Read Online Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell - Free Book Online

teeth flashed white and straight in his tight smile. That was Dad in a happy moment. A flash of white, tense bodily joy.
    I wanted to tell him it wasn’t what he thought, that I was dying out there. I didn’t know where any of it came from, didn’t really want it to ever happen again. If that was winning, I was too tired for it.
    â€œMy rib, Dad, I’ve got to ice it.”
    He took me by the arm and I leaned in to him. We hobbled down the hill to where he parked, and I did what I shouldn’t have, what I felt negated everything for him: showed him who I really was. I sniffled and wiped my nose, let hot tears run down my cheeks. I didn’t take it like a man. In the car, I really started to cry, moaning a little even.
    At the ER, the doc was cool. “Got your moment of glory, now, didyou?” I said yeah, though it felt like ancient history by then. He taped me up and said I’d be out for as long as the ribs took to heal. At least five weeks, could be twice that. “Broken things want to be still,” he said. “But ribs are things that move even when you sleep, every time you breathe.”
    I started some noisy-ass crying then, right there in front of the guy. He was younger than my dad, maybe late thirties, bald and skinny with a big nose and watery blue eyes, the kind of eyes that darkened with concentration when he looked at you. He seemed to understand the blubbering better than I did. He stared at me long and hard over that beak of a nose, trying to see what he was dealing with.
    â€œI’m going to give you something to help you rest, okay?” he said at last. “Last thing a wounded warrior needs is a bad night’s sleep.” I nodded, and waited while he gave the nurse the prescription.
    When we got in the car, I told Dad we should stop and pick up the drugs on the way home. “Hurts that bad?” he asked. Dad was anti-drug, barely ever took aspirin, and hated the idea of a cloudy head. A one-beer-a-game kind of guy.
    â€œYeah, he said it’s important so I stay still when I sleep. Otherwise, I might miss more of the season.” It was a small lie, a white lie, I figured, and I wondered about that expression, how the difference between lies that hurt and those that didn’t was a kind of cloud, or a smudge.
    â€œIt was some game you played,” Dad said, as he grabbed my leg and gave it a squeeze. “When you do something right, even pain afterward is a kind of a sweet reminder.” I let that statement hangthere, didn’t even nod.
    What he said stayed with me. I was determined to forget not only the pain, but the impulse that had taken over me, that had made me a winner in his eyes. I knew all along what I was doing out there, and it wasn’t winning I’d wanted.
    I’d wanted the pain.
    When we got home, Mom had dinner waiting for me. She was still in her work clothes, some sort of blue, silky pants. I had already taken a Percocet before I sat down to eat, and I remember thinking those blue pants she wore were the most beautiful pants I’d ever seen.
    There are more half-douche guys out there than there are either good guys or full-douche guys. I might even be half-douche myself. It’s hard to say. Jay was a definite half, but better than most. Girls went nuts for the guy, and that should tell you, because one thing you can guarantee about girls is that they aren’t lining up to go out with someone genuinely nice. Never happens. Jay and I were best friends because he wanted it that way for some incomprehensible reason. He was not a deep dude, but he’d get real certain about stuff—where to go for pizza when all the pizza in town sucked, or how Pamela Mahoney had the best tits ever. He meant this shit. Like Pamela was hotter than Scarlett Johansson, or some fucking swimsuit model. He was like that about friendship too, with about as much reason. “My main man,” Jay’d say, and smack me on