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.

29

Taylor

I forgot what a hassle the Spring Gala is every year. Friday morning I wake up late and have to scramble out of the apartment. From then it’s like the day is on fast-forward.

Spill coffee on myself sprinting to class. Didn’t bring the right notebook. Pop quiz. Haul ass to another class. Vending machine eats my dollar. Starving. Rush to Kappa to meet Sasha. Run to salon; they’re an hour behind. Get lunch while we wait. Get our hair done. Back to the Kappa house. She does my makeup while I do her nails. She does her makeup while I steam our dresses. And finally—collapse on the floor until Abigail starts stomping through the house shouting that the setup crew needs help at the venue.

Now Sasha and I are in the banquet hall hooking up the rented sound system with her laptop. Our heads are dropping bobby pins while we crawl around on the floor in our sweats before we have to run back to Kappa house to take a baby wipe shower and get our dresses.

“Don’t we have pledges for this or something?” Sasha gripes while we haul another massive speaker inside from the loading dock because the dolly has a flat tire.

“I think the freshmen are in the kitchen folding napkins.”

“Seriously?” she says. We drop the speaker in place and take a moment to catch our breath. “Shit, I’ll go sit on my ass and fold fucking origami. Get that lacrosse chick out here to throw a couple of these on her back.”