Only it wasn’t.

I searched through four pages of Abbys. Nothing.

With the basketball season over and my “friends” being idiots, I didn’t have shit to do. I tried to get some homework done, but I couldn’t focus.

After lacing my sneakers and going to my wardrobe, I moved a few boxes aside on the top shelf until I felt the hard leather of the basketball. This one was new, my fifth one in just as many months. I’d tried to find different places to hide them, but my strategy didn’t seem to be working. Dad had never told me, and I’d never asked, but I knew he was taking them . . . probably deflating and discarding them, just like he’d done with my ego and my dreams of playing ball.

The one thing he couldn’t take away, though, was the mental escape I got from playing the game. And right now, I needed the escape. I needed to get Abby out of my head.

An hour dribbling a ball up and down the driveway killed me. I hunched over and attempted to catch my breath.

“You’re dehydrated.”

I lifted my eyes. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d heard her voice. I nodded in greeting. “Mother.”

She leaned against the doorway of the guesthouse and took a sip of whatever her current choice of alcoholic beverage was. “Have you had anything to eat or drink today?” she asked.

Sighing, I straightened up, dropped the ball on the ground, and settled my foot on it. Then I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for her to continue with the facade of being a caring mother.

She glared at me. It was her go-to move. “What?” She raised her chin, attempting to look defiant. It would’ve worked if she wasn’t drunk off her ass. She’d changed in the last few years since she’d started drinking. She had once been vibrant, the perfect soccer mom, according to everyone. Now she looked like ass. Her clothes were several sizes too big for her, most likely because of all the weight she’d lost recently. Her hair was a mess, and her eyes had lost the fight to fake it. She looked at least a decade older than her forty-five years.

“Just surprised you remember who I am is all.”

She sighed, dropping her shoulders, and stared at the ground. “I was at your game,” she said, as though it was going to make up for years of neglect.

“I didn’t see you.”

“I went in disguise.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course you did.”

She pushed off the door frame and looked like she wanted to come to me. Maybe say something more than the few words we occasionally exchanged. “I tried” is all she said, before walking backwards into the guesthouse and shutting the door.

Guesthouse—I should probably stop calling it that, considering she’d been living there for the past five years.

“She tried,” a deep voice boomed from behind me. Great.

I turned toward the voice, arms still crossed. “Colonel.”

He eyed me up and down and raised his eyebrows. My body went rigid. I balled my hands into fists behind my crossed arms. I knew what his expression meant. It meant that my crossed arms and casual posture were no way to greet a colonel, regardless of whether he was my dad or not.

“You didn’t come home last night.”

No hello. No how are you, son? Nothing.

I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off. He always did. “Midnight curfew,” he said. Then he paused for a beat, his jaw clenched. “I don’t know why you’re still messing around with that shit. Shooting a ball through a hoop won’t help you when the enemy’s pulling the trigger on an AK aimed at your damn head.”

He spun on his heels and walked away.

“Fuck you,” I said under my breath but then quickly raised my eyes. His back was still turned. He hadn’t heard. Thank God. I didn’t feel like an ass beating today.

After such amazingly heartwarming conversations with both my parents, I decided I needed to get out of the house. So I did what I always did. I ran.

Somehow, I ended up in the bushes where we’d found Abby’s things the night before. I wanted to make sure that she hadn’t left anything behind. It wasn’t like I went out of my way. I was there to run anyway. And it wasn’t like I was hoping to find something just so it gave me a reason to go to her house and give it to her. I was just . . . fuck it. Who was I kidding? I wanted to see her.

Unfortunately for me, there was nothing around. But that didn’t stop me from stalking her, waiting for a glimpse of her outside her house. There were a bunch of kids playing in the front yard. Mary was there, too, sitting in the same spot that Abby and I had occupied only hours earlier.

Forty-five minutes, I waited.

I never saw her.

I drove out to the half-court I’d been going to since I was a kid and shot baskets until the sun went down. I picked up food on the way home and ate in my room, where I stayed. I didn’t see either of my parents for the rest of the night.

I went to bed early, hoping to get a full night’s sleep so I could actually focus the next day, but thoughts of Abby infiltrated my mind. I tossed and turned all night until my alarm finally went off. School was the last thing I wanted to deal with.

You know what the problem with high school is? There is way too much of it. I figured everything I needed to learn could have been compressed into two hours a day. I’d have enjoyed it a lot more if I had to devote only a couple of hours of my life each day to educating myself on the subjects I actually gave a shit about. Two hours. That was all it would take.