Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
Liam didn't remember much about when he was a child.
He had once read somewhere that, growing up, children select memories, preserving the most important and discarding superfluous to make room for new ones. Liam wasn't sure he agreed with this.
He remembered some tiny little details, the way he was squeezed between his parents when he was just over two years old, or that time when he was four when his mom tried to enroll him in soccer, but all he had done was do heaping up the dirt of the field in small heaps, he remembered the perfume of the flannel shirts that his grandfather always wore, or those bitter candies that the nice lady who lives next door always gave him. They were insignificant ones, yet he remembered them.
The rest, however, was really a mixture of confused memories, of shadows and people, vague words and places. For example, he was too young to realize that his father left one day. Simply for Liam one day he was there, and the other was gone. He vaguely remembered his mother's tears, the way she hadn't left home for months, and then nothing. Then one day suddenly she was smiling again, and the next they were moving to Beacon Hills, and Liam had a new dad, and he even had an older brother.
Liam was seven at the time. He had just moved to a new school and had never been good at making friends. But he had a family at last, and suddenly everything seemed more beautiful, there were trips and dinners and family vacations, and they lived in a huge villa with a pool, and he had a brother, he had Brett, someone to spend time, to play with. Brett was only two years older than Liam, but they seemed nothing at the time. They were just numbers. And Brett had a lot of friends, who always came home, and made it noisy and cheerful. A lot of kids that Liam could finally feel himself with. There were Scott, and Stiles, and Josh. Once in a while, even Mason, the only kid Liam really got along with at school, joined them.
And then there was Theo. Brett’s best friend.
Liam didn't remember how it happened. He only knew that from the moment he set his eyes on Theo, he had done nothing but feel a sort of admiration, almost worship . Because Theo, with the most beautiful eyes that Liam had ever seen, was always so smart, polite, so funny, and smiling, and everyone, literally everyone , couldn't help but adore him. Theo was simply perfect in Liam's eyes.
Liam remembered little of that time, only Theo. And that immense sense of happiness and belonging.
Instead, Liam remembered everything well from the moment when all of this slowly started to fade. It was after the summer of his twelfth year. When Brett and Theo and everyone else started high school. Those two little years that separated them had never seemed to Liam a world of difference as they were now. Because the days of plays, lacrosse games and walks in the woods were over, the days when they rang the bells and then ran away giggling or hiding under the covers to prank calls or exchange figurines were over. Or at least they were for all of them. Now they were high schoolers, there were lessons, exams, girls and dates and parties. Everything was going well beyond Liam's reach.
That was also the moment when his mind began to struggle with an insistent question to which he could not answer. Why, although everyone was making their own way, the only one Liam really missed was Theo? Why was he the only one who, when he happened to see him around the town, made his heart speed up and cause him sudden waves of longing?
The answer to this question came to Liam the summer of his fourteen years. He remembered that one day, while sitting at an ice cream parlor, Mason had confessed, somewhat hesitant and frightened, that he was attracted to boys and not girls. Liam was a little stunned. Not that he found it strange, he knew it was a possible thing, but so far it was just an abstract thought for him, something he'd seen in some movie or heard some kids make jokes about. It was the first time he realized that yes, it was really possible for a boy to like another boy.
He didn't think of Theo right way. But in a perfect concatenation of events, a few days later, as he and Mason strolled through the streets, they saw a scene that stayed etched in Liam's mind for months. Across the street was Theo, sitting at a table outside a bar, holding hands with a beautiful dark haired girl, probably around his age. They were smiling happily and at some point Theo had leaned in and kissed her, a real kiss, on the lips.
It was as if someone had clenched Liam's young heart in an iron grip, shattering it into a thousand little pieces.
It was then that he realized that the green-eyed kid, the ever-smiling kid, ready always with a joke, that he had always admired, was also his first love.
And he realized it too late.
Because that summer would have been one of the last moments he would spend in Beacon Hills for a long time.
The headmaster of his middle school, enthusiastic and confident in his grades, had convinced him, and his mother, which had not been easy, to try an admission test for a prestigious private high school in Los Angeles, talking about how a great opportunity was for an intelligent and gifted boy like Liam. And Liam had made it, he had entered Devenford Prep, without too much effort, and in September he had moved to the dorms of the prestigious high school. He had left Beacon Hills behind. He had come back a few weekends to visit, or during the holidays. But his contacts had been limited to Brett - who was always the usual asshole, with the only novelty that had apparently come out as bi, for the shock of his dad - and Mason - who was always the best friend in the world, finally a little less lonely since he started dating Corey, a boy of his year at Beacon High.
Liam hadn't seen Theo anymore. Not even once. And none of the others. Perhaps the friendship between Brett and the boys had deteriorated over time. Liam guessed that it was normal when growing up. You change. He, too, was no longer the shy and thin boy of the past. The gym, and above all the lacrosse, had made him buff and fit, and the features of his face had become more sharp. So much so that he often heard the girls in the corridors making malicious comments about him. But he had never paid attention to them.
The only thing that had not changed in Liam despite the passing time, was his massive crush on Theo.
The thing he remembered most, even though he really preferred to forget, was the day he was expelled from Devenford Prep. Not that it was hard to remember since it had happened just two days before. Liam remembered very well all the mental and physical pressure he had been in since the beginning of the year. He remembered how he didn't want to disappoint anyone's expectations, his parents and his teachers, his coach and his teammates. He remembered how he could no longer reconcile things, how his grades were dropping, how he could no longer focus on the lacrosse field, stress, anxiety, discouragement, that real sense of anguish while the half semester exams and the championship approached.
So happened that he snapped against the captain of an opposing team during the first game, and that simple fight had turned into a real brawl. The coach had suspended him from the team. And that was the first mistake. Then he decided it would be a good idea to buy the answers of the Political Economy exam from a third year boy, and well ... he had been caught. End of the story. End of his prestigious academic career. The principal had kindly told him that none of this was tolerable in his school. And he had invited him to pack up.
And Liam felt almost relieved for a moment. As if a weight had been removed from his chest. Then he cried when his mother and Jonathan had come to pick him up. It didn't seem true that he had fallen so low. Jenna had hugged him, crying too when he told her everything. She told him she couldn't believe he hadn't told her everything that was happening to him, told him he wouldn't have to bear that burden alone, and that it didn't matter, that nothing was over, and that the most important thing was that he was happy, and carefree, and healthy. And that if he had to get away from that place to be like this, then it was the right thing to do.
And so Liam had set off for Beacon Hills, and while Jonathan's car covered the miles that separated them from home, he couldn't help but feel decidedly different from the fourteen-year-old boy who had left it a year and a half earlier.
And he couldn't help wondering what would have been there waiting for him now.
TO BE CONTINUED