Try 

Prologue

Blaine Anderson dropped his bike outside the trailer and went inside. He walked through the tiny kitchen/dining room to the sofa at one end and flopped down face first into the thin cushions, he was tired and in pain.

He was still there when his mother walked in, her long dark curls piled up on her head and her waitress uniform slightly crumpled. Harriet Anderson was only thirty two but she felt so much older. She’d had to grow up quickly when she wound up pregnant and abandoned at the age of fifteen. Sometimes she wondered where she’d be now if she hadn’t slept with her then boyfriend but then she’d look at her son and realise she wouldn’t trade him for the world.

Right now her feet ached, she was tired from a long shift at the diner but even so she kicked off her shoes and let her hair down, she set a bag of take out from the diner on the table.

“Dinner Blaine,” she said at the lump on the sofa. She heard him groan and shift as she laid the food out. When she turned around she gasped at the sight of Blaine’s face. A dark purple bruise surrounded his left eye and his lip was swollen and split. “Oh honey,” she sighed, reaching out for him.

“I’m fine Mom,” he said, the same reply he gave her every time he came home with bruises. Harriet wanted nothing more to protect her son from the kids that attacked him because they didn’t like that he was gay. Tomorrow she would withdraw her son from North Lima High. She dearly wished she could send him too Dalton Academy, he’d be safe there, but she couldn’t afford the tuition. All she could do was hope that he’d have a better time at William McKinley High.