The Bottom Club

01 | inure

IF HE'D SUSPECTED that he would be getting dumped on his first day of senior year, Wyatt Carter would've boycotted the rest of high school by forgoing it entirely and moving to LA, where he would then open a beauty channel on YouTube: because surely there was more to life than crying in the boy's bathroom during your lunch break, stifling choked sobs as you tried to ignore the fact that the smell of ammonia hung so thick in the air it was almost tastable.

It was Heartbreak Twenty, which wasn't anything new. The fact that he happened to be crying in the last stall about a boy too wasn't new either, so what would have made a difference was if he actually happened to be crying for any other reason.

He had long come to terms with the fact that boys and men generally were a global problem.

They were like climate change, and terrorism, and broken iPhone screens, staggering into your life like hurricanes which left you emptied out, discarded on the sidewalk, your chest bloodied as you lay next to a heart that they had stomped all over.

Most people gave up after number three or four or six at most, but Wyatt wasn't most people and a lot of it had to do with the type of guys he found himself attracted to: tall boys with cute laughs, deep voices and messy hair, who happened to be emotionally unavailable; with three a.m. WYD texts featuring in almost all of their vocabularies.

In his seventeen years on earth he had dated chain-smoking bad boys that wore leather jackets and had tattoos on their faces (Heartbreaks Three, Eight, and Twelve), and rich prep school boys complete with their Abercrombie & Fitch cardigans and trust funds, who quoted Hemingway (Heartbreaks Two, Six, and Seven); then every other thing in between, but always the results remained the same: him, crying after they left. It was a tale as old as time.

For no exact reason a Taylor Swift song played on loop in his head and all he could think of was himself walking out of this moment, head held high and getting revenge on Rashad McCain by posting the nudes he had sent to Wyatt on one of the Mayfield Academy public group chats, but then that wouldn't really be revenge seeing as his ex happened to be very... endowed. Plus there were no guarantees that Rashad wouldn't retaliate by posting his pictures, and even if there had been it was an idea that left a bitter feeling in Wyatt's mouth.

Broad-shouldered Rashad who, even though he was a year below him (academically and age-wise), looked much older than sixteen and stood at over six feet; who played soccer and always had a way of impersonating other people in a way that sent Wyatt laughing till he cried while he gasped for breath.

Wyatt sighed.

He had it bad, and the worst part of all of it was the fact that if Rashad hit him up this evening, he would most likely offer himself to him on a silver platter or fine china, whichever he preferred.

Bonnie could have had a good life without Clyde, and historically speaking queens without kings often fared much better. Take England for example, the virgin queen Elizabeth I as opposed to the wives of Henry VI, who did not exit Holy Matrimony with heads connected to their bodies.

The bathroom door opened momentarily Wyatt held his breath, and then it dawned on him that he would have to breathe through his mouth and he resumed breathing via nostrils. He wasn't in a horror movie, though the only thing that could beat his current situation would be him this heart broken and in a horror movie.

Footsteps shuffled on the linoleum floors until they finally stopped in the stall beside his. Wyatt heard a zipper, and the sound of someone urinating, and the irony of his entire situation hit him like a bat over his head. Here he was, crying over a boy who was probably in the cafeteria laughing to something one of his friends was saying, stuck in a tiny cubicle with words like Noya Smith sucked my dick here and Wyatt Carter is a faggot―which was untrue: seeing as Noya was as lesbian as they came; and even though Wyatt happened to prefer guys, the bent over stick figure captured mid-intercourse accompanying those words looked nothing like him―scribbled on the door.