“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“As for you, you’re still on the hot seat,” I pointed out. “While you’re doing all this confessing, you might as well tell me about what’s happened to you since boot camp...”
Chapter 16
Seb stretched out his long legs into my side of the swing, crossing his ankles. “Shoot, Malone. What do you want to know about me? I’m an open book.”
“Okay,” I said. “Guess I just want to know... what you did. There are entire chunks of your life I don’t know about.”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
I nodded. “Fair warning, life outside of boot camp was pretty dull.”
He snorted. “God, I would’ve taken dull any day. I don’t know... where to start? I already told you a little about what it was like in that place.”
“Was there anything good about it?”
“After you understood what they wanted from you, it was just a matter of putting your head down and doing the work. Rebellion wasn’t worth it, so I just went into survival mode and kept going until I’d graduated.”
I could definitely relate to that feeling. I’d done a lot of keep-calm-and-carry-on–ing since Nana died. “Did you have friends there?”
“There was a girl, Kaylee, whose older sister was a musher—has done the Iditarod sledding race in Alaska? Anyway, when her sister picked her up from boot camp, I was trying to figure out howto get home because, you know, my father didn’t come. So I guess she felt sorry for me and let me ride with them.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Hold on. You’re saying Captain Jansenleftyou up in the Yoop? He didn’t come get you after graduation?”
Seb shrugged. “We weren’t speaking at the time.”
“He must’ve paid a fortune to put you in there. You’d think he’d at least want to see a return on his investment, if nothing else.”
“No, see. The investment for him was paying someone to take me off his hands. So he got what he wanted out of it.”
I truly hated his father. Maybe almost as much as I hated mine.
My father...Without consciously thinking about it, I tapped on my phone screen to pull up my email as I had thousands of times before over the past couple of days, waiting for a response from the inquiry message I sent through his company website.
Nothing. As there never was.
“Everything okay?” Seb asked.
“Oh, um, no text from Jazmine yet,” I said, putting my phone down and refocusing on him. “So what happened after you got a ride with the girl’s sled-dog sister? The musher?”
“The musher had a camp in the Yoop between Marquette and the Wisconsin border, bunch of little log cabins. She and some other people had been practicing for the Iditarod there for the winter, like a dozen mushers. All the winter snow was melting, so they were packing things up to disband for the summer. I’d never seen so many Huskies at once.”
I blinked at Seb. “That’s where you got Punkin.”
The lines on his face softened. “Yep. Punkin had hurt her leg, and she’d healed up but couldn’t race with the other sled dogsanymore. They were going to send her to a rescue, but the two of us bonded instantly. So they let me adopt her, and Punkin and I were able to catch a ride with one of the mushers who was headed back home across the peninsula to Milwaukee. So that’s where Punkin and I settled.”
“Milwaukee?”
He nodded. “When I got my lifeguard certification back when we were kids, I remembered the YMCA had some rooms for temporary housing, you know? So it was the first place I went in Milwaukee. They were super cool, let me rent a room for cheap, and the manager was a dog person, so she let me keep Punkin, even though it was against the rules. We spent the summer there while I earned a little cash doing oil changes for a mom-and-pop garage.”
“Auto repair?”
“No, boat. The garage was right on Lake Michigan. Did a good-enough job that the man I was working for, Mr. Legaspi, let me have the Speed Buggy for almost nothing—he buys lots of cars and boats damaged by storms on the side. He’s the one who got me hooked on audiobooks. He immigrated here from the Philippines, and he used to listen to audiobooks to better understand American culture. He told me to pick something I liked and lean into it, learn everything I could about one subject. I’ve always wanted to travel, so I picked that.”
“No fault found,” I said, meaning it.
“Anyway, the deal I had with Mr. Legaspi was that I had to get the Bronco running myself, so I fixed it up in my spare time and drove back to Michigan last fall. And that’s basically all there is to tell.”
