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That was… weird. Will hadn’t talked much about Janet, but when he had talked about her, everything seemed fine. They weren’t going out for long, but they had spent a ton of time together. He seemed really smitten with her actually.
If Will was having some kind of issue, did he know he could talk to me about it? I trusted him with everything, so why hadn’t he trusted me?
I dug into my pocket for my keys. I unlocked my door and stepped inside.
Instantly, I knew something was off, all thoughts of Will and Janet and piling dog poop set aside.
Something was terribly wrong.
There was a smell in the air. Like iron. It stung at my nose. I thought that maybe Mason or Jar had an accident in the living room before we left and the sun cooked through it, making the apartment reek.
Seconds later and that theory was put to rest.
“Oh my God.” I grasped at my chest, shock hitting me like a lightning bolt striking down on a cloudless day.
My first instinct wasn’t to run or to hide or to shout.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Beckham’s number, my entire body feeling like it was drained of all blood.
26Beckham Noble
Sweat beaded on my forehead. I wiped it away with the small white towel I had hooked in the side of my shorts. We were sitting outside of a popular pub, a happy hour special attracting all kinds of people to the beachside sports-themed spot. We had gotten here right after our kickball game and managed to dodge the mad rush, snagging a table by the far corner of the patio, underneath a palm tree that shielded us from the setting sun.
It had been a long day. Before the kickball game, I’d spent all day at the corner store that claimed they still had footage from the night of Oliver and Derrick’s attack. When I arrived, they spent a good hour explaining their system to me and how the videos were stored for years on the cloud. They showed me where all the cameras were set up, and they even went into an explanation of how they’d installed them. When they actually tried showing me the footage was when shit went south.
They opened up the folder labeled with the same year of the attacks. There, they clicked June. Once the June folder was open, they clicked on the seventeenth. A video for the day appeared on the screen.
They clicked on the video.
Clicked it again.
They clicked and clicked and clicked, and nothing was playing.
That was when we discovered the files were corrupt.
My hopes of catching the attackers on camera had been shot. None of the other stores around this area had installed this kind of system, so whatever footage they had lasted a month at most before it was deleted. And I knew that the attackers had fled down this very road because someone had reported two cars speeding off minutes later, and those cars were parked right around the corner shop.
It had been their getaway spot, and the two men must have crossed in front of the cameras to get there.
This had seemed like a massive fish on the hook, and there I was having to cut the line.
The owners of the corner store promised they would try to fix the file. I figured if they couldn’t, I’d ask Anya to work her techno-magic on the corrupt files and try to get something from them.
Still, there was a chance we’d never get to see what was on that tape.
After I got off that roller coaster, I went to my kickball game where we ended up beating the other team and earning a spot in our city’s big tournament. We had come to the pub to celebrate. Around me sat my four closest friends, all of us still wearing our kickball uniforms: shirtless light-blue tanks with white shorts, our nicknames printed on the back of each shirt, along with our numbers. I had met the guys through our kickball team, the Ball Busters, when I signed up something like ten years ago. Since then, the core five of us stuck together and managed to not only keep our team going for a decade, but our friendships as well.
There was Kyle Ramos, the mate I could go to at whatever time of the day, and he’d be there to offer a few helping words. Corey Meis was the jokester of the group and had zero shame in everything he did. There was one time we went on a cruise together and Corey ended up getting everyone together on the deck for a spontaneous improv show between him and whoever wanted to participate. By the end of the night, people were asking him to make his show a nightly thing.
Across from Corey was Silas Anderson, the hardest one of the group to crack, but once you did break through that prickly exterior, you’d find one of the most caring hearts to have ever beat. He had a rough go at life but was finally beginning to find some real happiness, and we were all happy for him.
For now, though, it wasn’t Silas we were talking about. Tonight I was the center of the conversation.
Or rather, Oliver and I were the center of conversation.
“He’s a really cool kid,” Kyle said. We were all wearing our light-blue jerseys from the game.
I had introduced Oliver to the gang a few days ago and was happy with how it went. Everyone seemed to get along, even though there was some awkwardness to overcome in the beginning. Our age difference wasn’t as apparent when it was just me and him together, but I could tell Oliver initially had some trouble being surrounded by men twice his age. I feared that there wouldn’t be anything to talk about and that we’d all stare into the bottom of our drinks for the entire night.
