Archer, ever the big brother.
“I’m not alone. I’ve got Marcel.”
“Yeah, but he’s yourlawyer. He doesn’t count.”
“I’m going to tell him you said that.”
Archer huffs. “Goddammit, Dan, could you be a little less of a sphinx for a second?”
“Leave the boy alone,” Norm barks as he strides past the weight rack, arms wide to accommodate lats I could only dream of. “Let him focus so he won’t drop those damn weights on his head.”
Archer grits his teeth; shutting his mouth and getting out of my business requires far more effort than his workout. But that’s the power of Norm. Even Archer’s big brother energy is no match for the mayor of Gene’s Gym.
But of course he can’t let it lie. Two sets later, he’s hunched over on a weight bench, elbows on his knees.
“Look, I get why you don’t want to talk to us,” he says, catching my eye in the mirror. “But you’ve got to talk to someone.”
I roll my eyes. “Are you telling me to get a therapist?”
“I’m telling you to get a friend,” my big brother snaps.
CHAPTER 9
DAN
The locker room at Gene’s Gym is a petri dish that smells like Old Spice and mildew. The mint-green tile looks like it was last cleaned during the Clinton administration. But I can’t risk running into Carson at her place, not until I figure out what I’m going to say to her after our little conversation. So the filthy gym shower it is.
I’m so pathetic.
As I tiptoe around public shower slime, Archer’s advice keeps ringing in my ears.
I’m telling you to get a friend.
I think I’d rather get a therapist. Although a therapist would probably tell me to stop avoiding my problems, and I can’t do that. Not when it’s been working so well for me all these years.
Fortunately, I have one other way of avoiding Carson.
When everything went to shit back in New York, I cancelled my last appointment with Eamon, my tattoo artist in Brooklyn. I’d found him online, and we’d bonded over our shared Midwestern upbringing and the fact that we’d both found our place in New York. Eamon has done several of my tattoos, including the cardinal on a snowy branch on my ribs. It hurt like a motherfucker, but it’s gorgeous.
I’ve always been a doodler. As a kid, it helped calm my mind. As an adult, it helps focus it. Whenever I feel like the world is too loud or my mind is too cluttered, I pick up a pen and let the ink flow. I started drawing in margins of books and around my notes in school. But in college, Jameson got me a sketchbook for Christmas. At first I didn’t know what to do with it. I wasn’t an artist. I was a mathematician. A fucking business major. I felt like a phony holding the black leather–bound stack of crisp white paper. But Jameson started shoving it in my bag each morning, and one day, sitting alone in the dining hall, I took it out and flipped it open. I wasn’t homesick, but I did feel unmoored, and so I took out a pencil and sketched a cornstalk.
Soon I was carrying the sketchbook with me everywhere I went, filling the pages between classes or when I needed study breaks. I learned that starting my day by drawing was like meditating, and soon I began every day that way. When I filled the pages of that first sketchbook, I bought another. And another. And another. Not only did a sketchbook serve as a distraction from my crowded thoughts, it had the added benefit of making me look busy. It kept most people from bothering me.
One day, I brought it with me to a tattoo appointment with Eamon. While he worked on a piece on the back of my shoulder, I hunched over the sketchbook, trying to distract myself from the sting of the needle. Eamon peered over at my doodles and asked if I’d ever considered tattooing.
I hadn’t.
Eamon offered to show me around a tattoo machine, and I took to it quickly. He let me apprentice under him, and I was shocked to find that all it took to get licensed in New York was a twenty-six-dollar infectious disease prevention class, proof of a hepatitis B shot, and a hundred dollars for a permit.
I’ve been a licensed tattoo artist in the state of New York for the last three years.
Not that I’ve done it very much. I have a real job.
Or I did.
When I told Eamon that I was leaving the city to come back to Indiana, he connected me with Drake Douglas, the owner of Electric Sting, a tattoo shop in Bloomington. Drake had been his mentor back when Eamon was a seventeen-year-old little shit committing petty crimes.
I was glad Drake seemed to have no qualms about dealing with criminals, since the crimes I’d been accused of were far from petty.
