I admit I was too dense and too battered at that point to pick up on what was going until Anthony pulled up the next picture and I saw an image that already haunted me in my brain before my eyes even saw it plastered up on a jizz-stained sheet on the wall. It was of Tyler, the boy who I had beaten nearly to death all those years ago. He was smiling in a Gold’s Gym tank top, trying to show off the barely-noticeable beginnings of muscle definition on some lightly-tanned arms and an awkward smile that looked to also be in its infancy of learning how to perform.
Anthony was Tyler.
Feeling that cold, hard guilt sift back into my bloodstream from my heart, my seat suddenly started to get itchy. I started to feel like the bad guy again, despite the current situation. I wobbled in my seat, trying to test the vulnerability of hold. I started to realize that Tyler/Anthony could do almost anything to me at this point and even I would have had to think it was at least a little bit justified.
“But while setbacks might take you off your course for a brief moment…”
A picture of Tyler lying in a hospital bed, giving a thumbs up through a cast, broadcast on the sheet for a few moments.
“…They are just that, setbacks, and they can’t stop the determined.”
The picture changed to Anthony flexing in a smaller purple Speedo in the mirror of the very room we were in.
“Because you change things. You change your name. You change your identity. Boring old Tyler Richter becomes Anthony Verano and slowly, but surely, you change your body.”
The picture moved on to a much more built Anthony smiling in a pair of board-shorts, in front of a glittering ocean at sunset.
“And by a stroke of luck, through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, you find out about a business of someone who set you back so cruelly, which would allow you to one day plan the perfect revenge on that assailant.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I finally cracked.
How fucking unlucky was the string of events that led me to this moment? I pouted to myself. That guilt almost completely gone again.
