This is one of the first stories that I have seriously sat down and written so i greatly appreciate and desire any feedback at x.magoon@gmail.com. There is no explicit content but there is a beginning to a relationship between two teenaged boys. If this offends you then don't read. If not please enjoy. This story is not based on truth nor is it meant to resemble any real people. Please do not steal this story, if you would like to use it or re-post it somewhere, then ask and give credit where it is due. Enjoy
Hope
Sam Worth was your average high school kid except for the fact that he was gay. Before his fifteenth birthday, Sam thought his life was going pretty good. Sure he'd never had a boyfriend or even a close friend, but that was fine with him. He had his mom, his brother, his dog, and his best friend Laura. They were the only people that mattered to him. He even knew that they were all waiting for him when he got home. They were going to throw him a surprise party. He found out earlier in the day but he didn't care. He was just happy that he was going to be with the people he cared about.
All that changed though, when he pulled around the corner of his street only to be met by an orange haze and a distant roaring. Dread crept up his stomach and he felt sick. His home was at the end of the road, only it wasn't like he remembered. There was orange and yellow tongues of flame and heat leaping off of the walls lighting up the night sky with their vicious light. The loud siren was muffled by his wails. He barely remembered getting out of his car and running towards the inferno, lashing out at the people trying to stop him. He burst through the front door and fire consumed him, swallowed him, welcomed into the depths of agony and pain. A place where he would be alone, no mom, no friends, no brother, no dog. Only the brightness of fire and endless darkness of sleep.
Now, two days later, Sam wakes to find himself in a foreign room with wires and tubes running into him. People talked around him but he didn't care. Nothing mattered to him anymore. Doctors came and went , giving him their condolences and telling him he would get better. A lawyer even came by once to talk to him about who he would stay with and where he would be living. Sam blatantly told her to go away. The things she talked about were the last things Sam cared about at the moment. He just wanted to be alone.
Sam stayed in the hospital for a while. He lost track of the number of people coming to talk to him, but eventually they all stopped. Maybe they realized that he stopped caring. Or maybe they just stopped caring themselves. All that changed one day though. His door slid open. Then it closed. Sam had been pretending to be asleep in hopes that the person would go away, but no body talked to him. Sam was curious now.
Normally the people who talked to him talked as soon as they came in. Sam cracked his eyes open but he didn't see anyone. He did, however, see a piece of folded paper laying on the chair next to his bed. He reached for the paper and tentatively unfolded it. His jaw dropped and his eyes widened.
There on the paper was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It was a drawing of him. Him laying on his bed and his eyes closed. He traced the lines on the paper feeling the light and heavy strokes that the person had put onto the paper. You could count the hairs on his head and see the dark rings under his eyes. His face framed by his ragged brown hair that hadn't been cut in too long. The faint scars left from the burns he vaguely remembered were not hidden in the picture but they were subtle and added to the depth of the image.
The person who had drawn this picture had captured his very essence. But who had drawn it?
Sam stood and walked to his door opening it and peering out into the hall. Failing to see anyone who could have drawn the picture, Sam walked back into the room and plopped onto the bed. He quickly fell asleep his dreams turning toward the paper clutched in his hand and the person who had given it to him.
Sam woke later in the night to a doctor coming to quiz him on his well being. After weeks of indignant silence, the doctor was surprised when Sam responded to his questions. Other doctors came and went. Perhaps they wanted to see if he was actually talking now and what had caused his sudden change. Sam didn't tell them about his picture though. That was his secret and no one else needed to know about it.
Sam quickly got tired of the doctors talking to him though, so he did what he normally did when he wanted to be alone. He left to go to the roof. He enjoyed the emptiness up there. The isolation. It reminded him of himself, empty and covered in a blanket of darkness. No questions existed there, nor problems. Just him and the sky.
Sam especially enjoyed sitting on the ledge and watching the city go by. He found it fascinating how life kept going no matter what happened to those who experience it. He sat there now. He sat there for hours just following the trail of the moon across the sky. Now, after hours of isolation, he turned towards the door to leave.
He stopped in his tracks. There taped on the door was another piece of paper, just like the first. His heart fluttered and flipped as he rushed forward to grab the paper. Afraid that it was all a dream and would flutter away unless he had proof. Sam opened the paper and revealed a picture even more stunning and spectacular than the first.
Again, he was the subject of the drawing. Only this time the setting was the roof and he was sitting on the ledge. He could see the musculature of his back through the hospital gown he wore. The city lights were sparkling and twinkling in the background of the picture. His body was silhouetted by the rising moon causing the appearance of grand and majestic wings upon his back.
A tear struck the paper and Sam blinked wiping at his face with his sleeves. He couldn't remember the last time he cried or felt any kind of emotion. There was a door in his mind, a door that he had sealed away all of his feelings in. The drawings blew that door off of its hinges.
Sam walked into the building still staring at the paper. Then he saw him. Merely a fleeting sight but he saw him. A boy watching him from the corner of the stairwell. When he saw that Sam saw him, he ran. Sam followed him throughout the entire hospital before he ducked into a room.
Sam asked a doctor whose room it was. The doctor told him that his name was James Wells and that he was deaf and hadn't talked since his parents had died in a car accident. Sam gaped. He went through the same thing that he had. But how could he talk to him if he couldn't hear him. He didn't know sign language so that wasn't an option. Was the one person who made him finally feel again unapproachable?
Then it struck him. He could draw for James like he did for him. Sam ran to the reception desk and got a piece of paper from the secretary there. He drew. The pencil flew across the paper. First a sun, then a grassy hill and some flowers. The last piece of the drawing was of two people laying on the hill, James and Sam. Sam ran back to his room brushing past doctors and nurses much to their protests.
Sam folded the paper in half and pushed it under that crack of the door. After waiting one minute, then two, Sam turned to leave. The door cracked open and Sam beamed. He was there. James was the most beautiful boy Sam had ever seen. He had shaggy yet short tree-bark brown hair, eyes the gray of storm clouds, and small timid lips. Even His face glowed with an inner radiance.
James' nose crinkled some and his lips tilted up hesitantly at one corner making a weak and small smile. It was enough for Sam though. It meant that James had seen the picture. James reached his hand out and passed a small piece of paper to Sam. This paper had writing on it.
It read, "Your picture is pretty".
Sam hadn't stopped smiling since he saw James, but now his smile broadened even more.
He wrote below his note, "not as pretty as you".
James flushed and looked up at Sam, standing a full head taller than him. His lips parted and a look of determination passed over him as his lips parted slightly and a word escaped his mouth. "L-Love"? Sam nodded and reached forward, tilting James' head up slightly with two fingers. He leaned forward and kissed him softly, their lips barely touching but conveying everything.
They both took a step back and blushed and grinning broadly. Their eyes met and an unspoken message passed between them. Never give up hope, never surrender to despair, life will always get better. Sam smiled and looked at James simply asking him, "may I come in?". Again James simply blushed and stepped inside holding the door open for Sam. Sam stepped into James' arms and the door slid shut with a solid click.
END