold my head up more, straighten my shoulders, and be proud of who I am. I don't want to harp on about the crap I've endured, but fuck, it's damn hard to act confident when whatever confidence I had has been knocked out of me.
    My thoughts stray to Dad, to how things were so different back then. Always smiling, that man, despite how hard it must have been living with Mum going on at him every five minutes. Mind you, there were times he didn't smile. I'd catch him, mouth downturned, frowning, the lines on his