ARC Excerpt
Slow Twitch: A Brenna Blixen Novel
Book 3
By
Liz Reinhardt
Coming Spring 2012
Saxon
I’m fairly hard to shock. In fact, I’m good at being the shocking one, and I like that. It keeps everyone guessing, and that’s always the best way with me. Once in a while, I get soft and let my heart leak out on my sleeve, but I’ve always regretted it. Every single time, it’s bit me in the ass. Once in a while, once in a really rare while, I manage to shock myself.
That’s where I was just after the end of my unimpressive junior year at Frankford High. I had missed almost as much school as I had attended. I had hit on my brother’s foxy girlfriend and practically convinced her not to completely hate me, then fucked it all up and lost my one chance to be with a girl whose brain interested me more than her tits. I boozed a little more than I should have and blacked out one too many Saturday nights. And Wednesday afternoons. And Monday mid-mornings. Then I needed some money, so I started dealing. I’m not remotely interested in sad-sack stories about innocent fucking school kids buying a bag of crack and hurtling themselves off of tall buildings. I deal; I should know who buys. It’s other assholes like me. Losers who need to forget just how shitty life is.
‘Cause mine is. I live in a big piece of shit house that’s been featured in twelve different architecture magazines and still manages to creep my ass out and make me feel like I live in a really shitty modern art museum. I’ve slept with every delicious piece of ass in a hundred-mile radius, but the only chick I really dig is with my brother, Jake, and they’re so in love it even makes my icy heart thaw a little. I have a hot car, a bitching Charger, but it’s pretty hard to drive it when it’s locked in my piece of shit father’s garage. I’m captain of the soccer team, an honors student, a badass and a little bit of a rebel. So how the fuck did I end up in the back of my Aunt Jackie’s shitty Mazda, zipping down the highway towards a tiny piece of south Jersey hell? Why is my life so shitty?
Did I do drugs because my life was such a steaming pile of shit, or was my life such a steaming pile of shit because I did drugs? My theory is that it’s a nice bundle of both theories. I think I just chose the wrong drug. Coke made me see things more clearly, have more energy. For what? I had no one to do anything with, considering I’d screwed the love interest of every guy friend I’d ever had, and I don’t hang out with girls unless they have the only thing I’m interested in on their minds. I already have a genius IQ, like it or not. And despite smoking a pack a day, I was a star athlete without the drugs. So the coke just made everything more clearly, draggingly miserable. That’s why I wasn’t good at hiding it. That’s why my mom found it. A lot of it.
Trust me, the amount matters. Lylee didn’t wig out because she feared for my life and health. She would have been cool with a little line here and there. It was the fear of being caught with so much of the shit in her house that made her squawk to my father, the shithead who left when I was young enough to still feel like a dad might be a good idea. Lylee wasn’t about to give up her bourgeois whoring and partying and her cushy professor job because I was being fruitful and selling enough of the shit to get attention from the bigger city dealers (another bad thing that was about to get a whole lot worse). So dear old Daddy came down and slapped me around a little and threatened to take away the only thing that can still make my granite heart skip a beat; my inheritance.
Hey, it’s blood money, but it’s fair and square blood money. Jake will get his, I’ll get mine and so will the two dozen or so other Maclean cousins and grandkids and whoever else is a direct descendent. It’s old money, and I’ll take it happily.
But Daddy told me no money unless I cleaned up my act, and he wasn’t about to take my word for it. I was put in the back of Jackie’s hideous purple Mazda with a duffel bag of necessities and sent somewhere that was pretty much going to be tailor-made hell for me; I was being sent to work in a diner.
I had been to rehab. Twice, actually. It’s all kind, dumb therapists who always act like there might be secret VH1 reality show cameras documenting every deep, heart-string-pulling conversation. There’s usually a lot of nature (ocean, mountain, trees, whatever) and a lot of meetings with other losers. It was like a very lame vacation.
And I had been out of the country. Lylee spirited me to Paris, which was only made bearable by the company of Brenna Blixen, Jake’s hot girlfriend. We spent a lot of time kissing and twice as much time pissing each other off. It was clear to me from the beginning that I was a reluctant experiment at best. She’s been in love with Jake since the first second she met him. He is a good-looking guy, and I can admit that honestly because our spectacular genetics can’t be denied.
Jail would have sucked. That was probably next, or maybe juvenile hall. But eighteen is coming up quick, and any sane judge would have wanted to teach me a real lesson about the harsh reality of drug use and dealing.
But I escaped the slammer. I got indentured service, family style.
Daddy’s family owns all kinds of random shitty businesses, and one of them is this queer diner that plays oldies and has girls skate out to your car with food like some shitty Happy Days’ episode. I get to be a dishwasher, lowest of the low men on the totem pole. And I will shack up with some geezer great aunt of mine in her piss-stinking, shag-carpeted, doily-decorated house.
As if this shit storm wasn’t bad enough, Aunt Jackie was blaring Celine Dion. Who the hell listens to Celine Dion willingly?
“Can you turn this crap down?” I asked as nicely as I could manage.
Aunt Jackie glared at me and turned the knob on the stereo up a little. Celine’s ferociously annoying voice filled the inside of the car and battered against my eardrums. “You are not here on vacation, Saxon,” she lectured. “This is not about you enjoying yourself. You have been stripped of all privilege and comfort for a reason. I am certainly not playing one of the greatest singers and divas of all time to punish you, but knowing that it irritates you is a bonus.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You are supposed to be thinking about why you are where you are instead of enjoying your summer with the family in New York like your brother Jake.”
I groaned at his name. “If I hear about your damn golden boy one more time, I’m going to hurl,” I said and reached instinctively for my cigarettes. Damn! Those were gone, too.
“Jake is someone you should look up to,” Aunt Jackie droned. “He’s making a real effort to fit in and he knows the value of hard work. That’s a Maclean gene he seems to have in abundance, even if it did manage to skip right over you.”
“I work hard,” I drawled, keeping my voice irritatingly lazy. “Do you know how much effort it took to turn potheads into cokeheads? No easy feat.”
Aunt Jackie blew a long breath through her flared nostrils and cranked Celine even louder. When I closed my eyes and moaned at “My Heart Will Go On,” Aunt Jackie punched the repeat button. I had to smile a little. Sly bitch.
Finally we were at the diner. Aunt Jackie pulled in and turned to me. “I’m not letting you get dumped on poor Aunt Helene so you can sit on your laurels while she gives you coffee and cookies. I’ll drop your bag at her house. You work here, and you can walk to her place. Tony has directions for you, and there are a few other kids who live in that area, so you won’t be walking alone. Go ahead. It’s time to get to work.”