Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
“What are we doing?” he asked me as he eased back, turning to look at Kola, who was pacing in front of the TV.
“You don’t want to go put your gun away?”
“No, I wanna know what this is first.”
We were all quiet for a moment as Kola, arms crossed, scowling, reached the fireplace, turned, and then walked back to the china hutch with glass doors that we used to hold trophies and framed awards that the kids had won and Sam’s medals from when he was in the military, as well as his commendations as a federal marshal.
“Hey, buddy,” Sam said to his son. “What’s goin’ on?”
Kola stopped suddenly and looked at his father. “I don’t even know what to do.”
“All right,” Sam replied, turning his head to look at me—I shrugged and smiled—and then to his left, to Hannah, who shook her head, and then back to his son. “Why don’t you tell me what’s up.”
“Okay,” Kola agreed, holding his hands up, using them like bookends, as though visually framing his words. “So I have this new girl in my Constitutional Analysis class. Her name’s Ashley, and today she asked me to come over to her house after school so she could get my notes for the test on Monday and go over some other parts of how Mr. Parkinson wanted the arguments presented. He has this deviational model that he wants us to use, and she’s never seen it before.”
I myself had tried to help Kola with his homework for that class, only to be utterly defeated by the deviational model that was supposed to be easy to use.
“When we got to her house, I was surprised that she had us go to her room, and even more when she locked the door.”
Sam crossed his arms. “This girl had you in her room with the door locked?”
Kola nodded.
“Okay,” he said, taking a quick breath.
“But I wasn’t comfortable, so after a minute I got up and unlocked it and opened it. But then she got up and closed and locked it again and told me it was fine.”
The play-by-play was killing me.
“So then I told her to knock it off or I was out of there, and got up to unlock it at the same time someone tries to come into her room.”
“Like the doorknob is trying to turn?” Hannah asked her brother.
“Yeah.”
“Then what?” Sam prodded his son, stretching out his arms across the back of the couch.
“So then Ashley goes to the door, opens it, and her dad, or, I guess, her stepdad is there, and he asks her what’s going on.”
“How are you not murdered?” Hannah asked, bewildered, turning to look at me and Sam before returning her focus to her brother. “If I locked my door and there was a boy in there, I would be murdered and then reanimated and grounded until I was thirty.”
“Right?” he said, his brain clearly spinning.
I was starting to understand what had happened. It was a mindfuck for him, and he was trying to make sense of it all.
“What did she tell her dad?” Sam questioned his son.
“She told him nothing happened—which was true—and he says okay, like it’s cool, like it’s no big deal. He tells her he trusts her, and then she grabbed my face and gave me this crazy kiss goodbye, and then after just went to the bathroom.”
“And what did you do?” Hannah wanted to know.
“I left.”
Sam grunted.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“Do I believe that nothing happened?”
Kola nodded.
“If you tell me nothing happened, then I trust you, but you know damn well that in our house, locked doors are not acceptable.”
“No, I know, which is why I felt weird with it locked, and then when her dad—I mean her stepdad—when he tried to open it and couldn’t, I felt like I was doing something bad even though I wasn’t.”
“Since you weren’t doing anything wrong, why is your brain spinning over this?” I thought I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from him.
“Because I kept wondering what you guys would say about me just leaving without explaining things to him, and now I wonder if I should go back over and tell her father for sure that nothing happened.”
“What do you think we would say?” I asked him.
He crossed his arms, thinking. “I was wondering if it would be worse if I did it or if Hannah did it.”
“I would never do that, I don’t have a death wish,” Hannah chimed in quickly.
“Oh calm down,” he said snidely. “I just meant, if I had a locked door and there was a girl in there with me, would it be the same if Hannah had a guy in her room?”
“It would be the same,” Sam assured him, his voice low with a thread of warning. “You lock yourself in your room with a girl—or a boy for that matter—you better be prepared to have your privacy become a thing of the past. As in, the first thing to go is your door.”