Chapter 28

A shrink would classify my behavior of this past week as self-destructive. Or at least that’s what Hunter’s girlfriend accused me of doing today, and Demi is halfway to being a shrink, so she’s legit. Apparently she ran into Taylor on campus earlier, prompting her to text me something along the lines of, “The fuck did you do to her???”

Which I can only take to mean I’ve managed to ruin Taylor, too. It’s nothing more than what I expected would happen. Exactly what I deserve. Can’t keep spraying perfume on the pile of crap and pretending it doesn’t stink.

I wanted to call her. I drove to Taylor’s apartment after the beach last weekend but couldn’t make myself go inside. I couldn’t lie to her face again and tell her everything’s fine. I’d rather have her think I’m just another asshole jock than know what I really am.

We’ve met up a couple times since then, grabbing coffee between classes on campus, but I’ve avoided her place and haven’t asked her over to mine. The coffee dates are already awkward enough, a solid hour where I can’t think of anything to say and she’s afraid to scare me off. And every text she sends wondering what’s wrong drives the knife a little deeper.

If I were a better person I’d tell her the truth. I’d come clean and let her look at me with those beautiful turquoise eyes full of betrayal and disgust. Let her call me a pathetic loser and watch her finally understand what I’d been too chickenshit to tell her all along: that she deserves better.

TAYLOR: You wanna come over tonight?

But I’m a coward. I keep telling myself that once I get rid of Kai, things with me and Taylor can go back to normal. I’ll make an excuse and she’ll reluctantly forgive me and then I can spend the next month winning her back.

Except every time I see the question mark at the end of her messages it gets harder to imagine facing her again.

Another text flashes on my screen. This time, it’s from Kai.

KAI: You’re wasting time…

I turn the phone over so I don’t have to look at the screen anymore. It’s Monday morning and I shouldn’t still be lying in bed. My philosophy lecture starts in less than an hour. Although I’m doing plenty of philosophizing in my head, so maybe I should just skip. Too much introspection can’t be good for the soul.

I stare up at my bedroom ceiling and draw a ragged breath. Then I drag my lazy ass out of bed and force myself to get dressed.

My phone vibrates again and I pretend not to notice. It’s either Taylor or Kai. Or maybe my mom.

Right now the only person it hurts more to disappoint than Taylor is my mother. I can’t call her asking for that kind of money. I thought I could muster up the balls to call Max directly, feed him some bullshit story about one of my teammates getting into trouble and not wanting to worry Mom about it. Or I could say I wrecked someone’s car. But then I pictured the face he’d make.

Hitting him up for cash would only provide him with more confirmation of what he’d always believed about me: that I was trash, always would be trash, and no amount of money, distance, or education would change that.

So I have no choice. After class, I show up at Hunter’s place and tell him we need to talk.

Demi’s on the couch beside him, shooting me laser eyes. I’ve interrupted them watching some crime documentary on TV, but I know that’s not why she’s glowering at me.

“Don’t tell Taylor I’m here,” I ask her, my voice rough. “Please.”

She inhales and rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to tell you what to do—”

“Good,” I say, then turn on my heel and duck into the kitchen, where I grab a beer from the fridge.

“But you shouldn’t string her along,” Demi finishes the second I return to the living room.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “I’m not.”

“Does she know that?”

I assume it’s a rhetorical question, and if it’s not, doesn’t matter. I didn’t come here to talk to Demi about Taylor.

I take a long swig of the beer and nod at an uncomfortable-looking Hunter. “Can we talk in your room?”

“Sure.”

“I like Taylor!” Demi calls after me as I follow Hunter to the doorway. “Put on your big-boy pants and make things right with her, Conor Edwards.”

“Sorry,” a rueful Hunter says as his girl continues to chastise me when I’m not even in the room.

In Hunter’s bedroom, he takes a seat at his desk while I lean against the door, picking at the label on my bottle. He knows me well enough to get something’s up. Hunter’s my best friend on the team. Hell, probably my best friend anywhere. A week ago, Taylor was right there next to him.

“What’s going on?” he asks, watching me for clues. “This about you and Taylor?”

“Not exactly.”

“What’s the deal there? Demi keeps asking if you two broke up, and I don’t know what to tell her other than to mind her business, but you know Demi. She’ll bite my nuts off before she lets me tell her what to do.”

“No, haven’t broken up.” Though it’s getting harder to see much difference. “It’s nothing to do with Taylor. It’s, uhh…” I trail off, suddenly feeling foolish.

This is harder than I thought it’d be. Hunter is my only out. His family’s loaded—the kind of loaded that makes Max’s mansion look like the servant’s quarters—and he’s got access to money.

The whole way over here, I thought I could be cool about it, casual. Hey man, spot me a few Gs. No biggie. But this hurts. I don’t think I’ve been so humiliated in my life, so completely demoralized. Still, I’ve got no choice. It’s this, or let Kai tell Max what I did.

And I can’t do that to my mom.

“Con. You’re freaking me out a little. What’s going on?”

I push away from the door, needing to keep my feet moving, like they’re powering my brain. “Look, I’m gonna be straight with you. I need ten grand and I can’t tell you why. I promise I’m not into it with a loan shark or moving drugs or anything. There’s just this thing I gotta take care of and I can’t go to my family. I wouldn’t come to you if I had any other choice.” I drop to the edge of his bed and sit, dragging my hands through my hair. “I promise I’ll pay you back. To be honest it probably won’t be quickly, but I’ll get you every dime if it takes me the rest of my life.”

“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.

I exhale a cloud of smoke. The thing is, we forget that our friends have designs of their own. That we’re just pieces in their blueprint. We’re constantly at cross-purposes. They’ve got families of their own. Their own orders of magnitude in damage. Brothers who handed them that first joint, first swig of beer.

I look back, and it’s obvious Kai and I were always going to end up here. Because a part of me needed him, wanted to be like him. But then we reached the gut check moment—that sense of survival that makes some of us afraid of heights and some of us jump out of airplanes. It kicked in for me, and it was like fight or flight. An innate animal instinct that Kai would be the death of me, if I let him.

So I ran, and I changed my life—for a time. But maybe people aren’t ever capable of changing once that foundation has been laid. Maybe Kai and I were always going to be each other’s destruction. Right now I’m afraid of heights and he’s stopped wearing a parachute. He’s leaning out of the plane and I’ve got one hand on his shirt and as soon as I let go, he flies. Only, he pulls me with him, and we both plummet.

I flick the joint out the window and reach for my phone.

ME: Friday night. I’ll meet you.

KAI: See you then

I don’t know what happens after this or how I come back from it. If things between Hunter and I will change. What happens when I go home to California and sleep in that house and have to look my mother in the eye.

Then again, I found a way last time, so maybe I should stop kidding myself that lying doesn’t come naturally and guilt is permanent. Maybe I should stop pretending that if I feel bad it means I’m not completely defective. Hell, maybe I should stop feeling bad at all and embrace indifference. Accept that I’m not, and never was, a good person.

When I get home, I head upstairs to my bedroom and text Taylor to blow off lunch tomorrow.

And the day after.

Because avoidance is easier.