AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Vin walks inside the gym where he spent the past seven years training to become the next world heavyweight champion, the smell of sweat and dirty sneakers bringing back countless memories. The only memory that matters now is the one where his coach made him pack up his locker and suggested a new career route, like being a ringside commentator or becoming a coach himself.
Insulting.
Vin sneaks down to the generator room and pulls a homemade bomb out of his gym bag.
Vin is going to die where he was made. And he’s not dying alone.
MATEO
12:58 p.m.
We pass a shop window with classic novels and new books sitting in children’s chairs, like the books are hanging out in a waiting room, ready to be bought and read. I could use some lightness after the threatening grill of that man with the gym bag.
Rufus takes a picture of the window. “We can go in.”
“I won’t be longer than twenty minutes,” I promise.
We go inside the Open Bookstore. I love how the store name is hopeful.
This is the best worst idea ever. I have no time to actually read any of these books. But I’ve never been in this store before because I usually have my books shipped to me or I borrow them from the school library. Maybe a bookshelf will topple over and that’s how I go out—painful, but there are worse ways to die.
I bump into a waist-high table while eyeing an antique clock on top of a bookshelf, knocking over their display copies of back-to-school books. I apologize to the bookseller—Joel, according to his name tag—and he tells me not to worry and assists me.
Rufus leaves his bike in the front of the store and follows me as I tour the aisles. I read the staff recommendations, all different genres praised in different handwriting, some more legible than others. I try avoiding the grief section, but two books catch my eye. One is Hello, Deborah, My Old Friend, the biography by Katherine Everett-Hasting that caused some controversy. The other is that bestselling guide no one shuts up about, Talking About Death When You’re Unexpectedly Dying, written by some man who’s still alive. I don’t get it.
They have a lot of my favorites in the thriller and young adult sections.
I pause in front of the romance section, where they have a dozen books wrapped in brown paper stamped “Blind Date with a Book.” There are little clues on what the book is to catch your interest, like the profile of someone you meet online. Like my Last Friend.
“Have you ever dated anyone?” Rufus asks.
The answer feels obvious. He’s nice for giving me the benefit of the doubt. “Nope.” I’ve only had crushes, but it’s embarrassing to admit they were characters in books and TV shows. “I missed out. Maybe in the next life.”
“Maybe,” Rufus says.
I sense there’s something more he wants to say; maybe he wants to crack a joke about how I should sign up for Necro so I don’t die a virgin, as if sex and love are the same thing. But he says nothing.
I could be totally wrong.
“Was Aimee your first girlfriend?” I ask. I grab the paper-wrapped book with an illustration of a criminal running away, holding an oversized playing card, a heart: “Heart Stealer.”
“First relationship,” Rufus says, playing with this spinner of New York City–themed postcards. “But I had things for other classmates in my old school. They never went anywhere, but I tried. Did you ever get close to someone?” He slides a postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge out the spinner. “You can send them a postcard.”
Postcards.
I smile as I grab one, two, four, six, twelve.
“You had a lot of crushes,” Rufus says.
I move for the cash register, where Joel assists me again. “We should send postcards to people, you know?” I keep it vague because I don’t want to break the news to this bookseller that the customers he’s ringing up are dying at seventeen and eighteen. I’m not going to ruin his day. “The Plutos, any classmates . . .”
“I don’t have their addresses,” Rufus says.
“Send it to the school. They’ll have the address for anyone you graduated with.”
It’s what I want to do. I buy the mystery book and the postcards, thank Joel for his help, and we leave. Rufus said the key to his relationships was speaking up. I can do this with the postcards, but I have to use my voice, too.
“I was nine when I bothered my dad about love,” I say, looking through the postcards again at places in my own city I never visited. “I wanted to know if it was under the couch or high up in the closet where I couldn’t reach yet. He didn’t say that ‘love is within’ or ‘love is all around you.’”
