Facing West (Forever Wilde 1)

By then, both the boys were regular tormentors of mine in school. They found little opportunities here and there to tease me and poke at me when they could. None of it was serious enough to warrant saying anything—it was more the repetition of the barbs that hurt. Like death of a thousand cuts.

But I’d put on my game face that day for my mom’s sake. I knew she’d fallen head over heels for the sheriff not long after the widower and his sons had moved to town earlier in the year, and Mom had been daydreaming of becoming his wife ever since. I imagined how much easier our lives would have been without her needing to work two shitty-ass jobs and struggle to make ends meet. I thought about what it would be like for her to be able to walk through town as the sheriff’s wife instead of the trailer-trash widow of a good-for-nothing drunk.

Curt leaned his cocky face toward me and whispered low enough for only me to hear. “He’s trying to impress your sister.”

The admission startled me. I glanced at Reeve Billingham at the wheel, noticing him looking proud as a peacock. The guy was seventeen, the same age as my sister.

“That’s gross,” I’d said.

“Tell me about it,” he’d scoffed. “He could have any girl he wanted. What the hell’s he gotta look at a skinny chick with no tits for?”

I felt bile rise up in my throat at the thought of anyone looking at my sister in any kind of sexual way. The use of the word “tits” in relation to her made me want to blow chunks off the side of the boat.

The boat lurched again toward shore, and that’s when I saw who Reeve was really trying to impress. The entire track team and all its fans from the high school were standing on the shore preparing for the massive water balloon fight. Reeve was their star pole vaulter, who’d apparently had to skip out on the team’s fun to hang out with us. He was pulling stunts at the helm of the boat to get his buddies’ attention on shore.

Adriana looked pissed, so I carefully made my way over to where she was sitting on the other side of the boat.

“You okay?” I asked quietly.

She nodded but didn’t open her mouth. Long strands of dark hair blew around her face from where they’d escaped her ponytail holder.

“The guy’s a jerk,” I muttered.

She shrugged. “Meh, he’s okay. I just wish we could go tubing or something fun. This sucks.”

I looked over at my mom who was sitting in the circle of the sheriff’s arms and gazing at his face with rapt attention while he pointed out parts of the boat. My mother had grown up around boats all her life. Her father had been a commercial fisherman out of Galveston, and yet she stared up at the sheriff as if she didn’t know a propeller from a cleat.

“The point is for us to become best friends with these rodents,” I said under my breath. “As if that’s going to happen in this lifetime.”

Adriana blew out a breath, squinting for a minute before turning to me. “Nico, don’t fuck this up for us.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You want Mom to actually do it? Marry the sheriff so we can all be one big happy Billingham family?”

She looked away, off toward the horizon away from the shore. “If it’s what she wants… And shit—maybe then I could afford to get the hell out of here and go to school in the city.”

She ran a tanned hand across her face in a useless attempt to clear the strands of hair from her eyelashes and lips before looking back toward shore.

I took another glance at our mom just as she leaned her head back in a laugh. The sun was shining on her, casting a glow that made her seem lit up from the inside. It was a rare moment of seeing her in full relaxation mode. She was snuggled against the much larger sheriff, who was busy telling a joke and making her laugh.

Everyone in town seemed to think the sheriff was a cantankerous old grump but the kind who was also somehow endearing. I’d never seen the endearing part. Just the cantankerous part. But then again, I wasn’t the kind of kid he was predisposed to like. I hung out with the different kids. The kids with weird clothes and weird taste. The ones who didn’t wear golf shirts and show up for youth classes at the church. The ones who got caught sneaking cigarettes and cheap-ass beer behind the concession stands at the local high school football games.

Just then the big man turned and caught me staring. In a rare instance of singling me out for a good reason instead of a bad one, he told Reeve to stop the boat so I could take a turn at the wheel. For a brief moment my heart swelled. Maybe I was wrong about his opinion of me. Maybe he didn’t think I was a good-for-nothing. Just for a second I felt like one of his kids—a son he wanted to teach how to drive the boat.