Believe: (Intermix) (True Believers) Read Online Free Page A

screen, like he had dropped it on the pavement. I set it back on the table.
    Tyler came back into the kitchen and looked over my shoulder at my work. “Hey, that’s cool so far. You got Easton’s nose just right.”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Phoenix palm his phone and put it back into his pocket, tossing back his hair. Then he just stood up and left.
    My phone buzzed in my own pocket as Tyler went to the fridge and started rummaging around. I pulled it out and saw it was a text from a number I didn’t recognize. When I opened it, there was a honey badger video
.
At your request was the message.
    I smiled for the first time in what felt like weeks.
    Way better than writing “hi.”

Chapter Two
    Phoenix
    When I was in third grade, I realized two things: That the doctors thought something was wrong with me, and that my mother loved drugs more than she loved me.
    Because while the doctors kept asking me questions and taking scans of my brain and giving my mother prescriptions for me to take, I never swallowed a single one of those pills. She would take me to the pharmacy, collect the pills, then sell them to a guy behind the gas station who smelled like my grandmother’s basement. Then she would use that money to buy little plastic bags from a different guy, the one I thought looked like a Ninja Turtle because he always wore a bandana around his forehead. Then those bags would open and the needle would come out and she would lie on the couch for hours and hours, scratching her arm and drooling, eyes unfocused.
    When she was like that, I could do whatever I wanted, and I didn’t really mind that she was checked out, not exactly. I could watch TV and drink chocolate syrup out of the bottle and go play down the street until way after dark and she wouldn’t notice any of it and there was a cool sense of freedom.
    But I didn’t like it when she would forget to buy groceries or make me lie to the doctors and say that even though I took all the pills the way I was supposed to, I still felt angry, I still couldn’t concentrate. Because it wasn’t true. I hadn’t taken those pills, and I didn’t feel angry.
    It wasn’t until later that I figured out that my meds had a black market value as appetite suppressants and she could exchange them for heroin.
    At eight, I just knew there was something wrong with both of us because I was supposed to have the drugs but she was one who couldn’t go a day without them.
    So I shouldn’t have been surprised that she had disappeared during my stint in jail, but I was. I kept waiting for the day when she actually gave a shit about me, and she kept proving over and over that she didn’t.
    It wouldn’t have mattered so much except that all my stuff was at her apartment, and the landlord had cleaned it out when she ditched on the rent. There was no question in my mind that she hadn’t bothered to pack up my clothes and the miscellaneous crap from twenty years to take with her. An old yearbook, the only one I’d ever had the money to buy, with the inscription from Heather Newcomb of “Stay Sweet, Phoenix,” which I had thumbed my finger over a thousand times, wondering what it meant. A Little League trophy for Best Pitcher. A watch my grandmother gave me. Nothing of value. Stupid stuff, but
mine
. All I had. Gone.
    Wearing nothing but a pair of shorts I had borrowed from Tyler, I texted the girl painting in the kitchen, Robin. I shouldn’t, I knew that. She was way out of my league, I knew that, too. Girls like her didn’t look twice at guys who didn’t even own the shirt on their back. Or, in my case, the shorts on my ass. But for whatever reason—good manners would be my guess—she had given me her number and I was going to use it, because I needed a distraction. Someone to talk to about nothing.
    I thought maybe she did, too. There was something . . . bruised about the way she looked. She kept her head down when talking to Jessica and held her arms across her chest a