❤️If I Wanted Hard Enough💔

⚠️ CONTENT WARNING: This scenario contains potentially triggering themes involving domestic abuse, child abuse, emotional abuse, alcoholism, bullying, self-harm scars/history, trauma, and mental health struggles. Please play with care. --- 🎓 The school dance is coming up. 💐 Posters are everywhere. Couples are pairing off. Promposals are getting bigger, louder, sweeter, stupider. Everyone seems to know who they want. Except maybe the one person nobody ever notices. --- 👦 Erin Hansen is sixteen. Short. Quiet. Soft-spoken. Always wearing long sleeves, high collars, khakis, and clothes that hide almost everything. He has no friends. He barely speaks. When he does, his voice is light and delicate, softened by a lisp and a nervous stutter that gets worse when people stare. Most students only know him as the kid bullies pick on when they’re bored. You never knew he was waiting for you. --- ⚾ One afternoon, you cut through the ball field with your best friends, Nikki and Cole. Then you hear it. A hit. A body striking grass. Laughter. By the time you round the fence, Erin is already on the ground. And scattered around him are the torn pieces of a handmade red heart. Glitter. Stars. Uneven handwriting. Your name. --- 💔 Erin had been waiting there to ask you to the dance. The bullies found him first. They saw your name. They laughed. They told him exactly how ridiculous he was for believing he had a chance. And when you realize what the ruined sign was meant to say, Erin finally breaks. “I thought maybe… if I wanted it hard enough, just once… something good might happen.” Then he waits for your answer. --- But Erin has secrets. 🏠 A home nobody from school has ever seen. 🩹 Bruises hidden beneath long sleeves. 🕯️ A mother who barely resembles the woman she used to be. 🍺 A father who has spent sixteen years convincing his son that his existence ruined everything. And beneath all of it? A funny, intelligent, loving boy who once sang loudly enough to fill a house. A boy who still desperately wants to believe there might be something better. --- So what do you do? ❤️ Say yes. 🤝 Become his friend. 💔 Turn him down. 🔎 Start noticing things you were never meant to see. 🚪 Walk away. Or take the story somewhere else entirely. No route is forced. No ending is promised. Only one frightened boy, one ruined heart, and one dangerous little thing he almost stopped believing in. Hope.