1. CHAPTER 1

1

KAI

PRESENT DAY

A swift blow hits me in the gut, forcing me to my knees, landing on the sticky, dirty floor of this shitty bar. Fuck, it hurts when your stomach feels like it's been repositioned into your chest. Clutching my stomach, I curl over, coughing, trying to get my breath back before slowly rising to my feet, grabbing onto the chair beside me to gain my balance. This always happens. Trouble follows us everywhere we go. Actually, that's a lie. My best friend, Jez, along with his brother Zac and his gang are always the ones to find trouble wherever we go. I've lost count of the amount of times I've been arrested and thrown into a cell for the night, only for my mother to have to come and collect me and read me the riot act. I’m lucky I haven’t ended up in prison. The only reason I haven’t is because of Officer Tim Lovell, who has known my mom for years and has the most obvious crush on her. I refuse to allow myself to like him, even though he’s a nice guy and he’s saved my ass more times than I could mention. He just makes me feel worse. He’s the good guy, Mr. Fucking Perfect, and I’m the screw up.

Stop with the pity party, dumbass.

Living in a small town like this is double sided. The positives are the good people within the local community who look out for one another. They seem to see good in me that I’m not sure exists anymore. I’m numb to most things in life when it comes to expectations. The negative is that you get stuck in the bubble, staying with the same group of people who influence your routine, and you find yourself landlocked into bad decisions. A huge part of me wants out of here, to find a good path to set my life on, but it's so hard. Hard to push myself. The disappointment I see in my mom’s eyes is a daily thing, and it's easier to live up to that than try to make it better.

Outside of my mom, Jez is all I have, and that’s not a good thing. Over time, his brother, Zac, has had a growing number of cronies that started to hang with us and they now refer to themselves as ‘The Skins’. A small-time gang that steals, deals and causes havoc with anyone who even looks at them in the wrong way. Like tonight. Same old shit, we have a few drinks, play some pool and start a bar fight with another group who accused Zac of stealing drugs from one of his guys. I’m so fucking over this life that all the energy in my body I had to try and change has been sapped out.

“Kai, we gotta go, cops are here!” Jez shouts back at me as he lands his fist into one of the guys that lunged over at us, when Zac was goading him.

My feet don’t move. I just stand and watch Jez beat the shit out of these guys like it’s nothing. His long ratty brown hair, tied into a small scraggly bun, looks like it’s about to come undone. He has blood on the corner of his mouth where someone must have got a hit in, his hazel eyes are like slits, what you’d imagine everything evil in the world to look like in human form. As I stand here, zoned out from the shouts and crashes of broken glass, it dawns on me that he isn’t my friend, or even someone I particularly care about. He is my routine. To be honest, he’s kinda like a boss. He tells me what we’re doing every day and I follow. Why have I only just caught onto that?

“What the fuck you waiting for, man? Let’s go!” Zac shouts at me and pushes me from behind. I fucking hate him. Not only is he unaware of basic hygiene, his hardened face tells a thousand stories of a fucked up life that’s never gonna change. The guy lives for violence and destroying people’s lives.

I stumble when he pushes me just as the door to the bar flies open and in walks the local cops, guns out and yelling orders that don’t reach my ears. Zac and Jez with the other guys are nowhere to be seen. Did I miss them leaving? All activity around me is happening in slow motion, but my body still doesn’t react. Am I in shock? Or is this an epiphany?

“Kai, get down. Hands behind your back, you know the drill,” one of the officers says to me. I recognize him but I don’t say anything. The familiar look of disappointment is written all over his face, similar to my mom’s. Fuck. My mom. She’s gonna kill me.

An hour later after being processed at the local station, they allow me my phone call, which I tentatively take as the buzz from the booze earlier has officially left my system, replaced by nausea and apprehension of putting this shit at my mom’s door. Again. You’d never have guessed I’m a twenty-two year old adult.

Biting the bullet, I make the call, hoping that she is awake and not too pissed.

“Hello?” Mom answers, voice slightly groggy from sleep.

“Hey, Mom.”

“You’re fucking kidding me. You’ve been arrested again, haven’t you?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Call it intuition or call it a habit.” She sighs into the phone. Tears fill my eyes, which I put down to exhaustion. I’m a fuck up. Who would be proud to call me their son? I want help. I need help, but I’m too afraid to ask for it.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, fighting the urge to regress into a child and cry hysterically.

“I know, but I can’t do this anymore. I’m calling your Uncle Jules. See if he can help get you out of this mess.”

My body goes rigid at that name that hasn’t been uttered for months, maybe even years. Jules. I don’t even want to entertain his name being spoken, but the excitement that’s swirling in my stomach, similar to a washing machine, needs to get the message. We don’t think of Uncle Jules anymore. He isn’t my real Uncle. Jules and my mom are step siblings through marriage. I barely know him as he didn’t spend a lot of time around us, especially after we moved, only visiting a handful of times a year. But I do remember when my hormones started regarding him differently and he became an obsession. I’d just turned sixteen and he’d visited for my birthday. He then visited for Thanksgiving the same year and after that he left, he just disappeared from our lives. I was equally devastated as I was relieved. Does Mom still talk to him? She must, or why would she call him to help out? Why has she never said anything and why has he never wanted to talk to me?

“Jules? Why call him? We don’t know him and how could he ever help me?”

“I don’t know, but I’m out of options. Try and rest tonight and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Okay. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too.”

It takes a few seconds to notice the dead dial tone on the other end of the line, signaling that she ended the call.

As I get placed back in my cell, I spend the whole night staring at the ceiling. I let the tears fall freely, wishing this would just all end, and accepting that I’m not worth shit to anyone or anything. I’m worthless—a piece of trash. My grandparents didn’t want me even before I was born so they kicked my mom out, Jules high tailed out of our lives, and now my mom is not far behind washing her hands of me. Maybe I’m the problem. I don’t add anything to society, I just aimlessly drift through life, only thinking of the consequences after I’ve done something inevitably to fuck up. It’s exhausting. I’ve never felt more alone than I do right now. Lost in the dense fog with no way out, nobody who can hear me silently beg for help.

Then the saddest thought passes through my mind, plummeting me into the dark depths of sleep that a small part of me hopes I won’t wake from. The thought that…would anyone actually miss me?