I glared at the two idiots when I answered. “I don’t like to play withthem.”
The scoff that came out of Eli and Gordo was impossible to miss.
“C’mon. Don’t be a party pooper,” my twin muttered.
“I’m not being a party pooper. I just don’t feel like getting the crap beat out of me,” I explained to them. Glancing back at Carter, I sighed. “Every time we’ve played in the past, I end up getting hurt. My lip got busted last time, and I’m pretty sure my tailbone was fractured. I also had this bruise bigger than Eli’s head—”
“We need you on a team,” Gordo insisted.
I just shook my head.
“Quit being a baby and play. Gordo promises not to knee you again, don’t you, Gordo?” Eli asked.
The dark-skinned man next to him nodded almost enthusiastically.
They were so full of shit.
“I promise not to knee you either,” Eli amended next. “We can be on the same team if it makes you happy.”
Well, that was part of the problem when we’d played in the past too. I wasn’t usually a competitive person—a game was just a game and if it made someone’s day to win, so be it—but when it came to doing things against Eli, that was a whole different story. We’d been competing for attention, love, food and just about everything else from the moment we’d been born. Arguing and fighting over stuff was second nature for us.
But still. The memory of my bloody busted lip was still fresh in my mind two years later. Before that there had been a visit to the dentist for a new filling, a bloody nose, a sprained back, an ankle I couldn’t walk on for two weeks… the list was endless.
Then there was whatever crap the losing team had to go through. It was the whole purpose behind playing: to embarrass the loser.
“I’ll tell Mason not to purposely trip you anymore,” Eli finally added with an expectant look on his face. “Deal?”
I hesitated. Along with the bloody lip in the past, there had also been a black eye, an elbow to the center of my chest…
“It’ll be fun,” Bryce, the TCC light guy, suggested.
It’ll be fun, they said.
Just a friendly game, they said.
Well, they were fucking liars. All eleven of them.
Two hours after I was finally guilt-tripped into agreeing to play, the bus made a detour on the journey from the parking lot it had sat overnight to the park it dropped us off at. The drive had only been four hours long, and in the middle of the night, we arrived in Houston, Texas. Unfortunately, there was more than enough time to kill before we needed to get to the venue, so I couldn’t use that as an excuse as to why we couldn’t play. We all piled out, dressed in shorts, T-shirts and an array of tennis shoes.
A few of us, including me, were busy putting sunblock on when Gordo went around passing out pieces of torn-out notebook paper folded into small pieces. There were two papers with stars on them for whoever won team-captain duties and nine pieces of paper with either a “1” or a “2” on them, the deciding factor for which team each person ended up on. We’d already agreed in the bus that Eli and I would be on the same team, so I would choose a paper for the both of us.
That part of it went fine. There was no problem.
Julian ended up the captain of the “1” team and Freddy, the tour manager/sound guy or front of house, got the other piece of paper to command the “2” team.
Julian, Mason, Sacha, Bryce, Isaiah and Mateo were on team one.
Freddy, Carter, Gordo, Miles, Eli and I were on team two.
Still, no problem.
Then they decided they were going to go over ideas as to what the losing team had to do as their punishment. This wasn’t unusual, either; every time I’d played their stupid Soccer Death Match in the past, there had been some bet going on. It had always been something humiliating, so my standards weren’t too high. I was pretty much ready for something involving bare asses or being someone’s slave for a day.
And then Mason’s dumb-dumb-dumb-ass blurted out, “Losing team has to shave their heads.”
Uhh…
“YES!” I wasn’t sure who first yelled out their agreement, but I wish I had so I knew who to nut-punch.
