Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 108049 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108049 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
“Okay.” Hunter looks at the floor. He’s sort of nodding, like there’s a time delay between the words leaving my mouth and him. “And you didn’t kill anybody.”
He’s taking this better than I expected.
“I swear.”
“You’re not skipping the country,” he says. “Right?”
I won’t lie—the thought has crossed my mind. But no. “Staying put.”
He shrugs. “Cool.”
Before I can blink, Hunter digs around in one of his desk drawers for a checkbook. I sit there, stunned, as he fills one out to Cash. “Here you go.”
Just like that, he hands it to me. Ten grand. Four zeros.
I’m such an ass.
“I can’t tell you how much you’ve saved me.” The sense of relief is instant, the remorse even quicker. I hate myself for this. But not enough to not fold the check up and stick it in my wallet. “I’m sorry about this. You—”
“Con, it’s all good. We’re teammates. I’ve always got your back.”
Emotion tightens my throat. Man, I don’t deserve this. It’s a complete accident I even ended up here. At Briar, on this team. I got it in my head I had to get the hell out of LA, and a couple phone calls later Max had me enrolled at his alma mater.
I didn’t do anything to earn a spot on a D1 team or the friendship of guys like Hunter Davenport. Someone owed someone a favor and I got to walk onto the team as a junior. I’m an okay hockey player, maybe even pretty good sometimes. Less frequently I might even be better than good. But how many other guys were better than good and didn’t have connections? I have no doubt that there was someone else more deserving, someone who doesn’t come asking for handouts from their friends to buy off the guy blackmailing him because he robbed his own family.
That’s the thing about running from yourself—you’re always running straight at the problem.
After I leave Hunter’s place, I just drive. I’ve got nowhere in mind, and I end up at the coast, sitting in the sand and watching the waves. I close my eyes to the sun setting at my back and listen to the sound that saved me once. The sound that normally centers me, connects me to whatever it is we call a soul, a conscience. But the ocean isn’t helping me tonight.
I drive back to Hastings and wait for some voice inside me to offer up a better choice, the right choice, but I’m alone in my head.
Somehow I find myself at Taylor’s apartment. I park the Jeep and sit there for nearly an hour watching the texts fill my screen.
TAYLOR: Getting dinner.
TAYLOR: Going to bed early.
TAYLOR: See you tomorrow for lunch?
I lean toward the glove box and pop it open, rummaging until I find the small tin Foster shoved in there the other night. I pull out the rolled joint, find a lighter in the center console. I light up and exhale a plume of smoke out the open window. Knowing my luck, a cop’ll drive by this very moment, but I don’t care. My nerves need some relief.
KAI: Got it yet?
KAI: Get at me
I take another deep drag, blow out another smoke cloud. My thoughts start to get away from me, almost developing a mind of their own. I’m so deep in my own head, I don’t know how to dig myself out. You hear from people who have near-death experiences that their whole life flashed before their eyes, and here I am, living and breathing, yet the same surreal phenomenon is happening to me.
Or maybe you’re just fucking high, man. Yeah, maybe that.
Another text messages appears.
KAI: Don’t try me bro
It’s almost funny, right? You see a kid across the street. Sit near him in school. Piss off the neighbors doing skateboard tricks in the middle of the street. Get bloody noses and scraped elbows. Then you’re learning how to hold a joint, how to inhale. Daring each other to talk to that cute girl with the fake lip piercing. Giving each other safety pin piercings in the stairwell behind the school auditorium. Stuffing beer bottles down your pants in the 7-Eleven. Cutting through chain-link fences and wedging yourself through boarded up windows. Exploring the catacombs of a decaying city, thirty-year-old darkened shopping malls where the fountains are dry but the roofs are always leaking. Skateboarding past the hollowed-out carcasses of Radio Shacks and Wet Seals. Learning to tag. Learning to tag better. Getting jumped behind the liquor store. Joyriding. Running from the cops and hopping fences.
I take another pull of the joint, then another, as my entire childhood races through my mind. Nothing shapes us like our friends. Family, definitely. Families fuck us up by an order of magnitude. But friends, we collect them like bricks and nails and drywall. They’re pieces in the blueprint, but that blueprint is always under renovation. We’re all deciding toward who we were always meant to be, choosing, mutating, growing into ourselves. Friends are the qualities we want to absorb. What we want to be.