Page 11 of Dark and Dangerous

Dad waits all of two heartbeats before mumbling, “Weird kid.”

I release a long, drawn-out breath and shake my head. Say nothing. Because I don’t think there’s anything weird about Jace. He could’ve kept ignoring my existence like he’s done since I moved in, but he didn’t. He made the effort, walked his ass over here, and dropped a horribly awkward truth in order to what? Protect me?

Yeah… there’s nothing weird about Jace Rivera.

If anything, there’s something honorable about him.

6

Harlow

I came across this video once, of a woman in Brazil who’d just survived a horrendous car crash. She was the passenger and, according to witnesses, the car she was in was traveling at insanely high speeds and collided with a concrete pillar, ripping the vehicle in literal half.

In the video, you can see the driver’s side of the car completely gone, leaving the woman, still in the passenger’s seat, visible to bystanders. That’s not even the craziest part of the story. The woman, who had gone into extreme shock, sat for a moment, then reached into her handbag, took out a mirror, and proceeded to calmly apply her makeup.

Now, I’m not comparing my life to a car crash, but also?—

Maybe I am.

And it has nothing to do with the crash itself, but it’s about the woman who survived the tragedy.

Only I’m not that woman.

My dad is.

And over the weekend, I watched him slowly wake up from the shock of the past five months and face a version of reality he’d been toodistressed to notice before. Swear, there’s nothing more heartbreaking than watching the first man you ever loved, the man you look up to, the man you saw as a superhero, fall completely apart, because it suddenly dawned on him that no matter how much he loved the people most important to him, how hard he worked to give those people everything they wanted, he couldn’t save them.

In the space of five months, my dad had lost his son, his wife, his house, his friends, and the life he’d envisioned for his future. The only thing he had left was his daughter—his seventeen-year-old weed-addicted daughter, who was caught screwing her dead brother’s basketball coach.

On his couch.

By his wife.

What a fucking consolation prize I am.

And to top it all off, the reason we left Dallas in the first place (the shame of my promiscuity, as my mother calls it) has followed us five hours away. I always knew that it would. Just like I knew that packing all our shit and creating a “new beginning” somewhere wouldn’t solve all our problems. I just wish…

Sigh.

I wish it wasn’t Jace Rivera who ripped the blindfold from my father’s eyes and forced him to face the cold, hard truth. And I wish, more than anything, that I didn’t care what Jace Rivera knew about me or what he thought of me or what?—

“I don’t get it,” Sammy muses, and I slowly trail my gaze to her.

“Get what?” I ask.

“The appeal of Jace Rivera.” She pushes her lunch tray to the side and peers over her shoulder. “You’ve been staring at him for a solid five minutes, and I just don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing to get,” I mumble, looking past her and back to Jace. He’s in his usual black on black, sitting at the end of one of the cafeteria tables, focused on his Nintendo Switch or whatever gaming thingy he has. He’s leaning back in his chair, his legs kicked up on the tabletop, ankles crossed, too cool for school. A strand of dark hair fallsforward, over his brow, and he flicks his head back, chewing his lip as his thumbs mash at the controller. “He’s nice to look at, that’s all.”

“He’s so weird,” Sammy says, and my instant response is to glare at her.

She giggles, but I don’t know why it’s funny. I also don’t know why I have such a visceral reaction to what she said. Why I feel the need to protect him the way he’s protected me. “Why is he weird?” I ask.

“Look at him,” Sammy says, but I already am. “He’s a grown-ass man so obsessed with childish video games that he hasn’t looked up once. And you know how I know? Because if he did, he would’ve caught you staring at him, and he hasn’t. He has no girlfriend, no real friends… The guy’s your textbook definition of a loner, and yet, somehow, he’s the most popular guy in the school.” She raises her hand between us, as if I was about to speak. I wasn’t. “And I get it. It’s because of basketball,” she adds, rolling her eyes. “And speaking of basketball, how the fuck did he get to where he is? Because it’s not like he spends his free time practicing.” That she knows of. “He doesn’t even like his teammates, let alone do any form of team bonding, and did I mention the college scouts, Harlow? Because they exist, and they circle him like sharks out in the ocean. There are Division I universities willing to give their left nutsack to have Dopey McDreary Depression Boy play on their team. And you know why it’s weird? Because he doesn’t even try. He’s going to end up in the NBfrickenA, and he couldn’t give fewer shits about it.”

I wait a beat, making sure she’s done babbling before saying, “Just because he’s good at something doesn’t mean it has to be his entire life.”

“Valid point,” she’s quick to say. “I hear your argument, and this is my counter…”

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