Page 1 of Indigo Sky

PROLOGUE

There comes a moment in every man's life where he looks back on the mistakes he made and wonders what would've happened if he'd made different choices.

Maybe it’s a slew of stupid moments that, at the time, seemed like trivial, incidental blips of nothing that eventually piled up, one on top of the other, until it all came tumbling down, like a tower of matchsticks. Or maybe it was just one huge, royal fuckup that steered the bastard from the well-beaten path.

For my father, I like to think it was the moment he blew a firework up in my face, disfiguring his only son—his only kid at all—for life and leaving him with one eye.

Or, you know, it could've been the day he opened his home and heart up to Nathan Manning.

No, wait, let’s rewind for a second.

Nathan Manning never would've been inside our home had my father not blown my face up.So, let's go back to the eye thing and the big fuckin' scar that left every other kid in school either disgusted by me, terrified of me, or both.

They called me a one-eyed monster. They called me Cyclops—and I was eight! I was eight fuckin' years old, and kids I used to call my friends turned their backs on me quicker than if I'd shaken them down for their lunch money every day since preschool.

But kids are brutal, and nobody knew that more than Nate. ‘Cause, see, Nate was a monster, too, but the difference between us was, hewantedto be one. It was a defense mechanism, you know? I think it's how he got himself through the bullshit he dealt with at home. Before he moved in with us, I mean. Before—

Actually, you know what? This would probably be easier if I just started from the beginning.

You have the time, right?

CHAPTER ONE

"I don't want to go to school."

I stood there in my parents' bedroom doorway. They hadn't even gotten dressed for work yet, hadn't even had their morning coffee, and I was already begging them to keep me home for the day or the week—or, you know, forever.

As if Mom could afford to lose another day at the gym she owned. She had already kept the place closed for months while Dad continued to work on and off as a construction foreman.

But I wasn’t thinking about that.

Honestly, it was hilarious that, at eight years old, the thought of walking into elementary school with a fucked-up face and a missing eye seemed like the absolute worst shit to ever happen. You know, moreso than the fucked-up face and the missing eye, but at this age, your entire world revolved around what was going on at home and what was going on at school, and for me, shit at home was fine.

Shit at school though?

Not so much.

It had been three months since the Fourth of July. Three months since Dad had blown my face up with a firework—and, yes, it was a fucking accident, so don't even think about asking, all right? I don't want to hear it.

Anyway, it had been three months since the accident. Doctors did what they could to fix my face, but there was no fixing the eye. They said I would adapt to living life with only the one, and honestly, that had been the easiest part of it. I'm notsaying it didn’t suck. I'm not saying I didn’t go through months of pain, between healing and surgeries and healing some more. But let me tell you, nothing about all of that sucked nearly as much as my late return to school in the middle of October.

Like I said, kids were brutal, and they did not take too kindly to Mrs. Matthews making a spectacle of me in front of my second-grade classroom.

"Kids," she said, gripping my shoulders with what she probably thought was reassurance, but instead, I felt like I was being forced to stand there and be stared at, like some fuckin' circus sideshow. "Many of you have known Revan Waters since kindergarten, and you probably remember him looking a little different last year. But accidents can happen to anybody at any time—even you or one of your classmates—and over the summer, Revan suffered an accident that made him, uh …different. But! He’s still the same old Revan, so I hope you’ll treat him that way.”

God, that bitch.

I don’t think she purposely intended to make my life a living hell that day. I think she genuinely thought she was doing the right thing by drawing attention to the elephant in the damn room and making it seem like not such a big deal. But then she had to go and do that—shestumbled. She didn’t want them to treat me differently, but she alone had treated me like a freak show. She had singled me out, pulled me aside, forced me to come to the front of that classroom, and made me stand there while telling those kids that I wasn’t different … but Iwas. And, boy, did they know it, and they didn’t let me forget it my entire first week back.

This one kid, my old best friend, Joe Weston … on the first day, he threw a crumpled-up wad of aluminum foil at thebandage I was still wearing over my right eye—er, where my right eye had been—and forehead because he wanted to see if it hurt. And when I cried because ithadhurt, he laughed.

A whole lot of those kids laughed, so I made it a point to not cry in front of them again, no matter how much I wanted to—and believe me, that was a long week. It was hard to be an eight-year-old without friends. It was hard to have an entire grade of kids avoid me because they didn’t know how to treat me, so they treated me badly, and I begged and begged and fuckingbeggedmy parents to not send me back there to a class of kids who remembered a version of me that had been whole.

But they said it would get easier.

They said I’d learn to live with it.

They said the more I treated it like it was nothing, the more those kids would too.

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