“Max,” I said, gripping his hand.

He nodded and his smile grew like I’d just passed some invisible test. “Wes, Wes McCleary. I hope you know I won’t be helping you out on the field. I intend to whip your ass today.”

“That’ll make the victory taste sweeter.”

He laughed again, this time louder. A couple of girls walking by called out to him and pulled his attention away long enough I could get my hand back. Coach was going to be pissed and wondering where in the hell I’d gone, so I quickly dismissed myself.

That was one of the more bitter victories I’d experienced.

The following weekend I was filling a red Solo cup when a hand clasped around my shoulder. I had turned with a raised eyebrow and found Wes, wearing a giant grin. Even though I hardly knew the guy, I could tell he was about to say something sarcastic.

“Haven’t you learned not to turn your back on people?”

I snickered and offered him the cup, which he accepted. That beer solidified our friendship. He was my best friend within weeks. Wes didn’t care about the girls I had dated, the fights that I’d been in, or what my batting average was; he was one of the first people, apart from David, that seemed to just want to know who I was.

Wes always knew where the parties were, and I never had a problem going, even when I only knew him. Everyone knew Wes, and whether people just accepted me because I was with him, or actually knew who I was, made no difference to me. We hit up a party in the spring of our junior year, Wes had already gone upstairs with a redhead he’d been eyeing all night. I was sidled up to the keg, feeling a little bored. The party was pretty dull.

“Hey, you’re in my English class, right?”

I turned around to see a tall girl with hair that had been so brightly bleached it was nearly white. I took a swig of my beer, buying myself a moment to seek her motivation for lying, and watched as her eyes danced over my body with an excited gleam. She wanted me.

“No, I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

“I know, I just didn’t know what else to say to you!” She bounced on the balls of her feet like an anxious puppy as she talked.

I had to give it to her. I liked the fact she was being honest, even if it made her look kind of stupid.

“I’m Lacey.” I nodded and took another long drink, not sure why I was acting like a dick. Something just made me want her to work for it.

“Do you go to Reynolds?”

I shook my head.

“Are you in college?”

“You’d be jail bait if I was.”

“Ah ha! So you do like me!” Her eyes lit up as she pointed an index finger to my chest. “Save the details. I don’t really care right now.” She grabbed my empty cup and set in on top of the keg, and then took my hand, pulling me toward the stairs. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was because she was the first girl to be this bold with me in a while, or maybe it was because I’d been thinking a lot about my dad that day and wanted something to distract me, but I followed her.

“Dude, everyone’s talking about you,” Wes yelled as I answered my phone on my way to class the following Monday.

“What in the hell are you talking about? And who’s everyone?” I hadn’t been in a fight with anyone in weeks.

“Everyone,” he emphasized again. “Lacey Caldwell, that girl you did at the party, she’s telling everyone you two are dating, and there are all kinds of crazy rumors spreading about the two of you and that fight that happened here. What in the hell did you two do?”

I rubbed a hand over my head and down my face, pausing outside of class. “Is she psycho?”

Wes laughed, obviously amused by my duress. “Describe psycho.”

“Fuck! Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I was a little busy. Redhead, remember? I have a weakness!”

“Miller! Class. Now!” Mr. Forson, one of our hall monitors, barked.

“I have to go. Do me a favor and play some offense for me. I don’t need this shit circulating to my mom.”

“Dude, you’re a sex god. Enjoy it and stop complaining.” He hung up and I shoved my phone in my pocket as Mr. Forson glared at me with another one of his idle threats.

An idle threat similar to the one Mr. Mitchell gave me as I sat in his office, waiting to hear my punishment for punching the kid that vandalized Ben’s car. His brows rose with his failing attempt to appear like a disappointed parent, causing his hair piece to inch back and become more prominent. I watched him, amused by his shirt stretching over his rounded stomach. The buttons looked about ready to take flight with the tension between each gap. They were probably exhausted from all of his bullshit too.

I caught sight of a letterman’s jacket moving by the wall of windows that were nearly obscured by posters filled with motivational quotes and pictures of people climbing stairs and standing on the peaks of mountaintops. My eyes followed the person to see if it was Ben. I had hoped he’d just gone to class. I didn’t want him to get involved in this shit, but knowing him he’d make an attempt to save my ass. He, like Wes, was constantly going on about my level of potential.

The letterman moved forward a few more steps, and I saw that it was Jewels. He had been gifted that nickname after he took a ground ball to the nuts during tryouts our freshman year.

I heard his baritone voice call out through the hall but couldn’t make out his words. While Mr. Mitchell went on about my failures, even though I’d managed to get decent grades and even excelled in several of my classes. I watched as a blond head that I’d recognize in a room filled with a hundred other blondes approached him. Mitchell’s voice drowned out as I watched through the tiny cracks between the posters as Jewels lifted Ace up and spun with her.

Their voices were muffled, and I strained to make out the words over Mr. Mitchell’s obnoxious tone that was filled with a false sense of authority. Then they disappeared.

I’d lived beside Ace Bosse and the four other legendary sisters for six years at that point, and over that past two, I had been working a little harder each day to ignore her.

Mr. Mitchell’s short fingers stabbed the buttons on the phone with a level of vehemence that I could nearly taste. I knew what he was doing, he was calling my mom.

Shit.

I looked back at my mom and the anger ebbed when I saw the defeat on her face. I hadn’t applied for college. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a stack of mail with a magazine sitting on top, advertising cruises to Alaska. It triggered my memory to a conversation that I had a couple of years ago when I broached the topic of my dad with Grandma Miller and asked if she ever wondered where he was. Her eyes had gotten misty as she told me that his older half-brother contacted her a few years prior and told her that they’d gone up to Alaska and joined a fishing crew. She retrieved a small postcard and allowed me to read it and then agreed when I asked if I could keep it. I never told my mom about the conversation, or the postcard that I kept tucked away in a binder of baseball cards in my closet. I never wanted her to feel inadequate, like she wasn’t enough for me. My mom was one of the only adults that didn’t look at me with disdain, and the greatest person on the planet, but at that moment I could see she was precariously close to that edge.

I lay in bed that night, picturing her face as she told me I needed to figure things out, and somehow my mind traveled to that Alaskan cruise ship, and a new resolve that I’d been fighting with became clearer. I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t him. I wanted to find him and see why he left, because as many times as my Grandma and my mom assured me that my dad didn’t leave because of anything to do with my brothers or me, that thought had always haunted me.