I was your average white boy. Except I wasn't white. The Latino in me wanted to be spicy but my soul was blander than toast.

Burnt toast.

"Hey, Axel!" the school's resident jock shouted as I walked down the hallway. "Find any good dick last night?" He laughed.

"Oh, please," I snapped back. "I could hear your bad porn from my room."

I went into the bathroom as my mom called us for breakfast downstairs. That's right. The school's resident jock was my stepbrother.

"Don't be an ass, bro," I heard from behind me. I looked back and met with piercing eyes―a mixture of hazel and ocean blue. "Good morning," my other stepbrother, Amil, said to me in a much nicer tone.

"Morning."

Amil flashed his pearly whites and my knees went weak. I closed the door quickly, letting a breathless sigh escape my chapped lips. That's right. While my nameless stepbrother was the resident jock, my other stepbrother was the school's resident playboy. And who was I?

The resident gay kid.

It took me forever to get dressed that morning. My plump ass wouldn't fit into three fourths of my jeans. I wasn't overweight, but over the summer, I'd gone from skinny twink to average twink and now my wardrobe hated me. After 20 minutes, I was finally able to find some jeans that didn't squeeze my butt too much. They were still tight, but I could get away with it.

I walked down the stairs and headed to the kitchen.

"¡Llegas tarde!" my mom scolded. "Tus hermanos ya han comido." I looked at the table, and sure enough, I'd taken so long getting ready that my brothers had finished eating.

"No time to eat, Wheel Axel!" my stepbrother mocked, grabbing his car keys. "Unless you wanna walk to school!"

My eyes shot daggers at him. His nickname for me was so stupid that I didn't even care. But walking to school? Hell no.

"I'm coming," I said, grabbing my book bag and following him out the back door to the garage. It was raining, the sky cloudy and dark.

Amil followed behind us. "I'll see you later." He waved, tossing his car keys in the air. Amil had his own car because he was one of the seniors whose first half of their day was taking classes at the local community college. For the second half, Amil and the seniors like him came back to the high school. That second half was my blood, pumping through my veins and capillaries, supplying me with oxygen that escaped every time Amil stepped into the room in all his glory. English with Ms. Umbridge, whose passive aggressiveness and nails-on-a-chalkboard fake smiles permeated the classroom every day, was less horrible when Amil sat beside me.

Our house had a detached garage and that's where my stepbrother got to park. The garage was basically given to him to do whatever he wanted and he'd stuffed it so full of junk, there was barely space to get to the passenger's side door, let alone open it. I waited in the rain as he backed out while watching Amil in the driveway, adjusting his rearview mirror. He caught me looking and smiled.

My stepbrother honked the horn and yelled, "Get in," through the window. I stomped over to the other side and pulled the door handle. It was locked. As I rapped on the window, my stepbrother said, "Sorry, sorry!" He pressed a button on the door and I heard the locks switch.

I reached for the handle again, and this time he hit the gas and it moved before I could grab hold. This douchebag was playing with me.

"Stop screwing around," I shouted through the rain and glass, "or I'll key your car."

I pulled my house keys out of my pocket and dangled them like a hypnotic pocket watch. In the blink of an eye, the door was unlocked and opened for me. It figured. Dude Bro was weak to his vintage apple red Mustang. As usual, the ride to school was nothing but Drake blasting as I stared out of the window. The way the rain cascaded to the ground mimicked the violin strings of my heart.

At my locker, my best friend was waiting for me. "Hey, Car'Mal."

She rolled her wheelchair back to give me room. "Hey, so I discovered something last night."

"What?" I asked as I spun the lock to my combination.

"You know how I'm disabled and have an unspecified mental illness?"

"Yep."

"And you know how I'm black?"

I glanced at her, wondering where she was going with this. "Yeah?"

"Well, I discovered last night that I'm LGBTQIAP."

"Wow," I replied, glad to no longer be the only queer kid in the school---that would've been unrealistic. "Which one of the letters are you?"

"Whichever one gets me more diversity points."

"Cool. So in your biopic, who do you think is going to play you?" I grabbed my English notebook, mind drifting to Amil, then closed my locker door.

"Either Rihanna or Gigi Hadid." Car'Mal turned around and we traveled to our first class at a leisurely pace. "So how's it going being stepbros with a major bro?"

I rolled my eyes. "Don't even get me started. At least now that we're family, he's stopped beating me up."

At that moment, we just happened to pass my stepbrother. His arm was slung around Serena Oak, the school's most popular girl and Amil's ex.

Serena gave me a once over, popping her bubble gum between her Candy K bubble lips.

"What a bitch," Car'Mal mumbled, watching the girl twitch her butt like it was hot. Looking at the other guys in the hallway "slyly" holding their notebooks in front of their flies, it apparently was hot.

"Hey, Nicki!" someone shouted. I swung around to see my stepbrother's best friend staring at me. "Nice jeans, Minaj." He and my stepbrother and Serena cackled. God, I hated popular kids.

"Don't pay any attention to them," my best friend said, flipping her curly ringlets over her shoulder with her warm amber hand. "Your ass looks good in those jeans."

"Yeah, well, it's not like there's any boy here in this school who can appreciate it."

A deep voice came from behind me. "Are you sure?"

I swung around yet again to meet with my favourite piercing ocean-hazel eyes.

Before I could react, the first bell screamed in our ears. "Shit, we gotta go!" Car'Mal grabbed my arm with the free hand that wasn't rolling. "Mr. Kristiansen doesn't play."

Amil winked and my face was on fire. Did he mean...? No, he couldn't... But I didn't have time to ask because Car'Mal practically threw me into the classroom just in time for Mr. Kristiansen to close the door. I sat at my desk, barely listening to the teacher, Amil's words playing over and over in my head.

'Are you sure?'

Amil was a playboy. He'd slept with all the girls in the school, except for Car'Mal, and the goths, and the nerds, and the Christians. But despite his popularity, he was kind to me. Most of the students outside of the popular kids didn't care that I was gay. Not that they wanted to be my friend either. Amil was the only person who wasn't afraid to be seen smiling with me in school.

Amil made my heart soar and the vibrations of volcanic eruptions shake my core. I knew that at any moment, the pressure would grow too great and my emotions would explode all over, leaving my heart like the residents of Pompeii.

My phone chimed with a beep and I pulled it out of my pocket. The text was from the boy who'd just been on my mind.

Alim: Axel... We can't be brothers anymore.

What? Another message came and I dropped my jaw.

Alim: I'm sorry but... our parents are getting a divorce.

"You there!" I looked up expecting to see Mr. Kristiansen but instead saw some random dude.

'Mr. Winchester' was written on the board behind him. Had he been here the whole time? I didn't even realize we had a substitute. He was kind of cute too.

"Put your phone away."

"Um... where's Mr. Kristiansen?"

"I just said where, but I guess you were too busy Snapshatting to listen. Mr. Kristiansen is still on vacation in Italy. I'll be teaching this class for the next month. Now open your books to page 10."

"Psst..." I glanced to my left where Car'Mal was sitting beside me. "What was that text? You looked shook."

"I am shook. So shook."

I looked back at the text. 'We can't be brothers anymore.'

Our parents were the one thing connecting Alim and me. My eyes began to glisten as I realized this was the end. But if we couldn't be brothers, I'd go broke or go home, as they say. I would tell him my one secret that I'd held onto for years. A caged bird, I'd finally sing. The dam would break and I'd swim to freedom letting the strength of the waves drown me.

I would tell him the truth I'd been hiding since that one party what felt like just yesterday. That I wasn't a virgin. That he was my first. And that he'd been too drunk to remember it.