continues, proving she doesn’t care I’m silently informing her to quit. “Don’t make me chase her for you because that would be embarrassing. Embarrassing for you. Not me. I’ll have to tell her you sent me, and because you’re a wuss, I’ll have to ask her out for you like we’re in sixth grade.”
I find myself missing the middle of nowhere. Trees, bonfires, mosquitoes, mud, bears...company that didn’t talk.
“She’s out of my league.” I haven’t spoken truer words in months. She was beautiful. She was poised. She was a cool breeze after a hot humid rain. She was that first ray of sunshine in the dark woods. She was the smell of honeysuckle in bloom. She was the first damn thing that made me forget who I am and what I’ve gotten myself into over the past year. That means she was out of my league.
Granted, she was out of my league before I was arrested. Everything from her manicured nails, to her brand-name clothes, to her high-end purse, to the way she held herself said she was about a hundred times higher on the social and economic spectrum than me, but the person I was before would have made the play because I was smooth—just like my father.
“She is not out of your league.” Holiday hounds me. “She smiled at you. I know when a girl likes what she sees, and she liked what she saw in you.”
Tension builds in my neck. Yeah, the girl smiled, but she didn’t know what she was smiling at. I’m a pretty façade on the outside. On the inside, I’m a house of cards teetering on a bad foundation.
Axle throws an arm around Holiday’s shoulder and edges her away. “Let’s get some food. Drix is going to have to talk soon, and we don’t want him to do it on an empty stomach. Passing out on TV isn’t a great first impression.”
Wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?
“Hamburger?” Axle calls as he walks backward for the food truck. “With everything?”
I nod. My brother knows me...at least who I used to be.
“I’m agreeing with Holiday on this,” comes a deep rough voice to my right. “Pathetic.”
I do a slow head turn toward my best friend and cock an eyebrow at an even slower rate.
He smirks at my expression. “We picked a game we always let you win, and you didn’t even try.”
They picked that game because I used to kick their asses at it, and they were trying to get me to be the old Drix. But I only offer one sloppy lift of my shoulder because I don’t know how to explain that it’s tough to engage.
“It’s creepy hanging with you,” Dominic continues. “It’s like you’re the Walking Dead. I’m half expecting someone to jump out with a samurai sword and slice out your heart.”
“Brain,” Kellen corrects as she adjusts the Spider-Man beanie on her head. It’s a hundred degrees outside, and she wears that hat like it’s thirty below. “They’d take out his brain.”
“That, too.”
Dominic and Kellen stand side by side. Siblings who look and act nothing alike, except for their attachment to me and my family.
Kellen’s barely sixteen, the baby of our group. She’s blond braids with black bows at the ties, and she wears her beloved fitted black Captain America T-shirt and worn jeans with rips. It’s weird seeing her with lip gloss and eye shadow. I’m betting that would be Holiday’s doing, but at least Kellen’s somewhat the same.
Since we were kids playing baseball in the street, Kellen’s been a sucker for a comic book hero. It gives the possibility to her that the world might make sense. Good guys in one corner. Bad guys in the other. It’s how Kellen found her way to survive in a very gray household.
Something about her makes me feel protective. Maybe it’s how Dominic hovers over her. Maybe it’s because Kellen still has the limp from a bad bone break she got when she was eight. Maybe because playing hero to her might make me redeemable.
“I’m the Walking Dead because I didn’t play a game?” I ask.
Dominic jerks his thumb toward the game. “Because you didn’t hit on the girl.”
The girl no longer needs to be part of our conversation. I liked her. She liked me. I’m on parole for a crime I didn’t commit. A plus B doesn’t equal C in this equation.
“And you only played after we lost. How much did we lose? Three games, five dollars a shot. That would be...”
“Fifteen dollars,” Kellen says, the math freak that she is. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the hell out of her for it. I’ll also admit her nonstop ticking brain scares me. Someone that smart is going to take over the world—in a lab-coat, stroking-a-cat, manic-laughter type of way.
“Fifteen dollars,” Dominic echoes. “Times five.”
“Seventy-five dollars,” Kellen pops in.
“Seventy-five dollars in total. Just to get you to play.”
“I never said I wanted to play,” I say.
“But I wanted that snake. That girl is walking away with my prizes. You’ve been gone a year, and you can’t help a brother out? That would have completed my collection.”
“He needed the pink one,” Kellen adds.
“See, my world is now incomplete.”
Dominic grins, and I can’t help the automatic grin in return. It feels strange on my face, especially when joking with him used to be as natural as breathing.
Where Kellen makes me feel like I need to clear the path, Dominic is a category five tornado; a broad-shouldered brick wall. He has to be for the neighborhood we grew up in. He has to be because his home is even worse, and he considers himself the protector of him and his sister.
The deep scar across his forehead tells one of many war stories. So does the long one on his arm from a surgery when he was ten. He has black hair, blue eyes and is a good guy to have in a tough spot. My best friend is cool on the outside, but deep down he’s two pieces of uranium always on a collision course. He’s volatile. Too many emotions and nowhere safe to store them. They stew until there’s an explosion, and Dominic hates explosions. He hates fallouts. Most of all—he hates tight spaces.
But he loves a guitar, loves music, and from all the letters and emails he sent while I was gone, he loves me. Kellen, Dominic and I are more than friends. We’re family, and I’ve missed my family.
“You let us down,” Dominic continues. “We got beat by some little blonde, and she was a sore winner. And the worst part? I didn’t hit on her because she smiled at you, you smiled at her, and I thought you were settling in and returning to playing the game.”
“You didn’t hit on her because she would have laid you out flat with her no.” I mock a jab to his jaw. “That girl was fireworks.”
Kellen smiles at the dig, Dominic snorts, and a heaviness avalanches onto me. There’s a pause they’re waiting for me to fill because that’s what I used to do: announce what’s next, but I don’t have a next. This should be easier than what it is, and I hate that it’s not.
“Dominic,”
