Lost Boys (Slateview High 1)

His voice hardened, and he leaned forward in his seat, bringing his face closer to mine.

“You think any of the people whose houses we hit are innocent? After everything you’ve seen? Get fuckin’ real, Princess. Nobody makes it to a certain position in the world without sacrificing something. You can just call what we do ‘karma’. And when it comes down to it, if you were in our positions, you’d do the same damn thing if it meant putting food on your table, or clothes on your back, or taking care of your family. You got no right to judge. None. And you ain’t learned a fucking thing since coming to Slateview if the first thing you do when you find out about our business is go on a tirade about ‘well, what about the rich people’. Fuck rich people. Those cocksuckers are the reason we’re even doing this shit to begin with.”

There was something in Bishop’s voice I’d never heard before. Even on the night when he’d broken into my bedroom—an action that was a lot less surprising now—he hadn’t sounded so bitter. There was a deep, hard anger in his tone that brought me up short.

I honestly hadn’t considered that this was something they were doing out of necessity. I’d always been taught that every criminal had a choice: they could either choose to break the law, or they could do the right thing. Circumstances were never an excuse.

But I knew Bishop had been on his own for years, with no parents and a foster family that barely registered his existence. What about Kace? And Misael? Why did they need to break into people’s houses and do shady jobs at all the hours of the night just to make ends meet?

Why was I even wondering if it justified anything they were doing?

I breathed through my nose, sitting on all of those questions. Earlier in the evening, before the party and before the break-in, I’d thought about how badly I wanted to know more about these boys. Then, it’d been about simple curiosity, a burning desire to understand these boys who drew me in against my will. Now there was an element of self-preservation to it—a need to know what exactly I’d gotten myself into.

For several long moments, Bishop and I faced off in silence. I’d been the subject of his ire before and had caved every one of those times, but this time I refused to back down, and anger crackled between us like lightning.

Then Misael spoke up.

“Maybe… we should explain a little more about where we come from? All of us?” He turned in his seat, looking back pointedly at Bishop. “Might help Princess understand more, since she’s still got a chip on her shoulder.” He looked to me. “Y’know. No offence.”

Kace scoffed. “Bit heavy for a coney night.”

Misael shrugged. “So? Better than nothing, if you ask me.”

“We didn’t,” Bishop deadpanned. Misael threw a tater tot into the back seat.

“Don’t be a smart ass, Bish. I’m just sayin’ this whole thing might go smoother if we laid it out there.”

I tore my gaze away from the brown-haired boy in the back seat, flicking a glance over to the driver’s side.

Misael was openly offering up information to me? Really?

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by it. The boy with caramel skin and laughing brown eyes was the least reserved out of the three of them. He was the shockingly open ray of sunshine that somehow penetrated the hardness of Kace and the stoicism of Bishop.

It did make me curious about how the three of them all worked so well as a unit—how their pieces had ended up coming together and fitting into the little puzzle that they were. I already knew a bit about Bishop’s history, that his parents had both died in quick succession and that he was convinced it was because of my father… an accusation I was still trying to come to terms with.

I sucked in a deep breath, setting down my half-eaten coney dog on the console beside me.

“I’ll listen. Whatever it is you have to say… I’ll listen.” I looked to Bishop, my gaze a silent reminder that I’d listened to him before. That he could talk to me and trust me to keep his confidence.

Shockingly, the harsh lines of his face relaxed. Then he sighed and nodded.

“Fine. But I’m not rehashing any of the shit Princess and I already talked about.”

Misael blinked at him, obviously surprised that Bishop had even explained a tiny bit of his past to me. Bish said nothing, however, sitting back with his coney and a quietly assessing look on his face. Misael shrugged and looked back to me.

“Well, we’ve all been in the system for years,” he said with that same lightness that always followed him. “Where I’m at now? That’s my eighth foster home. My mom passed when I was young. Like young, young. My dad was never in the picture, but that was fine by me. According to Mom, he was an asshole anyway.” He smiled a little. “I ended up in foster care when I was six. Been bouncing around from place to place ever since. That’s where I met Bish and Reaper; we all lived in the same house for about a year.” He nodded over to Kace like he was passing the ball over to him. “Go on.”

Kace’s gaze trailed over to my face. He almost could’ve looked bored if not for the glimmer of something in his eyes that I’d never seen before. A hint of real vulnerability. He was hesitant.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to—”

“My mom’s a junkie,” he said with a shrug. “She’s not dead like Bish and Misael’s, but the courts obviously don’t think a woman high off her ass all the time on ice has it in her to be a good parent. They took me away from her when I was thirteen.”

He said nothing of his father. Something about that omission seemed very intentional though, and I didn’t press for more details. I was still trying to process what they’d told me already.

What were you supposed to say to revelations like those?

My chest ached as if my heart had suddenly forgotten how to beat, as if it sat between my ribs like a useless lump of clay. These three boys who were closer than brothers had all met each other in foster care, and the circumstances that’d put them all into that system were terrible. There had been drugs, shady dealings, violence. Dead parents, absent parents. It was all so horribly… unfair.