“What are you doing?”

I can’t imagine for the life of me why Cas’ parents would have been able to access pictures of me from primary school — never mind the ones that were much earlier than that! — but here we were, I suppose.

“You’re not really Ashton, are you?” his dad asked, pointing at the most blatantly ‘Isla’ photo of the lot. A girl with long red hair tied neatly into two plaits, smiling brightly at the camera… and in a horrific pink dress.

I never did work out why Mum ever thought pink would look nice on me. It didn’t. At all.

“Of course I am! People change, don’t they?”

“You realise Cassian is never going to like you, right?”

That… threw me, a little. More than the whole accusation of me being a liar, actually.

Because how the fuck could they know that I even liked boys, never mind my headache-inducing feelings for both Cas and Robin (despite their combined ability to… you know, give me headaches)?

And also the fact that I think they just outed their own kid, who’s never said a word about his own sexuality in the same manner as Robin, without even thinking about it.

I don’t understand.

“What are you doing here?” I asked again. “What do you want?”

“We want you to stay away from our son,” his mum said slowly, with nothing in her voice to tell me it was a lie. “I believe you’re a bad influence on him.”

“I’m the bad influence? I’ve only been in town for two and a half months! How on Earth is a teenage boy being a bit ‘rebellious’ meant to be my fault?”

Because Cas wasn’t anything if not entirely obedient. Because he didn’t argue with anyone, really — unless they were Robin, and those weren’t really arguments.

And he wasn’t ‘rebellious’ because his parents 𝙖𝙗𝙪𝙨𝙚𝙙 him.

How on Earth were they able to think I’d done anything to ‘influence him’ when they held every imaginable power over him?

I couldn’t understand it.