The Rebel of Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels #1)(100)

Still straddling his bike, helmet in his hands, he looks up and sees me, and a slow, wicked smirk spreads across his handsome face.

“Alex Moretti, as I live and breathe,” I call down to him. “You weren’t supposed to get out of the hospital until tomorrow afternoon.”

He shrugs. “Hospital food’s the worst, Argento. And besides, I had to see you. I may have performed an elaborate and highly professional escape from the recovery ward about an hour ago.”

I slide all over the place as I throw myself down the embankment toward him. When I reach him, he catches me up in his arms, grunting a little as he hugs me to him. I realize too late that I’ve probably really hurt him. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting…”

He dismisses my apology by kissing me, his mouth against mine, hot and persuasive. He tucks a piece of my hair back behind my ear when he’s done with me. “How the hell can you forget, with the badass scar I’m rocking these days?” he asks.

After Alex had officially been pronounced dead, the lead EMT had charged up the defibrillator again and given it one last shot. A final Hail Mary. Screaming in a heap on the floor, I’d been too hysterical to notice the fact that they were all still working over him, but I sure as hell heard that EMT when she announced that they’d regained a sinus rhythm.

The bullet had traveled straight through Leon and buried itself deep in Alex's chest, perforated one of his major arteries, caused both of his lungs to collapse, along with all kinds of other damage to his body. The eight-hour surgery that saved his life has left him with a nine-inch-long scar from the base of his throat to his mid-torso, and he's convinced it's ruined the tattoo of his family crest.

“I’m glad you came here today,” he says, whispering into my neck. “It doesn’t make any sense, I know, but…I liked Leon. Until he started killing people.”

“I know. I did too.”

“I heard the nurses saying his father checked himself into the psych ward.”

“Yeah. There’s a for sale sign up at the end of their driveway. Dad says they’re probably going to have to pull it down though. Apparently, the fact that a mass murderer used to live there is gonna affect the house’s resale potential.”

“Fuck. How did any of this even happen?” Alex shakes his head sadly. “No one fucking saw how broken he was. I sure as hell didn’t when I hung out with him. I had no clue.”

“I don’t know. Leon was Kacey’s puppet. When she shut me out, he did, too. I never blamed him for it. Not really. But I wasn't close to him for nearly a year. I wish I'd noticed the change in him. I would have tried to help…”

“And now Kacey’s been sent to Seattle under a cloud of shame, Leon’s gone, and eighteen other people are dead.”

“Don’t forget that you nearly died,” I remind him.

He pulls a bored face, like that part’s not important. “And they’re reopening Raleigh in a week. Savage bastards. You’d think they’d give us all a little more time to recover.”

“We’ll all have to re-take our senior year if they did, and I, for one, would prefer to get it over with and move the hell on.”

“Oh? And where does that leave me, Argento? You, so quick to try and leave town and all…”

“I don’t care all that much about leaving Raleigh anymore. Just high school. But it would be nice to go to college somewhere less cold? And I was kind of hoping you might…”

Alex firmly shakes his head. “I can’t. I can’t go to college. Monty will never let me live it down if he ever finds out I can read and write properly.”

“You are coming to college!” I say. “You’re coming with me, wherever I end up going, and you’re going to love it. You have to promise.”

He observes me with a pensive, serious look in his eyes. He's far too pale after everything that he's been through, but he already looks so much better than he did. “All right, Silver Parisi. If that's what you want, then fine. I’ll go to college with you. I’ll follow you to the ends of the fucking earth if it'll make you happy. But there is something we need to do first.”

“And? What’s that?”

“We have to actually graduate first.”





Epilogue





SILVER





There are days in your life that are more than a series of hours strung together. Days that start off the same as any other. You eat breakfast. You struggle to find your keys. You’re mad at your mom, or your dad, or your brother, or your friend. You couldn’t find the shirt you wanted to wear, and it feels like the world is ending. And then something happens. Something so terrible and so catastrophic that suddenly the fact that you were running late doesn’t matter anymore. A literal or metaphorical bomb goes off, and all of the tiny little annoyances that were driving you crazy are thrown into stark relief, revealing them for what they are: unimportant. So inconsequential that you’re humbled by the size of the universe and how little control you have over absolutely anything in your life.

I have already lived through two such days in the past twelve months. The ground has been pulled out from underneath me, I’ve been blindsided, and the context of the world around me has altered so dramatically that I’ve looked around and not recognized what was once familiar. But, the thing about these nightmare days, the thing that continues to surprise and confound me, is that a series of days will follow right after them, when things slowly but surely seem to return to normal, and life? It just goes on regardless.