“It’s all good,” Garrett said. “You know what would be hilarious, though? Steele, go for Elizabeth.”
“Are you fucking high? That stuck-up bitch?”
“A little, but can you imagine? If you two ever break up, just call her by her sister’s name!”
We laughed. Tara may have been fierce and combative, but Elizabeth was an uptight prude. Tara could talk shit but wasn’t afraid to get dirty; Elizabeth had her father’s judgment and prudishness.
“Fuck that, bro,” Steele said. “I’d sooner go back to Tara than even say hi to Elizabeth. And besides, there’s no fucking way any of us are going back to any of those girls. Look at us. Do we look like a bunch of fucking rich lawyers and businessmen? When’s the last time you saw a Harvard grad with our tattoos?”
We all shared a laugh, but mine was fake and the first to die down. Tara had succeeded in one sense.
She’d scared some wits into me. She’d shown me I couldn’t keep living like this—drinking on a Sunday, not planning anything, not doing anything—if I wanted us to avoid being a bunch of losers for the rest of our lives.
I needed to become something more than a gas station attendant. I needed to push myself. I needed to take on some responsibilities and not just talk and think about making a difference.
“Doesn’t mean we can’t meet halfway,” I said. “Doesn’t mean we can’t be better.”
That quieted everyone else’s laughter.
“What do you mean?” Zack said. “Are you going to get an actual job?”
Zack hadn’t meant it insultingly. But it sure hit me right in the gut, as bad as what Sheriff Davis had said to me in the back of the squad car.
“Zack, you’re the only one who’s got a chance to get a real job. You gotta finish school and get out of here while you can. The Bandits are getting more and more feisty by the day.”
“Fucking Bandits,” Steele said. “Wonder if Sheriff Davis will ever grow a pair.”
The discussion digressed into what to do about the Bandits, the local gang, but I’d already heard this conversation a thousand times over. The answer was nothing. We could do nothing.
We wanted to fight back, but we didn’t have the resources. We weren’t a militia; we weren’t a club that could fuck them up and make this town a little saner. We were just a bunch of friends who had grown up on the same street.
Oh, trust me, I wanted to fuck them up. I’d even suggested turning the Bernard Boys into something more violent, but it had never progressed much before.
But it was time to change things. It was time to grow up from being a bunch of boys into a bunch of men.
It was time to take on a bigger challenge.
It was time for us to become someone.
Tara
Steele, to no surprise, had looked like he’d let himself go since the breakup. What had been a liberation for me, freeing me from a man who was a bad boy but not a thoughtful one, had been an imprisonment for him. He’d become trapped in his own head, and he didn’t seem eager to address that issue.
Brock, though…
Talk about a man who aged like fine wine. Talk about a man who looked youthful and sexy and mature and wise. Talk about a man that got my heart rate up and my stomach to flip a bit.
I shook my head. Driving down I-40 back toward Albuquerque, I thought of what my fraternal twin sister, Elizabeth, had always said. Those boys were terrible news, the stereotypical bad boys: fun for a night and disappointing for a lifetime. They might have provided a thrill of defying our parents—most especially our father—but in the long-term, they’d only cause heartache.
But that assumed they never changed. Steele wasn’t going to soon. But Brock…
Steele was never bad. He was a good guy. He just led a different lifestyle.
Brock can bridge those worlds, though. Brock can mask himself as someone in the “normal” world but also dwell in the “hard world.”
Why am I even trying to defend myself on this? This doesn’t even matter.
“Oh, Tara,” I said to myself.
