Read Online Inexcusable by Chris Lynch - Free Book Online

angrily away from the mirror, like it was the mirror’s fault. It certainly wasn’t mine.
    But it was more than just that. I felt tired. And slow. And hurt. I had pulled a thigh muscle a couple of weeks before, just playing some casual basketball in gym class—nobody gets hurt in gym class—and it was refusing to heal.
    I had to start training for real. I was going to get fit and stay fit. Something large, larger even than my belly, was coming over me.
    It was over. This life, or this leg of it anyway, was over, and truth be told, I was not unhappy or unprepared for it. Except for living with my dad, there wasn’t really any part of my life that I was not now prepared to trade in, trade up, for bigger and better things. Faster things, stronger things, prettier things, harder things, newer things, unknown things, and scarier things.
    So when I came downstairs, I told my dad I would be skipping breakfast. And that was just the beginning. “I’ve been thinking, Ray, that I don’t really want to have that open house here after graduation.”
    He stopped washing up and looked at me as if I had stripped again and was looking at my naked reflection in the breakfast plates.
    â€œYou?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œKeir MacTavish Sarafian?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œYou know that open house actually means party? You know you are saying you don’t want a party. Could that possibly be true?”
    â€œYa, Dad. I just feel like . . . I’ve had enough. Not that I don’t still love a party, Just that . . . I think I’ve done it now. Like I have had the breakup parties and the going away parties, and most of all the good-bye stuff and, honestly, I just don’t feel like doing it again.”
    I was briefly worried that Ray was going to be hurt. That he was going to feel bad that I had turned down his nice offer to throw me a do, that I had cut the legs off his big chance to send me off in style like he did for Mary and then Fran and that, I must say, he did spectacularly well. We were still pushing people out of the house two days later both times.
    But he was okay. Which I should have known he would be.
    â€œWhat do I want?” he said, lightly butting my head with his.
    â€œYou want what I want, Dad.”
    â€œThat’s right, goofus, and don’t you forget it. So, what do you want? A trip to Bermuda or someplace, I suppose.”
    â€œNo. All I want is Rollo.”
    He dried off his hands. “Rollo?”
    â€œYa, just Rollo.”
    â€œReally? Just Rollo, not his limousine?”
    â€œDuh, Dad.”
    Ray’s cousin, Rollo, owned what was by some distance the finest, gaudiest, most hysterically decked-out stretch limo in this area. You normally had to book him months in advance for a weekend. He was expensive, and only slightly moved by family considerations.
    â€œAnd what exactly do you want with Rollo?”
    â€œAll I want is just to ride around. For a few hours. Tooling around. Seeing places, seeing people. Picking up a friend here and there, having a laugh, dropping them off again. Showing off. Doing only what I feel like doing, when the mood hits me. Taking a stretch limo through the KFC drive-through. Seeing who I want, when I want, skipping all the rest of it, then when I’m done with it, being done.
    â€œAnd not getting up out of my seat the whole time.”
    He looked at me with great intensity, leaning up close. Like one of those pictures of the Kennedy brothers conferring over the Cuban Missile Crisis or Marilyn Monroe.
    â€œDamn,” he said with pride. “That’s a plan.”
    *  *  *
    As graduation approached I felt lighter and righter about it. While a lot of people at school were preparing for parties—mostly by partying all the time—I was pulling back, slowing down, stepping away. And it felt good.
    I found a new and brilliant method for getting in condition: I ate