Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 65346 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 327(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 218(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65346 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 327(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 218(@300wpm)
“Did either of you do this?” I felt a fury welling inside me like the tide being yanked by a full moon.
Scott shook his head while Penelope uttered a “hell no.”
“Tell me the fucking truth.”
Scott spoke up. “We didn’t. I didn’t— Why would we?” Penelope was picking up the pieces of the camera, shock playing out on her face.
I rubbed a hand over my face, hoping that the entire world would have disappeared by the time I opened my eyes.
It didn’t.
“I need to go.” Everything moved in slow motion and on fast forward at the same time. It felt like my limbs didn’t belong to me. Like I was watching someone else tug on their jeans and shirt, except I was watching it through their eyes. This moment didn’t feel real. Like I was drowning in oil and burning from the inside all at once.
I threw the door open. The sounds of the party echoed the beating of my pulse inside my skull. Dodging offers of drinks and conversation, I made it down the packed hall and into the main living room.
I was looking for Francisco, scanning the writhing room of bodies and disco lights. Instead, I found Maverick Gold, my best friend and probably the one person I needed most in that moment.
He must have seen the expression on my face. He crossed through the room, his charismatic smile quickly flipping into a worried frown the closer he got to me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, speaking over the thumping music.
“Everything.” I had to sit down. My knees felt like giving out. “Everything’s wrong. Everything’s over.”
3
Benjamin Gold
“Oh what the hell, bro.” I turned and walked off.
“Why are you briskly running away?” Dusty asked, catching up to me.
I realized he had to catch up to me, so I slowed it down. “I’m not running away. I just remembered I have something else to do, and it’s uh, somewhere else.”
We didn’t need our twin-ception powers for Dusty to see that I was full of complete shit.
“He seemed surprised to see you?”
“He did?” I caught my heart skipping a beat, making me want to bang my head against a nearby tree stump. “Well, that’s stupid, considering this is my family’s sanctuary he decided to show up at like some kind of stray.”
“Whoa,” Dusty said, looking over at me. He wore his thick-framed Ray-Ban glasses, his eyes magnified underneath the lenses. “I didn’t realize he’d bring up so much emotion.”
“Yeah. Me either.”
We had walked all the way to the stables, which were dusted over with a gentle blanket of snow. There were hoof prints in the pasture, leading toward the covered trough of hay. There, four of my mom’s new rescue horses munched away on their lunch. They were a mixture of grays and whites and browns, all four of them found abandoned in the same manure-filled pen.
I had already spent the morning grooming all four of them and instead led my brother down the path to the right, where another stable linked up to a separate pen. This was where Electra lived, a grumpy old thing that fought anyone who wasn’t a Gold, horses included. My mom had put a pink-and-blue-dotted birthday hat on her, which looked comically small on her massive head.
I smiled, a genuine smile that almost caught me off guard. “Hey there, lady.” I reached into a nearby bag and pulled out an apple.
Dusty leaned on a post as Electra whinnied her big gray head over the rail of her stable. She shook her head and bared her teeth in a hungry smile.
“What’s he even doing here?”
My brother shrugged. “Judging from the packed bags, it looks like he’s been offered to stay here. That’s just a hypothesis, obviously. You ran off so fast, I wasn’t even able to say hi to the guy.”
“And on my birthday. What a jerk. He clearly hasn’t changed.”
“Right,” Dusty said, looking down at his sneakers.
Electra grabbed the apple from my palm, the loud crunches that followed working as well as those addictive whispering videos I sometimes watched. Or the videos with the people cutting through clean layers of colored sand. Those got me hooked for hours.
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened between you two?”
I put my head against Electra’s, rubbing her cheek. No one else would have been able to do this without getting a stars-out kind of head-butt from her.
“You already know what happened,” I said.
Most of it.
“Yeah, but Benji, come on. I know you. Something else happened in Costa Rica. I know you two kissed but… why this reaction? Why the anger?”
“Because he’s as closed-minded as the family he comes from, and he said some stupid shit. Shit I can’t forget.” I went to grab another apple from the bag. Electra clopped in a little happy dance that made me want to do one in return.