Never again.
I refuse to keep people who matter at a distance. Griffin will get his freaking wish, I’m his friend till the day he skips to his grave. Parker and Skye, I’ll be so chatty they won’t know what to do with me. Dax, well, Dax is going to need to come out of his shell. I’ll make him. We both will step into the light of day with smiles on.
The Kings are my family, and I’m done not trusting them completely. I’m not going to risk missing out on moments because I want to think everyone has it out for me.
I blink until the wet glare starts to fade and lift my phone again. It’s blurry, but I start to pull up our small group chat. I don’t know what I’m going to say, profess my undying bromance to these guys, maybe?
Once I do that, I’m calling Drake.
My typing is interrupted by a phone call. Speaking of friends.
“Hey, Park,” I say, my voice is too hoarse. I don’t care.
“Ryder,” Parker snaps. He never snaps like this unless . . . something is wrong. A hundred scenarios cross my mind. Most have something to do with Ever or Skye, none of them are good.
“What’s going on?”
“There’s been an accident,” Parker says.
I’m numb. Cold. I hardly know I’m moving as I listen to him explain everything he knows.
“I’m on my way.” I hang up and sprint outside. Pays to be one of the fastest on the team. Within sixty seconds I’m pulling onto the main road, praying my new-found ambition to not miss a moment with my teammates didn’t come too late.
Ava
“Laura,you’re going to make me cry.” I laugh and take a bite of my salad when I catch Ryder’s mom looking at me again with her big, glassy eyes.
“I can’t help it,” she says. My mom snorts into her soup. Laura nudges her, but smiles at me. “I always hoped you’d find your way back to each other and now you really have. Do you know how long it’s been since that scowly son of mine has smiled so easily?”
“A decade?” I shrug. “Just tossing numbers out there.”
Laura grins. “He never was an outgoing kid, but you sparked something in him and it’s back, Tweety Bird.”
Laura was the first one to call me Tweety since she found out my love for the funny little bird. She gives me the full title, and like Ryder calling me Tweets, I’ve always felt like I was sort of her family too.
“How are you going to handle the MLB schedule?” Mom asks.
Ryder is on the road seven months out of the year. But I’m not about to let a wild schedule come between us. If my plans for my own organization go through, I can run a lot of it from a laptop if necessary.
“Working on the field house has reminded me what I always wanted to do,” I say. “So, I’ve started working on something. I actually have a meeting with Dallas Anderson and some big potential partners.”
My mom stops lifting her spoon halfway to her mouth. “Partners? For what?”
“I want to start a program where we partner with more professional athletes, or celebrities even, and create places for homeless or at-risk kids. Like the field house.”
“You want to make more field houses?”
“Well, sort of. I’ve been talking with Tate and Ellie Hawkins, he’s in Perfectly Broken—”
“The rock band with the billboards all over?”
“Yeah. He has his own youth center, and it’s heavily focused on the arts. It gave me the idea of making an organization that turns abandoned spaces into themed houses. For the arts, athletics, whatever partnerships we can form will determine what the theme is. Maybe it’s a clubhouse for young actors, maybe we’ll have skateparks where kids can play street hockey, or skateboard, or bike. Or, like ours, sports in general.”
“Wait,” Laura says. “And you already have partners for this business?”
“I think it would be more like an organization, but that’s a detail we’ll have to work out. And yes. I’m meeting with the owner of Enigma records, Dallas Anderson,andthe Perfectly Broken bassist has a brother who is a big actor. They’re going to reach out to him to see if anyone on the Hollywood side would be interested and—”
“Sweetie.” My mom interrupts, a look of awe on her face. Laura too. Her hands are covering her face and she looks like she still wants to cry. My mom covers my hand. “Ava, this isn’t just an idea. You’ve already dropped the stone in the water, andit isrippling. This is amazing, and . . . it’s going to help a lot of kids whose situation you understand all too well.”
