Read Online The Way Back from Broken by Amber J. Keyser - Free Book Online Page A

plowing his head into the skater’s stomach. Together they crashed to the ground. For a split second, they were chest-to-chest, too close and strangely intimate. Then the skater was digging his hands into the sides of Rakmen’s face, scraping flesh, inching toward his eyes.
    He pushed Rakmen’s head back to the splintering point. Fire shot down his spine. With a fierce jerk, Rakmen broke free of the skater’s grasp and pounded his head into the man’s chest. Under him, the skater thrashed and bucked, wrenching loose with a vicious jab to Rakmen’s kidney.
    He flipped Rakmen onto his back and scrambled to his feet. Rakmen was trying to stand with the singular goal of wrapping his hands around that asshole’s neck when the skater kicked him hard in the side. The sound was a pumpkin dropped on asphalt. The pain was a black flood. The skater kicked him again, and Rakmen crumpled.
    â€œYou’re nothing,” the skater jeered through bloody teeth.
    Rakmen couldn’t be sure if the words came from that gash of a mouth or from those puncture wound eyes, but they reverberated through him as he passed out.
    Nothing.
    Nothing.
    Nothing.

CHAPTER 8
    The old man was calling 911 when Rakmen regained consciousness.
    â€œDon’t,” Rakmen said, his tongue thick in his mouth. He’d thrown the first punch. Cops would never side with him.
    â€œYou’re hurt.”
    Rakmen tried to shake his head. His brain seemed to bang against the side of his skull with every movement. He held his head steady, looking at the still-spinning trees overhead, and reached for the man’s arm. “Please. No.”
    Squatting on his haunches, the old man gazed at him a long time.
    Rakmen willed himself to pass out again. Instead his body resumed. The world stilled. His breath returned to slow and steady. Everything ached, throbbed, stabbed.
    The groundskeeper pursed his lips and frowned at Rakmen. “Can you stand?”
    Rakmen stood, shrugged off the old man’s arm, and began to drag himself home. The blocks he’d sprinted stretched out before him. It was all concrete and pain and returning to worse than a beating.
    He could hear his parents fighting as he went up the front steps.
    He walked right in. At least they’d have something new to yell about.
    . . .
    His mother had cried, screamed at him, and then cried again, a good show of full-on parental shit fit. But really, she had been crying for Dora. Rakmen’s father had cleaned his son’s wounds in silence, diagnosed a broken rib without sympathy, and prescribed a double dose of ibuprofen. Rakmen was some patient on his rounds. A stranger.
    Rakmen had been banished to his room. No one checked in before bed. No one woke him for school the next day. Now it was nearly five o’clock. He’d stayed in bed all day, propped up on pillows to protect the worst of his bruises, and trying not to think about anything. His phone hadn’t rung once.
    When he heard his parents come home from work, Rakmen turned away from the door, even though resting on that side made the egg-sized lump on his head throb like a battering ram inside his skull. He breathed in shallow gasps. Inhaling too deeply sent pain stabbing through a rib on his left side.
    There was a knock on his door. He ignored it, but the door opened anyway. Rakmen pretended to sleep. The desk chair scraped against the floor. He could hear the weight of his father settling into it. The mattress shifted as his mom sat beside him, sending a redoubled round of aches through his body.
    â€œWe need to talk,” she said.
    Rakmen rolled over, blinking at her through swollen, slitted eyes.
    His dad sat in the desk chair, elbows on thighs, his head resting on the tips of his fingers. “What’s your pain level?” he asked, without looking up.
    â€œWhat am I? One of your patients?” Rakmen said. His dad’s lips pinched into a tight line, but he didn’t