Chapter Three
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Luc
Time is a strange thing. Some moments drag on forever. Others? They pass in the blink of an eye.
Take me, for instance. One day, I was a boy running as quickly as I could toward manhood. The next, I was a man who simply wanted to be a boy again. To go back to a time and a place where heartbreak and rejection, lost years and lost opportunities weren’t a part of my story.
Long ago, Maggie May was mine.
Well…notmineexactly. Not in the way you might think. But shewasmy only friend.
At Braxton Academy, New Orleans’s most elite private high school, I was an outcast on account of my mother, and because I was a poor kid from the swamp with black-water brain and mud blood. Maggie was an outcast because she was a lowly freshman who’d lost her parents in Hurricane Katrina two years earlier. She walked around with a haunted look on her face that was a constant reminder of a tragedy that most folks in town (especially the rich ones) just wanted to forget.
That’s how we found each other.
Even though she was two years younger, and even though we didn’t have any of the same classes, her loneliness and my loneliness led us to the same place after school. Unlike most kids who took off the minute the final bell rang, Maggie and I sought the quiet solitude of the library.
I can still remember the first time I saw her…
She was wearing a yellow sundress under a white cardigan, and her long, black hair reached down to her waist. I rounded the corner of the aisle where she was browsing and stopped to watch her run her fingers along the spines of the books.
She reminded me of a siren from Greek mythology. Or a fairy from European folklore. With skin like porcelain and soft, slender limbs, she stole my breath at first glance. Literally. It whooshed out of me like I’d been punched in the gut.
She must have heard because she turned. Her sky-blue eyes met mine, and her cupid’s-bow mouth curved into a tremulous smile.
That’s all it took.
When she asked, “Have you read Harry Potter?” I could hardly speak. But you better believe I went home that night withThe Sorcerer’s Stonein hand.I read every one of those books (and some of them arelong) so I’d have something to talk to her about.
It took me two weeks to find the courage to touch her hand while we sat at one of the library’s wide wooden tables. Twice as long as that to get up the gumption to ask her to the diner on the corner for milkshakes after school.
That’s where it happened.
That’s where Cassius “Cash” Armstrong walked through the door, sat down at our booth, and I lost Maggie.
Not that I blame him. Or her, for that matter. Some things simplyare.
Like the way Cash came to my defense against the whole football team his first day at school. Like the way he nearly got himself suspended for telling Dean Sullivan, the police superintendent’s son and Braxton Academy’s star quarterback, that he’d beat the living shit out of him if he ever said another word against me or my mom. (Back then, that was a true threat. Whereas it took me a good portion of my twenties to grow into my frame, Cash was as big at sixteen as he is now.) Like the way Maggie May’s voice got softer and lower when she spoke to him.
Like the way she looked at him then.
Like the way she’s looking at him now…
On account of me loving them both, and because I know they both love me, I don’t begrudge them their connection. In fact, I’m happy to see it’s as strong as ever.
After a decade of riding Humvees and donkeys through the mountains of Afghanistan, after years of assembling guerrilla armies and training military police to fight the opium trade controlled by the Taliban, and after a head injury that made him “unfit for duty” and unable to continue doing the job he’s so good at, Cash could use a little comfort. A little grace.
He could use a little Maggie May.
I see the look that comes over his face as she goes up on tiptoe to embrace him (one of wonder and guilt and remorse). And I close my eyes, sucking in a long, steadying breath. Smoky jazz hangs in the air. It competes with the mutedclip-clopof the carriage mules taking tourists on rides around the Vieux Carréand the hollowdrip-dropof the fountain in the courtyard below.
New Orleans…a city full of sound.
“Come in, come in.” Maggie takes Cash’s hand. She takes mine too, and an electric current shoots up my arm, zapping my pulse into high gear as she pulls us into her apartment.
We’re greeted by a three-legged dog who appears to be part pit bull, part beagle, and a whole lot of mutt. He’s as ugly as the back end of bad luck, which, inexplicably, makes him kind of cute.
