Part I
Chapter 1
Andrew Harper, Age 16
Normally, I don’t care what clothes I wear when I leave for school in the early morning. I spend my days with people I don’t really know. Most of my freshman year of high school was on a college campus—my curse for being smart.
I say “curse” because unlike my older brother, Owen, I don’t have normal friends. I don’t get to go to high school dances or hang out at football games. Not that Owen ever did, but he could have if he wanted to. I get to go to what’s called the Excel Program. I’m the lucky one learning physics and advanced calculus. The trade-off is I’ll probably be accepted into any college I want, get any job I want, and find the entire process to be easy.
The curse—I’m alone.
My friends were Owen’s friends: always three years older; always inviting me to things out of pity; always keeping me out of trouble, but just out of its reach. Protecting me. That was the line. My life was on the periphery. I heard it from Owen since the day I started grade school, and my mother echoed those words whenever I would protest I couldn’t go to the party with Owen or hang out in the woods with him and his friends.
“He’s only protecting you,” she’d say.
Protecting me.
Choking me.
When Owen graduated, so did his friends. My small sliver of a social life evaporated piece by piece as people went off to college or to find jobs in some town that wasn’t small. Then my mom sold our house to help pay for my grandfather’s care, and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a vacant unit on one side and neighbors in their sixties on the other.
Sophomore year is shaping up to be more isolating. My only friend my age, a guy I barely tolerated named Matt who I met during a torturous year when both of our mothers decided putting us in Boy Scouts was a good idea, moved to Guam. Not the next town over. Not California. Not any place I could convince my mother was safe enough for me to visit—escape to. The fucker moved to Guam.
I used to go to Matt’s house and spend hours playing video games. We didn’t talk when we played, which is what made my friendship with Matt work. Now, I go to school, then come home. I study and have dinner with my mom and her boyfriend, Dwayne Chessman, a man we’ve known for years. He teaches at the high school—the one I don’t get to go to because I’m so smart.
In the evening, I walk to the rink in the middle of Old Town, to a place called the Ice Palace, and I skate until my feet have blisters. I sprint and stop so many times I wear paths in the ice—so deep, they need to fill them with water when I leave. This is the only place I can go to feel something. On weekends, there are enough guys there to get a game going, but during the week, when I can come, it’s usually only me. I’ve always skated, but when my brother Owen left, I became obsessed with hockey. Seems the skills I lack at throwing a ball are made up for in my ability to move a puck. That, and I’m incredibly fast. It’s not the competition. I couldn’t give a shit about winning something. For me, it’s the rawness, the hunt—chasing something, taking something from someone, hurting them to get it, and not caring how they look lying on the ice in my wake. I don’t operate under those morals anywhere else. But I think, maybe, there’s a dark part of me that needs it. And I need to keep it on the ice.
Usually, though, I’m alone out there. So instead, I push myself until I can barely breathe, sometimes until my chest burns and I vomit. I push until Gary, who cleans up the joint, is coughing under his breath, leaning on the exit as he taps on his watch—his subtle hint to me to get my ass off the ice so he can go home.
My feet are sore today, but that’s the last thing I’m going to remember. This is the day so many things are going to change—the day I start caring about what I wear when I leave my apartment in the morning. Illinois passed a law that every high school student needs to take PE, even the smart students who don’t go to a real high school. I protested at first, dreading the bus ride I’d have to endure, the awkward blue uniform, and my assured complete-lack-of-allies for dodgeball. But those anxieties are escaping me now. The second I broke through the athletic department door, I saw her sitting against the wall of the PE office, her legs outstretched, the blue fabric of her perfect dress tucked underneath her knees. The vision of her hits me harder as my eyes scan their way up. Her hair is the color of mahogany, and it twists in spirals, like a tornado rushing down her shoulders and spine; a dark storm against her cream skin.
I sit opposite her, sliding down against the wall, stretching my legs out until the soles of my shoes tap the bottom of hers. I do this on purpose. I want to see her eyes. Her gaze comes up quickly, and she pulls her feet in fast, careful to tuck the bottom of her dress underneath more tightly, hiding her modesty. Her eyes are gray, a dark gray, like charcoal.