🏆Featured on TeenFiction | Head Over Heels
To Leroy 'Lee' Hiew, home's never felt like home. He has a huge mansion, a big car, and more money than he could ever spend. And yet, the idea of home always seems to elude him.
Armed with his dog, Socks...
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"You read Tuesdays with Morrie?" Jon smacks Cory's shoulder lightly, and despite the Vitruvian sculpture of their melded lips still engraved on his mind, Lee can't see them as anything other than best friends. Maybe it's the smokescreen of his own obliviousness, dancing in front of his blind eyes like a charcoal veil. Or maybe they're just better at hiding things than Lee could ever be. "Dude, we've got to keep him. He read freaking Tuesdays with Morrie."
After accidentally walking in on their romance movie recreation yesterday, Lee had honestly expected them to avoid him like the plague. What he hadn't anticipated was the way Jon McArthur had stopped in front of his table, all crooked glasses and outstretched palms and soft, soft smiles, with a hopelessly genuine, "Want to sit with us at lunch?" and he'd wondered if he should have realised that Jon is actually really fucking cute a whole lot longer ago.
(Lee knows he's not for sale---not even in the display case anymore---but he likes to look. It makes him feel better about the fact that he's ridiculously single, lonely as fuck, and crushes on a stone-faced enforcer with a massive stick up his ass.)
"Yeah." Lee laughs, tossing his hair back with a cheeky grin. "Mom is---" was "---an English teacher. It was assigned reading for her eleventh graders. She made me read it too."
"No way," Jon says, eyes wide behind his blocky lenses. "How old were you?"
Lee shrugs as casually as possible, but he knows the pride swelling up in his chest's written all over his face. "Thirteen, maybe? Give or take a year."
"You're so clever," his mother had cooed, all whisky-dripping lips and amber-quartz eyes, dotting kisses over Lee's forehead as he'd carefully enunciated every hard word. He'd run his nails over the red borders of the cover and let his hands indent the soft white pages. An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson, the text on the front had declared, and Lee had never quite been able to figure out what life's grand, elusive, greatest lesson was, because his mother had left before she'd been able to teach it to him."My darling, clever boy."
(Lee hates how he can remember the tone of her voice and the flush of her cheeks and every word she'd ever said, but some days, it gets hard to recall even the colour of her hair.)
"You're kidding." Jon's halfway across the table now, staring at Lee with stars in his eyes. Cory's gone quiet---he doesn't talk half as much as Jon does, but he's not usually completely silent. Lee briefly contemplates letting Jon know that his secret boyfriend is obviously feeling rather neglected. "Did you like it?"
Lee had liked it, mainly because it had been his mother's favourite book, and no matter how hard he wishes on full moons for the will to let go, he finds himself clinging on to the mosaic of his mother's memory like a lifeline in the sea. His mother had loved it---an awakening, she'd called it. A genius, she'd remarked, and even though she had a habit of calling everyone geniuses, Lee had nodded his head and thought of the author as a genius too.
