#alosinggame

When the character Reece reveals to Roderick that he was raped by a man he used to babysit for, it was one of the few real situations that happened to someone in my personal life. I had a friend in college who used to babysit for a woman and her boyfriend who was a friend of his aunt. The boyfriend sexually assaulted him at age 13 and when he told his aunt and mom, they didn’t believe him and he almost got thrown out at that young age.

There were quite a few secrets in this story and not everyone knew everything. For example, only a handful of people knew Jacory’s cousin Montrell was in a relationship with Saquan the basketball player. Even in the final chapter set five years later, most people didn’t know about their very serious relationship. Also, no one ever knew that Saquan and Reece had a thing going on while Roderick was locked up. They kept it between themselves and even though Reece was messy, he never outed Saquan, which shows Saquan definitely knew who and who not to mess around with. I wrote it this way because I needed to stress the importance of privacy in relationships, especially when dealing with guys on the DL. Not everyone needs to know everything all the time lol.

I added the characters Tayvon and Zayvon to the story to show how it sometimes is between identical twins. They both kind of tried to manipulate each other into doing what the other thought was right. Twins in general often try to get one another to follow one another along with anything and sometimes lie to cover up something one might have done. Tayvon wanted Zayvon to keep his side thing with Nate a secret but Zayvon wanted Tayvon to stop it so it wouldn’t interfere with the thing Zayvon had going with Demetrius. Eventually, Zayvon realizes he can’t keep anything from Demetrius because he’s falling in love with him. The twins never fell out with each other or split up but they did go through a rough patch because of Tayvon’s side relationship with Nate.

This was my first story written in third person on Wattpad. I’ve written a few short stories in third person but this was my first for Wattpad because it was always more comfortable for me to write in first person. I wanted to challenge myself and I also wanted to show more things at a time that I simply couldn’t do if I were writing in first person. While it wasn’t easier for me to write the story this way, it did force me to feel everything the characters went through; the joy and the pain.

I still get tears in my eyes whenever I reread or even just think about the scene where Deven tells Roderick he was molested at age 4 by a man with AIDS. Writing that scene broke me and I had to take a break from it because just the thought of having to learn something like that about yourself from someone else was too much. It’s a nightmare and that’s how I felt while writing it, like I was trapped in someone else’s nightmare. There were other parts of this story that broke my heart but this one was a deep break. It still hurts.