by Callie Hart
RECKLESS AT RALEIGH HIGH
CALLIE HART
RECKLESS AT RALEIGH HIGH
Copyright © 2020 by Callie Hart
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Prologue
1. SILVER
DAY ONE
DAY TWO
DAY THREE
DAY FOUR
DAY FIVE
DAY SIX
2. ALEX
3. SILVER
4. SILVER
5. ALEX
6. SILVER
7. ALEX
8. ALEX
9. SILVER
10. ALEX
11. ALEX
MESSAGE RECEIVED
12. SILVER
13. ALEX
14. ALEX
15. SILVER
16. SILVER
17. ALEX
18. ALEX
19. ALEX
20. SILVER
21. ALEX
22. ALEX
23. ALEX
24. ALEX
25. SILVER
26. SILVER
27. ALEX
28. SILVER
29. ALEX
30. SILVER
31. ALEX
32. SILVER
33. SILVER
34. SILVER
35. ALEX
36. SILVER
37. ALEX
38. SILVER
39. SILVER
40. ALEX
41. SILVER
42. ALEX
43. ALEX
44. CAMERON
Epilogue
ALSO BY CALLIE HART
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEEP ON READING TO MEET ZETH FOR THE FIRST TIME!
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…
I will fear no evil…
Prologue
“It’s like Star Wars, Mom. All the little white flecks flying toward the window are like stars. This is what it looks like when you’re traveling through space, y’know.”
The woman sitting in the driver’s seat of the people carrier smiles affectionately at the young boy sitting in the back seat. Her back hurts from all the driving, but they’re on the homestretch now. Well…not the homestretch. Home’s an hour in the other direction, where the roads are a decent size, people are civilized, and you can buy a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste like piss. Raleigh is the worst kind of backwater, podunk, nowhere town there is, and if the woman had her way, she’d never visit the damn place again.
Soon, perhaps. The wheels are in motion. One day not too far from now, she’ll gain custody of the little boy in the backseat and it’ll become official: she’ll be his mother. Legally. She won’t have to flinch every time someone overhears him calling her that. It was wrong to ask him to use that title before everything’s been ironed out in court. If things don’t go according to plan and the boy’s brother does somehow manage to gain custody of the kid, then it’ll end up being very disruptive for the boy. He needed a mother, though. He’s never had anyone solid and stable in his life to call Mom. She wants to be that maternal figure to him. Hell, the first time he called her by that title, she locked herself in the downstairs bathroom by the utility room, the washing machine midway through its loud spin cycle, and she squealed like a giddy teenager into the new Ray Dunn hand towels she’d just bought from Target. She could have corrected him. If she’d had more self-control, she could have told him it wasn’t a good idea to use names like ‘Mom’ just yet, but it had felt far too good for that. The precious little boy, small for his eleven years, with his mop of black, wavy hair, and his dark, expressive eyes wanted her to be his mother, and there was no way she was going to turn down the role.
She’d immediately started planning the trip to Hawaii for the holidays, knowing that the time away together would drive a wedge between the boy and his brother. An escape from all the cold, the rain and the snow. And surfing? Sunshine? Christmas Day dinner on the beach, with a colorful lei around his neck, and the sound of the ocean waves crashing on the shore to rock him to sleep each night? It was a trip that would stay with him forever. Something only she could give him. Something that useless piece of shit brother of his would never be able to give him.
Everything had been going so well. The woman knew it in her bones; each evening, when she kissed the boy goodnight, pressing her lips to the crown of his head, smelling the salt in his thick confusion of hair, she felt it working. He was forgetting about his brother, talking about him less, thinking about him less, growing closer and closer to her instead.
And then it had all come crashing down. Surprise, surprise, the brother had found a way to interfere with her plans. He always did. The phone call came in just after dinner, when she and the boy had been cleaning up in the kitchen of the Airbnb she’d rented. She’d let the old-school answering machine catch the call, which had been her biggest mistake. If the boy hadn’t heard the social worker’s voice projecting from those shitty speakers, she could have hidden the news from him until they’d returned to Washington.
“Hello, Jackie, it’s Maeve Rogers from CPS. Sorry to be calling so late and I’m sorry to leave this kind of information in a message for you, but it’s kind of urgent. Alex has been arrested…for shooting a boy from his school. I know. I know that sounds bad, but believe me…it’s not what you’re thinking. He’s being held at Stafford Creek. He could really use a friendly face right now. Is there any way you can bring Ben back to Raleigh to see him? I’m confident this is all going to blow over quickly, but still. Stafford Creek’s no walk in the park. Even a short stay in a place like that can change a person, and Alex has been doing so well. He needs Ben right now. If he knows his brother’s close by, I know he’ll do his best to stay out of trouble. You know I wouldn’t suggest it unless—”
The message had ended there, the machine cutting the social worker off, but it was already too late. The damage had been done. Ben had heard those magical words—his brother needed him—and that was it. Final. There was no way she could have kept him in Hawaii without alienating him. She’d tried, even knowing that would probably be the outcome. For another week, she’d delayed traveling back to the mainland. Put it off. Told the boy that his brother would call himself if he wanted Ben to come back. In the end, there was nothing else she could do, though. Reluctantly, she’d purchased the tickets back to Seattle, viciously stabbing at the keyboard keys as she’d entered the digits of her credit card into the booking form. And now here they were, eleven o’clock at night, driving through a godforsaken blizzard on their way to Raleigh, when they should be tucked up, sound asleep in their own small little Hawaiian paradise.
The woman sets her jaw, staring straight ahead, trying to breathe around her anger. “Prisons are pretty scary places, y’know, Benny. Even for adults. You sure you wanna go there tomorrow?”
The woman knows it’s a low blow, but she has to try. The boy blinks owlishly at her from the dark recesses of the backseat. “I’m not afraid,” he says. “I’m excited. I’ve only seen prison on TV. And I get to see Alex, too. He’s been waiting for me.”
“He doesn’t know you’re coming, remember? We kept it a secret, so it would be a surprise.” The woman convinced the boy that it’d be fun, a sort of game to show up at the prison unexpectedly. The dirty truth is that she’s still hoping to persuade him that
the visit is a bad idea.
The boy nods thoughtfully in the rearview. “I know. But he’ll be excited when I get there. I bet he’s missed me. Now we can all spend Christmas together, can’t we. We’ll be able to take him home with us from the prison, and everything will be okay.”
“It doesn’t work like that, buddy. Your brother did something really, really bad. That’s why they’re keeping him at the prison. He’ll have to stay there until they can decide what they want to do with him. We’ve talked about this, remember? There’s a chance Alex’ll have to stay in prison for very long time. Maybe even years.”
Wouldn’t that just be fan-fucking-tastic?
Where has that sour taste in her mouth suddenly come from, though? Tastes like lies and deceit. The woman swallows it down, doing her best to ignore the rotten tang. She didn’t lie to the child. His brother shot someone, for crying out loud. Shot somebody, a good boy from a wealthy, well-to-do family. She’s done her research. She’s read the news reports online. There are plenty of rumors and mistruths flying around, but the woman’s been dealing with the boy’s brother for years now. She knows him inside out. He’s a liar and a thief. He breaks everything he touches. There’s no way he shot an ivy-league candidate because he was trying to murder that ditzy little girlfriend of his. She probably came to her senses and cheated on the brother with the Weaving boy. That was more likely. The brother had probably found them in bed together, fucking like the horny teenaged morons that they were, and he’d lost his temper. Pulled the gun and shot Weaving in a fit of rage.
“I just want to see him,” the boy says quietly. “I know he didn’t mean to hurt that other boy. Alex isn’t bad, Mom.”
Urgh. Poor, naïve, innocent, sweet child. Maybe the realities of a prison will scare some sense into him. She’ll go with him in the morning, and she’ll do nothing to shield him from the horrors of an underfunded penitentiary. There’s every chance—
SHIT!
Red.
White.
Startled, wild brown eyes.
The impact rocks the car, the sound a deafening roar.
The windshield…gone.
Glass, shattered, raining down like diamonds.
The woman wrenches at the wheel, stunned, reacting blindly, steering the car, left, left, left…
Weightlessness…
Darkness…
The desperate, frightened, thin scream of a child. “ALEX!”
So much fear. So much terror.
White, spiraling into the black.
Another impact. Jarring.
Breathless, winded, jagged, sharppain… pain…painpainpain…p…p…
Ticking metal.
Hissing steam.
They…they’re off the road. In a ditch. Accident. There’s been an accident. A deer…out of nowhere. It came out of nowhere.
“Ben? Benny, are…you okay?”
Nothing.
The woman tries to turn and sees the shard of metal protruding from her chest. It doesn’t make sense, that piece of metal. It’s a part of the car’s fender. How? It shouldn’t…be inside the car. It shouldn’t be inside her.
“Ben? Ben, answer me, baby? Can you…hear me? Are you okay?” It’s impossible to spin in the seat; the twisted piece of fender won’t allow for that kind of movement. Instead, the woman has to use the rearview, angling it to the left and down, in order to find the boy on the back seat. His head is open, blood pouring down his face. It looks bad enough that when she opens her mouth and tries to cry out, no sound comes. His eyes are open. He silently blinks at her, his small shoulders shaking…
Oh god.
The boy’s shoulder’s dislocated. And she can see white showing in amongst the beautiful thick waves of his hair—the kind of white that should never be showing.
A small, voiceless whimper comes out of his mouth.
“Oh god. Oh…god, Benny. Hold…on, son. I’ll…I’ll get…help.” Each word is harder to form. Each breath is harder to take. Her insides feel wet. It feels like she’s breathing water. With both hands, the woman takes hold of the sharp metal pinning her to her seat and she slowly begins to pull. There isn’t much time. If she tries… If she really tries… If she hurries…
The pain nearly robs her of her last moments of consciousness. If she was alone, the pain would be enough to force her into submission right here and now. She would gladly throw in the towel, admit defeat and sigh out her last breath, knowing that it’d be a reprieve from the staggering wall of agony that’s slamming into her. She isn’t alone, though. There’s Ben. He’s hurt, and he needs her. If she doesn’t make it back onto the road, then he isn’t going to make it…
The broken piece of fender, slick with blood, makes a hollow clanging sound as it falls into the footwell. Warmth spreads down the woman’s chest, staining the ‘Aloha Kākou!’ sweater she bought at the airport a dazzling shade of red.
The door won’t open on her first try. It won’t budge on her second attempt. The third time, the woman lays her shoulder into the busted plastic housing of the door, and the metal groans, swinging open, depositing her out onto the ground in the snow.
Get up.
Save him.
Save your son.
Your son…
Your son…
Your son…
With her life pouring out of her into the cold, relentless night, the woman manages to crawl halfway up the slope that leads up to the road. Dizzy, disoriented, fighting for breath, her brain feels so damn muddled all of a sudden.
Why was she climbing up the slope again?
She rolls onto her back, dazed and numb, and laughs silently as she coughs up blood.
Wow. The night is so beautiful. The snowflakes, swirling down from the heavens, so thick and fast…they really look like stars.
1
SILVER
Guilt’s an unpredictable beast. It doesn’t behave the way you assume it will. When Kacey Winters was still undisputed queen of Raleigh High and I was yet to be cast out of the Sirens, she encouraged us to be as hateful as she was. The meaner we were, the more arrogant, the more we established our dominance over the lower echelons of the socio-economic student body, the more we pleased Kacey. The pursuit to win her approval was a full-time job that required a level of dedication and determination most high school students are unfamiliar with. But I was never as cruel or unkind as Zen was.
Fiercely competitive, Zen was always willing to take things that one step too far. By rights, she should have been Kacey’s favorite. It never worked out that way, though. I laughed along with the jokes, I made spiteful comments under my breath whenever Kacey prodded at me to tease someone, and I made sure to mock the girls on the cheer team whenever one of them fucked up. In hindsight, I was the John Lennon to Zen’s Colonel Gaddafi, but that was irrelevant. I was Kacey’s favorite.
I never felt guilty about the malicious acts I participated in under Kacey’s reign of terror. Not until long after, once Jake and his bastard friends held me down and hurt me.
This morning, however, I’m choked with guilt. I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t constructed a fake body in my bed out of lumpy pillows and a wig and snuck out of the house in the middle of the night. Mom and Max are in Toronto for the next six weeks, visiting my Aunt Sarah. Dad gave his permission for me to stay at Alex’s apartment. I don’t have to be home until midday, but…it’s Christmas morning. It feels like I’m breaking some kind of rule, waking up here in bed with Alex, blissed out and deliriously happy.
We spent last night with Dad, decorating the entire house, arranging our gifts by the fire place, wrestling ornaments out of Nipper’s mouth and drinking eggnog, but I still feel bad that my father’s going to wake up this morning to an empty house for the first time in twenty something years. It just doesn’t seem right.
The sun ekes in through the window next to the bed, washing my skin in cool winter light. It’s still early, just after dawn. If we get up and get dressed now, there’s still time to ma
ke it back to the house before Dad’s finished with his morning shower. God knows what Alex is going to say about leaving his warm, comfortable bed, though. His arm tightens reflexively around me, his body hot as a furnace, his smooth, hard chest rising and falling beneath my head as I lay nestled into his side. For the past fifteen minutes, I’ve been lightly tracing the tips of my fingers over the lines of the extensive ink that covers his torso and spreads down his arms, admiring the complexity and the beauty of the work, and he hasn’t even stirred. Once he passes out, there’s very little that can wake a sleeping Alessandro Moretti.
I take the opportunity to study him. Usually, I’m careful about the length of time I allow myself to stare at his handsome, artfully drawn features. When he’s awake, he’s highly sensitive to the weight of another person’s eyes on him; he knows the moment he’s being watched, and he isn’t afraid to call me out on it when he catches me scrutinizing him. Plenty of times I’ve done it unwittingly—risked a sidelong glance at him, just to see what expression he’s making, or to gauge the look in his eyes—only to wind up mortified when he curves one of his dark eyebrows and angles his face toward me, smirking like the bastard that he is.