Page 10 of Reckless At Raleigh High
Spinning around in the three-inch heels I borrowed from Mom’s designer shoe collection, I lock onto Zander with a laser beam focus. He immediately retreats, backing into the doorframe. “Whoa, now, sweetheart. I really had nothing to do with this. Alex was on a tear when I got here. He didn’t stop until his eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the deck somewhere ’round three this morning.”
“Where is he now?”I’m not used to hissing at people. I don’t think Zander’s accustomed to people speaking to him this way, either. He scowls, a disdainful dimple punctuating his cheek.
“Who the fuck knows? Haven’t got a clue. He woke up at six-thirty, threw up in his guitar case, took a cold shower, and then he left. And before you accuse me of being a shitty friend, Ididask where the hell he thought he was going. He declined to part with the information.”
“You should have gone after him,” I snarl, pushing past him out of the bedroom.
He follows me, bare feet thumping against the floorboards. “Ha! Yeah, right. I make questionable decisions all the time, but I’m not that stupid, darlin’. I don’t have life insurance and chasing after a category five hurricane does not sound like a good time to me.”
God, I could throat punch him. “You should have called me, then. Told me what he was doing. I would have come.” My cell phone’s already in my hand. I’m already pulling up Alex’s contact info on the screen. A second later, I’m hitting the green call button.
“Sorry, but again…I wouldn’t bother.” Zander gestures to something on the floor. I stoop down and pick up…oh, that’s just fucking great. It’s his cell phone. Smashed beyond recognition, the metal warped and flattened.
“What the hell happened?” I look up at Zander, expecting a reasonable explanation for this, but then I see just how ridiculous he looks and realize I’m not going to get anything sensible out of him. “Urgh, never mind.”
Where the hell would he have gone? Did he run out of booze? Maybe he went out to grab some more. But no…Zander said he threw up in his guitar case. He couldn’t have been feeling well. More alcohol was probably the last thing he wanted. So then what? I stand by the front door, pressing my fingers against my brow, trying to think. “It’s his brother’s fucking funeral this morning, Zander. I can’t believe you’d let him do this. Not today.”
The music stops, the song that was playing coming to an end, and for one second a complete, consuming silence floods the empty spaces inside the apartment. It feels alive and angry.
“What did you just say?”
I give Zander a withering sidelong look, surprised when I see his expression. He looks stunned. I’ve seen him arrogant. I’ve seen him amused. I’ve seen him annoyed. But I’ve never seen him like this. The swagger is gone, and suddenly he doesn’t look like a member of a potentially very dangerous motorcycle club. He looks like the seventeen-year-old high school student that he is. “What do you mean, it’s his brother’sfuneraltoday?”
Oh, this just gets better and better. “He didn’t tell you? Of course he didn’t tell you.” Makes perfect sense, really. Alex has been so shut down, getting him to speak tomehas been a labor of love. Alex’s friendship with Zander is clearly complicated, but I can see it for what it is—a love/hate relationship. It didn’t even cross my mind that Alex would have kept this from him, though. Sliding my phone back into my pocket, I sigh, the weight on my shoulders far heavier than it was a moment ago. Telling this story isn’t something I relish.
“Ben and the woman who was fostering him, they were in a car accident. They…neither of them made it.” I keep it as simple as possible. I can’t talk about Jackie’s perforated lungs. How she drowned in her own blood. I can’t talk about Ben’s brain bleed, or how he slipped away from this world without anyone sitting on the backseat beside him, holding his hand.
Zander’s face is ashen. “That isn’t funny, sweetheart.”
“You think I’m joking? Christ, what kind of person would joke about something like that?”
“Tell me you’re fucking with me,” he persists. “That’s why he destroyed himself last night? That…” Shaking his head, Zander slumps back against the wall behind him, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Bendied?”
I sympathize with him. It doesn’t feel real to me, either. Istillcan’t wrap my head around any of this. “Zander, you gotta think. Did he say anything about where he was going? Anything that might tell us where he is. I don’t think he’s in his right mind. I’m really fucking worried.”
When Zander drops his hands, his eyes are red and bloodshot. He clears his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, um…” Frowning, he shrugs. “He said something about going to see his mom. He stormed out of here without a jacket. He said he wouldn’t need it. He took the Scout.”
“Herode the bike?” I look around, surveying the chaos and destruction that is Alex’s apartment, trying to mentally add up how many units of alcohol are still churning around his system. I throw my hands up in the air, turning toward the door, then turning right back again. “He’s fucking dead,” I whisper. “He’s probably driven head-on into a Mack truck and now he’s fucking dead, too.”
Tense, and with a face whiter than a sheet, Zander shoves away from the wall. “No need to get melodramatic, Parisi. If we’re lucky, he might have just paralyzed himself from the waist down. You said the funeral’s this morning?”
I nod, fighting the urge to dash into the kitchen and throw up in the sink; I could have done without the thought that Alex might ironically share the same fate as Cillian Dupris. “Yeah. In twenty minutes.”
“Then that’s where we’re going. He wouldn’t miss Ben’s funeral. Come on, I’m coming over there with you,” he says, shaking his head. “Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t believe this is even fucking happening.”
4
SILVER
The driver doesn’t say a word about Zander’s robe, or the fact that the jeans he quickly put on are shredded beyond all functionality. His lips remain sealed in a tight, disapproving line as he drives us to the church. Greenwood Presbyterian is on the outskirts of Raleigh, set high on the side of a hill that overlooks town. It was the very first structure erected here, before the quaint stores on Main Street were built, or the warehouses and factories, owned by the Weaving family for generations, began to monopolize Raleigh’s modest skyline. The four families who founded Raleigh decided that the town’s people would need God more than anything else, and so they made a house of worship their first priority.
When we pull up outside the church, Zander and I bolt from the Town Car, hurrying inside the building. The large solid wood doors crash open, startling the figure dressed in white, standing in front of the lectern in the church’s apse. My legs nearly go out from underneath me when I see the small, half-sized coffin at the head of the pews, festooned with sunflowers.
Zander grabs my hand, pulling me behind him up the aisle, head sweeping from left to right. “He isn’t here.”
“Mr. Moretti?” the priest calls from the apse. “Welcome. I took the liberty of—”
“Nope. Not Alex,” Zander replies. “He hasn’t been here?”
