“You still have my card, right?” Marty asked.
“Yeah, tucked away.”
“Then, you know how to reach me. Say the word, and your next stop is LA, kid.”
He was still considering Marty’s offer long after the man had left the skatepark. Fucking with his camera to check the footage from earlier, the idea of LA continued playing on repeat in his mind and what it could all mean. Maybe it was just too much information for his seventeen—almost eighteen—year-old brain to truly comprehend, but that didn’t make much of a difference to him.
LA seemed like the right choice.
The buzzing of his phone had him glancing to the left of his current perch on the cement steps of the park’s exit. Figuring it was just going to be Rose saying the school called again because he didn’t show up, he was surprised to find a different name lighting up the screen.
Renzo, that was.
He snatched the phone up from the ground and answered the call without thinking about it. “Hey, Ren.”
“You know Rose has called me twice today because you didn’t show up to school—”
“I had something else to do.”
“Again,” Renzo finished quietly.
He loved his brother.
He did.
Sometimes, though, Ren got that parent tone going on when he spoke, and Diego didn’t want to hear any of it. He blamed that on the fact that he never really had parents to begin with. Only his older siblings that looked out for him and did what they needed to do even though raising him wasn’t their job.
He wished they understood that didn’t make them his mother or father—so far, no such luck.
“I was looking forward to coming to Nevada to see you,” Diego said, referring to the trip he was supposed to take soon, “but less when you … do that, Ren.”
“Do what?” his brother asked.
“That. You know what.”
Renzo sighed on the other end of the call. “I know about Rose and what’s been going on. Skipping school. The restlessness. Late nights. You’re not in some shit I have to take care of again, are you?”
Diego rolled his eyes. “No.”
“Diego—”
“I said no, bro.”
And he meant it.
He wasn’t in trouble.
He was just …
“Hey,” Renzo said, his tone soft but firm at the same time on the call. “You can talk to me about anything. You know that, right?”
Maybe that’s what he’d been waiting for here—the thing that he needed to finally make a decision about what he wanted to do with his life. Or rather, whether he should take the leap and uproot his entire world just to chase what felt like a pipe dream across the country. Something like college and a traditional job were sure things. Hopes and dreams were not.
Diego felt like he was on the verge of something. Or a lot of things. Adulthood. Understanding himself. Greatness. Whatever form that took.
“You okay?” his brother asked.
He was.
Sort of.
Instead, Diego replied, “Just—hey, can we talk when I get out there with you? I need somebody to listen and let me talk through some stuff.”
Renzo didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely.”
FOUR
Renzo
“Rose, I told you. Did I not tell you?”
“I know, I know.”
His sister said she knew—like she had told him again and again since their last conversation—but he wasn’t sure she did understand a lot of what was going on when it came to Diego. She assumed a lot he realized. Both his sister and her husband decided a lot about what was the case with their younger brother, but Renzo also learned something else the more he talked to Rose about what was happening back in New York.
She didn’t talk to Diego.
Or rather, she didn’t listen.
It was a lot of we want and we think and he should whenever Renzo got Rose down into the nitty-gritty of the problem they thought they had with Diego and his lack of … motivation. The bigger issue was that Diego’s disinterest was probably a symptom of something else, and he didn’t think Rose or her husband understood that at all.
They were too busy trying to make sure Diego could be a responsible adult because his adulthood was right around the corner. Renzo absolutely recognized the whys of it all, but that didn’t mean their seventeen-year-old brother did, could, or even cared.
But given he was in Nevada, Diego wouldn’t be on a flight to him until tomorrow, and Ren had a job to do here before he could get back home and be present in New York … well, for the moment he was stuck dealing with what he could during phone calls. He and Rose made attempt after attempt to come to some solution between the two of them that would allow them to be united in front of Diego when they presented him with some options.
Except that was hard to do when Renzo hadn’t even spoken to his little brother for long enough to get into the topic of what was going on. He respected Rose’s position on encouraging Diego to further his education—or at least, try. He also thought that maybe there was something his brother might want to do, and why couldn’t he have a conversation with Diego about it first before he decided anything else?
Seemed simple enough to him.
“I know—you’ll talk to him,” Rose said in a huff, the noise crackling the speaker of the Bluetooth in his ear. “Sometimes, I just worry about him. That’s all. It’s like he doesn’t hear anything we say most of the time, Ren.”
That had him chuckling. The sound drifted down the empty corridor of The League’s complex, reminding him that all too soon, he needed to end the conversation with Rose to handle business here. Whatever business that was, as the phone call from Cree demanding he—and apparently other team members—come into the complex last minute hadn’t given him a single hint about what was going on.
Except that it was a situation.
Perfect, huh?
“That’s probably the most normal thing about Diego. The fact you worry about him because he’s a teenage boy who doesn’t care to listen to what you have to say.” Coming up to the corner that would take him to Dare’s office, he could already hear the voices starting to filter down the hallway. Renzo decided now was the time to get off the phone. He could deal with Rose another time, and Diego would be there in Nevada with him tomorrow. “Leave him alone—don’t push him about anything. Let me have the next week with him, and I’ll see what I can do about what you want, but also what he wants after graduation, okay?”
“Skateboarding—that’s what he wants. It’s all he ever does. That and carry that damn camera around with him all the time.”
Renzo sighed and resisted the urge to scrub a hand down his face. “And?”
Because people made careers out of that all the damn time if they were ambitious enough to make it work. Why couldn’t Diego do the same, if he really wanted it?
“What if he breaks a leg, Ren? Blows out a damn knee? What will he do then if he can’t get on a skateboard anymore or—”
“What Diego does is more than just skateboarding.”
And it was.
Even Ren knew that.
Someone needed five minutes scrolling down Diego’s social feeds to know the kid was multitalented. Photography. Videography. Editing. He had an eye for art, too, and especially colorful, modern abstracts. Something Ren thanked Rose and his wife, Lucia, for because both women encouraged Diego to be artistic.