“Alright. Good luck at the tournament, I know you’ve got that coming up—” She stops, and frowns. “What? That stinks! I should come over there and talk to that—”
He says something that cuts her off.
“But it’s not f—”
And again.
“Fine, I’ll stop, but—” Mom growls, and she so rarely does that. “Fine. Call me sometime, okay?” She nods and draws a deep breath. “Alright. Goodbye. You too.”
She brings my phone away from her ear, ends the call, and tosses the device to my mattress. Then glaring at me, she spins on her heels and storms out of my room. “You are an asshole, Allyson Moore. He deserves better anyway!”
Wow.
Luke
Goodbyes
I was once ordered to complete twelve weeks of therapy to help deal with my anger, and was tasked with fixing the old pier at the lake. All because I got into a fight with a poor little rich boy.
On my tenth week, I got into a fight with a guy who, turns out, might have been my father-in-law in another lifetime.
Fuckin’ called that wrong.
My court date was… rough.
Judge Abram wanted to sentence me to sixty days in lockup; not a big sentence, in the grand scheme, but long enough to teach me what incarceration feels like. More importantly, long enough for me to get to know guys who are in there for life, and to learn from their mistakes, to learn the consequences of brash actions and short fuses.
Luckily for me, Douchebag-Jason declined to press charges, and Jessica Bishop is a good fucking lawyer who got me off with six more months of therapy, and five-days-a-week volunteer work teaching kids martial arts.
Which, in reality, is my day job. But the catch is, I first have to build a community center in the middle of town. A space with engineer-approved columns, rafters, shade for the summer, but light and walls for the winter. I need to get an electrician in to install power. And the space must be equipped with barbecues that operate for free, and have mats on the floors that are maintained and replaced as needed – for life. On my own bank balance.
I’m to host classes five days a week for low-income children who can’t afford membership at my family’s gym, and though it’s only an hour a day – seeing as how I have to fit my actual job in, plus therapy, plus all of the moping I like to squeeze in for Ally – I then have to train and grade these students… completely for free.
Belts, equipment, time, and mentoring. Free, free, free.
The kids love it, and I can admit it’s kind of fun, training outside with a bunch of dipshits who can hardly balance on one foot for more than twenty seconds. But at the end of the day, I still have to eat dinner with my family, and endure their bad attitudes; I’ve essentially just opened a competing gym, and because it’s free, they’re giving me shit for stealing business.
Basically, I’m the fucking goat. Not the Greatest Of All Time kind of goat, but the scapegoat kind who has to defend his free school for poor kids – which is ironic, really, considering it’s the kind of school that might have made a difference for people like my dad back in the day.
Everybody loves a solid case of irony. Everyone except the goat, that is.
Engineering plans take time, then county approval, then coordinating builders and equipment, so on top of everything else, I’m now a project manager too. Not a skill I ever thought myself capable of, but architectural drawings now litter the kitchen table that often doubles as a poker table, and is sticky with liquor and wrought with memories; many of which include a laughing Ally.
And thinking of those memories makes me think of Chester, the missing llama.
Where is he now? Who has him, and why have they remained utterly silent on it?
It’s not like I want to snitch on the thief, but hell if I’m not dying to know who town’s most dastardly criminal is. But I guess that’s another thing I’ll never know. Another thing I’ll never have. Because sometimes, life just fucking sucks.
Like right now, in December, just a few days before Christmas. It’s the first day of the annual Stacked Deck tournament, except I’m court-ordered not to attend. That judge legitimately banned me from stepping foot on the tournament’s premises for an entire forty-eight hours before the start of, and an additional forty-eight hours after the end of, this year’s event. She says it’s to curb my lust for violence.
A joke, really, considering she has no problem with me teaching other kids how to fight.
What it is, is segregation. It’s about making me miss out on something fun, like I’m a child being sat in the naughty corner. And that is an effective punishment for someone like me, with my personality and the need to be at the center of all things adrenaline-fueled.
My family tried something new this year – to fuck with me, I suspect. Instead of selling spectator tickets to regular folks, like they do every other year, they gave them away for free – to my students. So here I am at my sort-of school, where we’ve already poured concrete foundations, and the installation of flooring – a timber deck – has begun, but there are no walls or a roof yet. And I’m all alone, in the fucking snow, drilling screws into the new timber flooring that no one will ever actually see, because once I’m done with this shit, rubber mats will be laid down.
Joke’s on me.
My punishment has nothing to do with reform, and everything to do with scolding the noisy little shit who just can’t stop fucking around in class. But what’s worse than all that is that Ally refuses to take my calls.
Perhaps she’s in cahoots with the judge; maybe she’s on board with the ‘Let’s leave Luke out in the cold’ bullshit, just like everyone else. And it’s working, because being without her is a special kind of torture I had no clue existed until she came along and made it so I had something to lose.
Maybe I know now how Jason felt to have been separated from his family for more than half of his life – except it’s only been a matter of weeks for me. I still have so much life to go, so much loneliness left to endure. And maybe now, I kind of get why he was a taunting prick toward me, and why he gave zero fucks about what I thought, or about backing away when I told him to.
I belted my potential future father-in-law.
Kinda makes sense that she’s not throwing herself into my arms.
Halestorm plays through the speakers of my phone, tinny and barely loud enough to beat out the soft breeze and snow. Add in the way my beanie covers my ears, and the loud whirring of the drill in my hand, and I can barely catch much sound at all, but still I let it play, because if I work in silence for a minute longer, I might go insane.
The lead singer croons about going unseen by everyone except her one. I move my lips, sing along in my head, but I don’t make noise.
“I started this essay differently.”
A soft voice brings my spine straight with a snap. Like a hound on the scent, I lift my face up, then around, as my eyes search, search, and stop on radiant beauty.
Ally stands on one of the corner foundations of my platform, on the edge, so her feet create a V, and her toes point outward. She wears jeans that are so tight, they may as well be a second skin, but over them, she wears boots that come to her knees, a sweater, and a coat over top. White, fluffy gloves cover most of her hands, but not her fingertips, and a matching white beanie with the poufy ball on top covers most of her head. Her red hair that isn’t really all that red splays over her shoulders, and her lips, cherry red from the cold, tremble – from the cold, or nerves?