This agreement is straightforward and simple. By the end of it, we’ll both get what we want, except as I stand in front of the man that never wanted me and fed Mom’s addiction underthe radar but also directlyinthe radar, my stomach coils with distrust because…
I just made a deal with the person who killed my mom.
FORTY-TWO
COLSON
Old text messages…
Violet:You awake?
Colson:Am now. What’s on your mind, baby?
Violet:Nothing and everything.
Colson:Which category am I in?
Violet:The everything one. Always.
Colson:Promise?
Violet:Pinky promise.
A bittersweet stirringtakes place in my body, swishing from side to side as I look out over the crowd. Tonight’s matches are on a patch of land on the outskirts of Harrison Heights behind the old battery plant that was shut down years ago.
Finn and Clyde tried running me off this road not that long ago. That night, Finn pressed the head of a lit cigarette against my neck and melted my skin into a circular scar I still don.
My eyes keep skirting to Tommy from where I sit. I’ve decided to keep my distance until my fight is up, so I’ve gotten comfortable on the delivery landing dock. Behind me are huge garage doors with dents in them. Above those are windows busted from years of sitting and enduring ravenous weather. None of us should be here, the chemicals most likely still poignant in the soil. One touch and who the fuck knows what a person could contract.
But maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe it took years of working under certain conditions for so many of the workers to end up sick. It reminds me a hell of a lot like the movieErin Brockovich,a woman who was an environmental activist and built a case against an electric company that contaminated groundwater that eventually led to unexplained health issues amongst many in its town.
There was a solid two years when I was in middle school that Mom would fall asleep in the living room and that movie would play in the background. Sometimes, I’d sit with her while she slept and watch the whole thing through. Other times, I’d venture to my room because it was too hard to see her passed out when she was home.
I shake the memory out of my head.
Focus.
With the battery-operated lights someone hauled out here, I recognize the scars that litter my hands. The areas on my knuckles that have split repeatedly. The skin was supposed to grow back stronger, but I never gave it the chance to properly do so between fights. I run my thumb over one of the scars, and it immediately throws me back to the night I showed up at Violet’s apartment after Finn got to me in that alley.
My lip was split, bloody and horrifying, but she swept me under her arm, anyway. Didn’t get on my shit. Made me feel important. I think that’s when she really got in my head andheart. When everything around me started to blur just a little more each time I saw her.
The memory of her rolling my shirt up, her skin brushing against mine holds like the black of the night, finishing off the cracks in my heart where I’ve been worse for wear most of my life. I squeeze my eyes shut and drop my head, pretending like I’m in her room and her hands are featherlight against my damaged skin.
My entire body craves her presence, but then I open my eyes and remind myself how this—my current way of life—isn’t her. Violet has always been a blinding contrast to what I am. Seeing random people shove each other and holler when Remy gets his win isn’t something she approves of or needs to be around. She made that perfectly clear when she straddled my lap and begged me to stop.
It’s something I dream about at night, how I refused to follow her guidance. The way her disappointment wove around me in a death grip. But in my sleep, she’s not alone.
Clyde is also there, ripping Violet from my grasp, hauling her away, and forcing her to run drugs for him. When she returns from doing just that, he makes her test them, checking the potency by forcing them into her body and watching as she succumbs to the high. Her brown eyes drench me in sweetness and shame, and I’m fuckingimmobile. I try so damn hard to push to my feet to save her from his abuse, but I never can. All the while, scenes of Violet are projected across the wall of my mind. Her snorting a powdery substance. Her swallowing a pill. Her skin pricked and broke open with the fine tip of a needle.
Her body falls slack almost every time. She loses that brightness in her beautiful eyes. Her skin pales just like Mom’s. And then she’s an outline of a shape. A human body that’s alive but not living. An incredible, caring mind that isn’t aware but still giving into the motions.
A cold sweat breaks out over my arms and back. The same kind that’s always there when I wake up from the nightmare. Then someone clamps a hand over my shoulder and pulls me from the agony settling into my chest cavity.
I glance up to find Eli looking down at me, his face wearing the same distant expression as always when we’re out at fights. It never fails to remind me how he morphs into an entirely different person on nights like these. He turns into a fucking killer in the ring. I haven’t seen him lose one match since I’ve started, which reminds me that I need to lose mine tonight.
“I’m hearing the grass is slick as shit,” he says. “Still wet from yesterday’s rain.”
Well, that sucks for most of the guys fighting tonight. I choose to see it as a small blessing in the deal I made with Clyde. It almost feels like the universe is on my side for once.
