Page 1 of Body Checked By the Defenseman

PROLOGUE

Macklin

Seven yearsago

It was a hot summer night.I had come home from my job as a gardener’s helper. At fourteen, finding a job was tough but there was a guy in the neighborhood willing to pay cash and minimum wage, so I spent the summer mowing yards and doing all kinds of landscaping work. After a hard day, I liked to come home to a nice warm shower since it was sticky outside, but it sucked having to face my foster mother sitting on the couch where she’d been all day, eating peanuts. She was unpleasant, cold, and irritable. Add to it, she liked to remind me she had been using me for the paycheck she received bi-monthly. I was not wanted, only needed for her survival.

“Oh, you’re home?” she muttered as I came through the door. She didn’t even look my way. She wasn’t maternal oraffectionate, but I had a roof over my head and food to eat. It wasn’t the best diet, but I wasn’t hungry either. My parents died in a car accident when I was ten. Since there were no family members to claim me, I fell into the system. At age ten my survival skills kicked in. I was passed around from foster home to foster home until I landed here three years ago. At the ripe age of eleven, I knew not to be picky. I had to behave and make myself almost invisible because my foster mom, Leila Dolores Trout, did not like children. She made that clear off the bat when she had me cleaning every inch of our apartment the first day I arrived to live with her. My best friend, Hayden Foxx, and his sister, Ruby, got me through my shitstorm of a life. They lived with their grandmother across the hall. Abuela was the second best thing to happen to me, outside of Hayden. The woman always made sure to invite me to meals and she let me hang out at her place as much as I wanted. Leila didn’t care as long as I kept the apartment clean.

It was after my shower and I wanted to just lie down and chill when I heard my foster mom’s raspy voice. “Mack, you want to grab me a beer from the fridge?”

Once she sat on that couch in the morning, she didn’t like to get up. She tried to have the coffee table in front of her stocked for the day, but beer wasn’t an item she liked to leave on the table since they were better served cold.

I went to the kitchen and grabbed a cold beer from our almost empty fridge. Since I started working this summer, she started buying fewer and fewer groceries. She didn’t voice it, but she made it seem like she wanted me to pitch in when she asked me to grab milk from the convenience store without giving me money to pay.

“Here.” I passed it to her and walked away. She wasn’t going to say thank you or crack a smile. I was pretty sure she’d beensitting in that one seat on the couch so long it had an indent the shape of her ugly ass.

I heard a scream.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Leila.

“Hush, would you?” she replied, fixated on her old television screen where some soap opera was playing.

Another scream.

I knew that voice.

I wasn’t wearing a shirt, but I dashed across the hall. Hayden was out of town on some Boy Scout trip his abuela paid for, and Ruby was home alone without him. Hayden was very protective of Ruby and for good reason. She was the kind of beauty who seemed surreal with honey-blond hair and perfect round blue eyes. Don’t even get me started on her smile. I may have had a crush on Ruby since the day I moved in, but I obviously didn’t let it show. Hayden was only one year older than us, but he protected her like she was his life, and in a way she was. Ruby was his only living relative outside of Abuela. Since he was my best friend, I promised him I’d always look out for Ruby’s well-being and that is exactly what I did.

Now I was banging on the door of 2C with no shoes or shirt on.

Ruby swung the door open. Her eyes red and tears streaming down her face.

“She went down,” is all she could say. I looked past her and saw Abuela lying on the floor unconscious.

“Did you call 911?” I asked, feeling the adrenaline spiking my veins.

I dropped to the floor, placing my ear by Abuela’s chest, watching her chest, and listening for her breath.

When I saw her chest moving, a sense of relief washed over me, but I knew the danger wasn’t over.

I heard the paramedics coming down the hall and I ran out to them. “She’s in here,” I called.

There were two large men and a lady. They had a gurney with them and one of them carried a large black bag. I pulled Ruby away to give them space. I held her close as the paramedics got to work. One paramedic placed her on her back while another attached small stickers to her chest.

“Can you tell us what happened?” the male paramedic asked.

Ruby explained how Abuela had come home from the hair salon where she worked and they had dinner together, but Abuela seemed tired and complained of chest pain and nausea. She stood up and said her chest was hurting her. She fell forward and Ruby caught her, but she wasn’t strong enough to hold her and slowly placed her on the ground where she passed out.

The paramedics had Abuela hooked up to a machine and they were using a lot of words we didn’t understand.

“Is she going to be okay?” I asked because Ruby was so terrified it seemed like she was frozen.

“Looks like she’s had a heart attack,” is all the female paramedic said.

I heard Ruby’s sharp intake of breath from beside me. Those words had sucked the air out of my own lungs.

“Is there another adult here?” the male paramedic asked.

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