Page 1 of Risking it All

Chapter one

Relic

Idoubted anyone in this godforsaken therapy group ever truthfully answered a question.

Around the room we went, the five of us in a circle, exchanging pleasantries as deep as a puddle on a broken sidewalk. How are you today? Fine. How has your week been? Fine. Anyone have anything they want to share? Silence.

We weren’t a talkative group, which was good with me. Sharing and feelings were a double-edged switchblade.

Sucked to be me, though. Thanks to a court order, I was stuck doing this therapy group that met at my high school until I graduated, even in the summer. With it being June now, that meant I’d had one full year of this torture.

After our pathetic say-hi-to-your-neighbor moment, our therapist gave us a writing assignment and some decided to do it. Others, like me, decided to do nothing. We sat crammed in the closet-of-a-room that served as our mental health counselor’s office. The school’s thermostat had to have been be set tothe temperature of the surface of the sun, and the two floor fans didn’t help the sweltering conditions of the boxed-in, no-window room. Even the school’s therapy dog, a golden Labrador named Zeus, had no love to give as he lay stretched out in the middle of the circle, twitching with his happy puppy dreams.

In my back jeans’ pocket, my cell buzzed, and, annoyed, I rolled my neck. My older sister, Lyra, had been sending me a stream of texts, and I wasn’t in the mood. Most adults sent texts to remind the teenager to take out the garbage, do homework, feed the dog. Nope, not me. Lyra’s main concern? I wasn’t “being seventeen enough.”

The text that kicked off her tirade:Marsh said there’s a party at Brayden Gentry’s house tomorrow night. You need to go.

Not like she had any idea who Brayden Gentry was or how much of a dick he was to the human race. As for Marsh, I was going to kick my best friend’s ass the next time I saw him for conspiring against me with my sister.

Me:No.

Lyra:If you don’t go to that party, I will change the locks on the door. Stop being so responsible and wasting your youth. It’s exhausting.

Wasting my youth? What a load of shit. I was born old.

I slouched in the chair, crossed my arms, and kicked out my long legs, avoiding Zeus’s tail. I scanned our ranks, uncertain which of us in our group were here by choice and which of us, like me, had been forced.

Me? My plea deal had landed me here. Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor and had movies made about his life. I took a five-dollar bill out of an unlocked BMW and everyone bent themselves out of shape. The judge asked if the five dollars was worth it. Yes? No? Heroes were all about perspective.

“Two more minutes,” called our therapist, Zuri, from her desk in the corner of the room. She glanced up from her laptop whereshe’d been furiously typing, no doubt informing her superiors how fucked-up we were, and our eyes met. She frowned at me. I didn’t care.

The four other people continued listing their “feelings” or “challenges” for the week. Actually, the guy next to me finished coloring in a rather impressive cartoon goldfish with a body-builder chest and a sharp-fanged smirk. The fish wore a T-shirt that stated: Not Today, Bro.

Kudos for the proper use of the comma.

He caught me looking and waggled his bushy eyebrows behind his unruly, spiraled black hair that had fallen into his face. The kid had a strung-out vibe to him, like he’d spent one too many twenty-four-hour binges on shrooms. Tall like me, as pale as a vampire, and he couldn’t weigh more than one-ten even with rocks in his pockets. He constantly said shit that caused strain to appear on Zuri’s face. Each time he spoke, it was as though her bones wanted to pop through her skin. My current favorites: “We should take a moment to contact our alien ancestors on a spiritual level, as we have a special bond with them,” and “Has anyone else ever lost sleep over how a kiwi feels? The fruit not the bird.”

Nope, can’t say I’d ever lost a single night’s sleep over that.

“Sexy, huh?” he said to me, eyes flicking to his paper and back up again. This kid definitely wasn’t here by choice. Group therapy was probably the second stop after his police-involved forty-eight-hour hold.

As I said, we were a fucked-up group.

“Relic,” Zuri called to me. Five foot four if she wore heels, she had smooth, deep brownish-umber skin and long box braids she tucked behind her ears when agitated, which happened often when I was around. She was one of two mental health counselors at our school, and it was obvious with how the other counselor, a fiftyish-year-old woman, would either pop in everyfew minutes or sit in on sessions, that Zuri was the new girl learning the ropes. This group session probably completed some requirement she needed for some license or degree. Also, she insisted we use her first name—rookie mistake.

“Are you finished with your list?” she pushed me.

We both knew I hadn’t completed a thing. “Yep. I got all my feelings out. Felt great. I’m transformed. Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. I’m fixed now, so can I go?”

Only thing the judge demanded, besides restitution and to pay the poor-house-inducing court fees, was that I stay out of trouble and attend group therapy until I graduated next spring. No one said I had to participate. Survival was in the details.

I gave Zuri credit for cutting her gaze away before the death lasers within her eyes could fully activate. Still, her mouth flattened as she closed her laptop.

One sixteenth of me felt bad for her. I imagined that six years ago, when she chose psychology as her major for college, she had all sorts of fantasies about swooping in and saving us lost and damaged misfits on the island of fucked-up toys. Reality, though, sucked.

Who knows? Maybe that meant she fit right in.

Either way, I didn’t have the energy to play along. I was too busy mentally calculating how to rob Peter to pay Paul. Electric bill and daycare fees for my younger sister were both due at the end of the week. The electric bill had the wordsFinal Noticeprinted in red on top, which felt serious, but it didn’t have a shut off notice attached. On the other hand, the front office bouncer at the daycare gave me a look like she might cut off my balls with a rusty knife the next time I picked up my younger sister, Camila, without giving her payment. At the moment, daycare bouncer was the horse pulling ahead in the race called broke.

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