“No, not really.” I felt like punching the wall. “So you want to be friends?”
“That seems like it would be best, right?” She looked away quickly. “You don’t do relationships, and I don’t sleep with guys who can’t stand me or my family and won’t tell me why.”
“So you’ll just find another guy to fuck, huh?” I glared at her, jealousy seeping into my voice. “I thought you weren’t easy?”
“Give it a rest, Logan.” She sighed. “You can’t have it both ways.”
“Whatever.” I didn’t need this shit. “I’m going.”
“See ya.” She walked into her room. “Close the front door on your way out,” she called out to me.
“Fine.” I glared at no one and ran down the stairs, pissed. I slammed the door as I left the house. The sun was rising and I ran to the car as annoyed as I had been when I had arrived a few hours earlier. What the f**k was Maddie playing at? Was this some sort of sick joke? I didn’t understand girls and had never cared before. They were good for a night or two, but I had bigger worries than their feelings. And a girl had never gotten under my skin like Maddie had. I turned the ignition and pulled out of Manor Road as quickly as possible.
“I’m coming!” I yelled into the phone as Vincent called me again.
“Dude, I gotta go to take my exam soon.” Vincent sounded annoyed.
“I forgot. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” I threw my phone on the passenger seat, and raced down the streets, not caring if a cop was waiting to pull me over for speeding. I sped home as if I was at the Indy 500, and when I pulled into the driveway, I was more upset than when I had left.
I ran up the stairs and to Vincent’s room and pushed his door open. “Here are your keys.” I threw them at him as he lay there in bed. He just stared at me with a worried expression. “Good luck with the test.”
“Thanks.” He nodded, and I left his room wordlessly. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door before turning on the shower. “Fuck you, Maddie Wright,” I cursed her under my breath. “Friends.” I rubbed the shampoo into my hair and closed my eyes. I needed to feel like I was in control or I was going to lose it. I stood there for a few minutes, letting the hot water beat down on me, and then stepped out of the shower calmly. I had bigger problems than Maddie Wright. I needed to come up with rent money in a little over a week or I knew we were going to get evicted. I walked to my room and sat on my bed, waiting for an answer to come to me. Praying that somehow I could figure it out. I’d always been able to figure it out before.
“Hey, Logan.” Jared knocked on the door and walked in. “Sorry about last night.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I wanted to give you this.” He dropped five hundred-dollar bills on the bed next to me. “I thought it could help.”
“Where did you get this kind of money?” I looked up at him and frowned. “Please tell me you haven’t been dealing with Joey?”
“Joey didn’t make me do anything.” Jared’s eyes flared at me. “I don’t know what you have against him, but he doesn’t control me.”
“Joey is bad news, Jared.” I shook my head as I held the cash in my hands. “I don’t want to get into it, but he’s not to be trusted.”
“You know the only people I trust are you and Vincent.” Jared sighed. “Joey is my friend. He does my bidding, trust me, bro.”
“What are you doing to get this kind of money?”
“We bet on the horses.”
“The horses? How old are you? Sixty?”
“Joey’s old man does it. He knows a few guys that are trainers. We get some tips, who’s looking good, who’s not. What jockeys are excited, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know about this, Jared, gambling’s not a good thing to get into.”
“And stealing cars is?” Jared’s eyes bore into mine. “I love you, bro, but you can’t do this much longer. Things are getting worse.”
“It’ll be fine. Vincent will get his degree and you will get your degree and we’ll be fine.” My voice held conviction; it had to be fine.
“And what about Dad?” Jared’s voice was hoarse. “I want to leave, Logan. I don’t want to deal with this shit anymore. He’s a f**king drunk. He’s not going to change and I’m not going to put up with his bullshit anymore. I’ve had enough.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Until he hits you again or, God forbid, gets a gun.”
“He’s our dad, Jared.”
“He needs to go to a facility or something. He needs to get help.”
“I know.” I sighed and stood up. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Where did you go this morning?” His eyes held a question, and as I stared at him, I knew I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“I went on a drive.”
“To?”
“Manor Road.” The words slipped out of my mouth bitterly.
“Why?”
“I wanted to see the house.”
“It’s been a while, eh?” Jared sat down on the bed and I sat on the chair in the corner. “Do you think Dad even thinks about it anymore?”
“I’m sure.” We stared at each other for a while and we both thought back to our childhoods and our weekly drives out to Manor Road.
“Why did you go?”
“I met a girl.” I sighed. “And I mean just met, so don’t go getting any ideas. We kinda hit it off, I thought she was cool. Hot, but a bit kooky, you know how some girls can be.”
“Trust me, I know.” Jared laughed and I joined him. Jared was a player, but a charismatic one. Girls loved him on sight, and they never seemed to stop calling him, or wanting to be with him. I stared at my brother and his too-long wavy black hair and I shook my head.
“You need to get a haircut.”
“Don’t change the subject, tell me about the girl.”
“I took her for a ride, we had some fun, but turns out she’s a rich kid.”
“Oh.” Jared made a face.
“Yeah, exactly. And to make matters worse. It turns out she’s Maddison Wright.”
“The mayor’s daughter?” Jared gave me a shocked look. I sighed inside. He was going to play the game with me.
“Yeah, she goes by Maddie, though.”
“Maddie, as in mad in the head?”
“Yeah.” I laughed and thought about Maddie and her forward nature. “I wouldn’t be surprised if her name has rubbed off on her.”
“So, you like her?” Jared cocked his head at me and leaned forward.
“Did you not hear me? Her name is Maddison Wright.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Do you think I would date the mayor’s daughter?” I rolled my eyes. “Granted, she’s pretty and dyn**ite in bed.” I laughed. “Do not repeat that.”
“Maybe you should date her.” Jared sat back. “Maybe this is the way.”
“The way for what?” I squinted at him.
“Maybe this is how we can get vengeance for Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“So-o-o,” Jared took a deep breath, “I met Maddie.” He paused and looked at me.
“Continue.” I held my breath. I had known as soon as she told me she had met one of my brothers with Joey, that it had to have been Jared.
“She knows Joey. I guess they went to school together at some point, and she is good friends with his sister. And every summer they hang out, and they go to college together somewhere in Boston.” He looked at me anxiously, and I gave him a look to hurry it up.
“So anyways, we were hanging out at Joey’s place one day, and Maddie was there. And Joey’s sister was like, ‘This is Logan’s brother,’ and she went all googly-eyed and asked me a bunch of questions about you.”
“She did?” I frowned. “But why? She doesn’t know me.”
“I guess you were the pin-up boy of all the girls in River Valley. She had some crush on you. And so, I kinda told her where you’d be yesterday.”
“Dude, why would you do that? What if she had called the police on me or told her dad?”
“She’s way too into you to do anything like that. She has a serious crush on you, bro. Like, she could be a stalker. She was going on and on and on.”
“That’s weird.” I made a face, but inside I felt a fire light up inside of me. So maybe she didn’t just hook up with every guy she met.
“So anyways, I was going to tell her to f**k off, but then I thought, this was the perfect opportunity. She’s the mayor’s only child, and supposedly, he is really, really overprotective, and she’s the apple of his eye. And I thought, what perfect retribution for Dad, if the mayor’s daughter is caught up with a Martelli. You could date her for a little bit, and then just ditch her. It would devastate this girl. She thinks she is in love with you or something.”
“She doesn’t even know me to love me.” My head was spinning with all the information he was giving me.
“I know, bro, she’s psycho. Though, I mean, she is super hot.” Jared grinned at me, and I resisted the urge to smack the smile off of his face.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“I wanted the two of you to meet naturally. You’re a shitty ass actor bro, sorry to say, but you are. So I wanted your first meeting to be natural, and to see if you hit it off great.” He laughed. “And it looks like you guys hit it off.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the wall, my heart racing. “We hit it off.”
“So, what do you think? You willing to date her to pay her and her family back for what the mayor did to Dad?”
“I don’t know.” I was hesitant, even though that had already crossed my mind when I had been in her house. Hadn’t I made love to her in her parents’ bedroom as some sort of sick revenge? I felt my stomach knotting, and a dart of pain shot through me as I pictured the look of fear in her eyes as I’d held her down.
“We don’t owe them anything, Logan.” Jared stared into my eyes bleakly. “He ruined Dad’s life, and ours. He cost us our childhood and our mother.”
“I know.” I nodded. “I just don’t know that we can take that out on Maddie.”
“We’re paying for the sins of our father.” Jared’s voice was agitated. “She should pay for the sins of her father.”
“I don’t know.” My voice trailed off. I no longer knew how I felt about Maddie, everything was so confused in my head, and the hatred that had existed for everyone in the Wright family was now hazy.
“He ruined our lives, Logan.” Jared jumped up. “This is our chance to pay it back.”
“Revenge isn’t always the way.” I sighed and stared at him. “Let me think about it.”
“You want to think about it? Go downstairs and look at Dad; look at all the beer cans in the living room. Go try and have a conversation with him. He could have been something. You know that, I know that, Mom knew that. And it was all ruined.”
“Yeah.” I nodded and thought about my dad and his life. A life that had been diverted off-course because of Mayor Wright.
“Think about it, Logan.” Jared walked out of the room. “And keep the money, use it to pay the rent.”
“I, uh.” I looked at him gratefully and sighed. “When did you grow up?”
“A long time ago, bro.” He smiled at me. “A long time ago.”
He walked out the door, and I sat back on the bed and lay back and closed my eyes. I could picture my mother’s smile and the loving look in her eyes as she had played with me, Vincent, and Jared as kids. She had made sure to tell us she loved us every day. As we got older, we used to squirm and blush, embarrassed at her declarations of love, but what I wouldn’t give for her to tell me she loved me one more time. She died within three weeks of getting diagnosed with cancer. There was nothing they could do. That’s what the doctors had said. The cancer had spread, and even a mastectomy wouldn’t have helped at that point. She should have been going for yearly checkups, they said. But we couldn’t afford yearly checkups. My parents barely got by. The only income my dad could get was from the cars he stole, and that always depended on how much money Marty gave him and didn’t win back in a poker game. My mom had died from cancer and nothing had ever been the same in our lives again. Not that everything had been great before then. It hadn’t been, but there had been hope. Hope that my dad would get over his bitterness and try and make something out of his life. But his hatred of the mayor had consumed him. And he had every right to hate him. My eyes popped open and I stared at the ceiling as the bitter poison of hate ran through my veins.
Mayor James Wright, or just James, as he had been called back in the day, had gone to school with my dad. They were both in the same grade and they were best friends. James came from a rich, prominent family, and my dad’s parents were hardworking Italian immigrants with little money but lots of ambition. Their greatest wish for my dad had been a top quality education and a job as a lawyer or a doctor. My dad had been really smart and had done well in school. He had been a handsome man as well, so he had done well with the ladies. He seemingly had the best life, aside from being poor, but that would have eventually changed, because he was smart and there was hope that he would get a scholarship to go to college. My dad signed up with James to take some college entrance exam and they both took it at the River Valley Library with about thirty other students. But the day after the test, it was discovered that some of the tests and answers had been stolen. Someone anonymously reported that my dad had stolen the exams. The school board and the colleges all believed the report because my dad had near perfect scores. So he was kicked out of school. But that hadn’t stopped him: he had decided to get a GED so he could at least get into one college; even if he didn’t get a scholarship, he could get financial aid. And he started tutoring students to make extra money, and that was when he met Mom. He had fallen in love with her right away, but so had James. James made a play for her, but my dad won her heart right away. Things were looking up for him; he got another opportunity to take a college entrance exam, but the night before he was to take the test, the police took him in for questioning. A car had been stolen, and he had been identified as the thief. My dad thought there had been a mistake. He didn’t understand why or how two such huge and horrible incidents had been pinned on him. But then he found out it was James. It had been James all along. James wasn’t as smart as dad, and he had stolen the tests. He had also been mad about being rejected, so he had stolen a car and left some of dad’s belongings in it. He’d gotten his cousin to pretend to have seen dad stealing the car. Because James was from a prominent family, the police believed everything he had said easily.