Page 7 of Forgotten Sacrifice
After I was dropped off at boarding school nearly a yearago, I was naive enough to believe Vince would forget all about me. Until I received my first weekly debt update.
Send me pictures of your wrists.
Shoving up my left sleeve, I angle my arm to where my wrist is showing, flipping the bird as I snap a pic. Doing the same with my right arm, I send him the pictures. Proof that I’m not cutting myself.
Without the attitude next time.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t specify,” I snipe.
Between dealing with Aspen and now Vince’s bullshit, I’ve lost my appetite, but I still make my way to the dining hall. Waiting in line, I see my friends on the other side of the room and wave. When I reach the front of the line, I order a salad and the fish entree.
I weave in and out of students with my tray, spotting my teammates from the bathroom incident waiting in the taco bar line. Once I near them, I pretend to trip, slamming into Aspen while gripping my fork for dear life. We tumble to the ground with my tray skittering across the floor, and in the chaos of it, I ram the fork prongs into the fleshy part of her bare thigh.
“Oww, you clumsy bitch!” Aspen’s eyes go wide as she notices the fork protruding from her thigh and the blood gushing from it. “Oh my God!” she shrieks.
“Oh, no. Fish fork got ya. Need help?”
I go to yank the fork out of her thigh, but she smacks my hand away. “Don’t fucking touch me!” She scrambles to her feet and hobbles out of the dining hall.
I glance over to her friend who was also talking shit about me in the bathroom, but she wisely disappears into the crowd of busybodies.
Pushing my way through the crowd, I cut to the front of the line. “Hey!” A girl bitches, and I spin around.
“You got a problem?” I snap, and I must look stabby, because she holds up her hands.
With all eyes on me, I grab my new tray and join my friends.
“What happened? We couldn’t see from over here,” my roommate, Olivia, says.
“Fish fork accident,” I say, stabbing a piece of salad greens with my fish fork and bringing it to my mouth in a very uncouth manner.
Chapter
Four
Vince
Arriving at Al’s Sports Bar, I belly up the bar, waiting for my clients to settle up for the week. In the not so distant past, underling bookies used to handle this for me. That is, until I lost the majority of my business to legalized sportsbooks. Now, I’m a one-man show.
“Hey, how’s your grandkids?” I ask my bettor when he hands me an envelope with this week’s losses. I take out the money and count it, noting the payment in my ledger with my little pencil.
“Good, thanks for asking. Oldest just got accepted into law school,” he says proudly.
“Congrats to Thomas,” I tell him, remembering his grandkid’s name. My business is all about relationships with my clients, and I’m a nice guy until someone forces me not to be. That hasn’t happened since Luna’s old man.
“Thanks, Vince.” He beams. “Hey, put me down for a dime on New York.”
“You got it,” I tell him, making the notation of his thousand dollar credit bet.
“See you next week.” We shake, and he walks out.
My final bettor takes a seat beside me, handing me an envelope. “What’s the moneyline on the fight action?”
I pause counting the cash. “What fight action? Here in AC?” Boxing was huge in AC years ago, but in my humble opinion, Antonio Parisi shot himself in the foot by squeezing unions too hard, who in turn, squeezed fight promoters too hard, who took their fights elsewhere.
“Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Heard my friend talking about it.”
“Find out more details, and I’ll consider adding it to my books.”
