Page 16 of Second Story

What the fuck am I gonna do with him when I get there?

Lenny huffs again like only a seven-year-old can at a big brother before he gets back to flipping the pages of his favourite story.

I’d huff too if I wasn’t keyed up, nerves strung tight and jangling at the thought of facing Luke Lawson again.

That isn’t all that has me rattled.

And what the fuck is Joe doing here in Cornwall?

Seeing him after so long has got me feeling all kinds of things I don’t have time for. Like rage at Joe assuming I haven’t spent the last twelve months looking out for Lenny every minute. And fear, which is irrational. I know Joe can’t have my brother taken from me for missing one day of school. All he has to do is google to see that it really is a blood-splashed crime scene.

I’ve got to get Len away from there.

I try to keep that in mind instead of the warm brush of Joe’s knuckles against my throat.

Why did I let him help me?

Now I don’t only have a neat knot in my tie. I have a whole new stock of visuals for my angry wank bank. I thought that hopeless phase was over. Believed I’d finally stopped wanting to bang him like a drum and had moved on to wanting to carve his heart out. That all works fine in fiction. In reality, I’d remember his smile whenever he saw me, his gentleness with my brother, his way of making me believe everything would be okay.

Stop.

I need to focus on my second story, one all about kids who have strikes against them, like Joe warned me Lenny already had against him. I can’t do anything about the first strike of our mother being an absent parent like both our fathers, and I wouldn’t ever want to lighten Lenny’s skin tone. That shouldn’t even be a cloud over his future, but Joe was right: All the stats do paint a much darker picture about his life chances.

Before Joe dropped us with zero warning, he also promised I could stop a third strike from happening, only I’d have to step up. That’s what he told me the first day Mum didn’t turn up at school to collect my brother, a promise he repeated when he took me back to a home I didn’t recognise in the months since I’d left for uni.

The kitchen Mum kept spick-and-span was a war zone, and as dusty with fingerprint powder as my brother’s bedroom, where Joe showed me scars of his own as a warning of what could be in Lenny’s future if we didn’t work together.

He also made one more promise—that she’d be released on bail and I’d get back to uni in a few days, only she wasn’t, and I didn’t.

Now I park next to a tall willow tree and glance sideways again to see my little brother’s face slashed by shadows and light. Gashed, like the poor fuck who got a sharp reminder that dealers don’t ever forgive or forget drug debts. Hundreds of miles and a long drive through the night later, I know these flashes are sunlight, not curved steel. Panic still prickles at how close Lenny came to?—

No.

Focus.

“Put your book away. And Silver Man, Len.”

Silver Man.

That’s what he calls this action figure substitute for his hero, which is ironic. It’s also ironic that my brother spots another candidate for hero worship the minute I turn off the engine.

He ignores the green and leafy setting of this school that could be a second chance for both of us. Lenny only has eyes for someone limping in our direction.

“Look,” he breathes.

Now would be a good time for him to be voiceless. “Don’t point, Len.” That’s the quickest way to attract the wrong kind ofattention where we come from. I follow it with a second warning. “And don’t stare.”

Too late.

Lenny already has his seat belt unfastened, and scrambles out of his booster seat. He almost knees me in the nuts in the process of leaning out of my open window to get a better look at different scars than Joe’s. He usually kept his covered. This man doesn’t have that option, which Lenny homes in on. For a kid whose quietness has had me worried, he finally speaks up loud enough that his voice carries.

Carries?

It fucking soars, unlike my hopes of scoring a job here, which sinks like a stone the moment Lenny asks a worried question.

“Did you forget to pay your dealer?”

What a timefor my brother to get chatty, even if this guy’s scar does look like a warning. Something flayed his face wide open and must have sliced through nerves in the process. Half of his face is still. He touches that side with the tip of a finger, and maybe all isn’t lost here.

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