AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The day we met,” I told him honestly. “Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Where’d you get the money?” I asked.
“The money for what?”
“The money to replace my library books,” I said.
Because, magically, the next morning, there was a bag outside our door when my grandma went to see who buzzed.
Inside that bag was every one of the books that the bullies had destroyed. And two extras.
Books for me.
My very own books.
I’d never owned my own books before.
I cherished them.
I still did.
They had a place of honor on my bookshelf in my apartment. The spines were broken and the pages nearly falling out from having been re-read so many times.
But they were my prized possessions.
Not much that I owned meant quite as much as those books did.
“You really want to know the answer to that?” he asked, and that devilish little smirk told me that the answer was absolutely something illegal.
“The statute of limitations has probably run out by now,” I shot back.
“Waited for those assholes and their parents to go to sleep, broke in, and stole some shit to hock.”
“You did not,” I said, eyes going huge.
“Sure as fuck did. Don’t go feeling bad for them. The one guy had an old man who beat the shit out of his ma. The other one once purposely swerved his car to hit a kitten in the road. They deserved to lose some of their shit.”
“You were ten years old. How did you know how to break in? How did you get to the bookstore?”
“Ama,” he said, shaking his head at me. “I might have been ten, but I’d been taking care of myself for five or so years by then. I knew how to do a lot of shit no one my age should have been able to do.”
That was always true.
It was probably what I liked best about Seeley when we were kids. While I was book smart, he was a different sort of smart. He knew so many things that no one else in our age group knew about.
I’d always sort of thought of him as the cool kid who just took pity on the neighborhood nerdy girl.
“I still have those books,” I told him. “The extra ones. I gave the other ones to the library to replace the ruined ones. Don’t laugh,” I said, giving him small eyes. “It was the right thing to do.”
“I know it was. You were always better at right and wrong than I was,” he admitted.
I shrugged that off, not wanting to get into it, knowing it was only going to cause yet another argument.
“Okay. Let’s get this cleaning over with. It won’t be pleasant. Did you find any pain meds to hold you over?” I asked as I got started.
“I didn’t look,” he admitted. “Passed out last night. Woke up to Eddie making a fucking massive breakfast.”
