Losing Her Read Online Free Page B

back and become more prominent. I watched him, amused by his shirt stretching over his rounded stomach. The buttons looked about ready to take flight with the tension between each gap. They were probably exhausted from all of his bullshit too.
    I caught sight of a letterman’s jacket moving by the wall of windows that were nearly obscured by posters filled with motivational quotes and pictures of people climbing stairs and standing on the peaks of mountaintops. My eyes followed the person to see if it was Ben. I had hoped he’d just gone to class. I didn’t want him to get involved in this shit, but knowing him he’d make an attempt to save my ass. He, like Wes, was constantly going on about my level of potential.
    The letterman moved forward a few more steps, and I saw that it was Jewels. He had been gifted that nickname after he took a ground ball to the nuts during tryouts our freshman year.
    I heard his baritone voice call out through the hall but couldn’t make out his words. While Mr. Mitchell went on about my failures, even though I’d managed to get decent grades and even excelled in several of my classes. I watched as a blond head that I’d recognize in a room filled with a hundred other blondes approached him. Mitchell’s voice drowned out as I watched through the tiny cracks between the posters as Jewels lifted Ace up and spun with her.
    Their voices were muffled, and I strained to make out the words over Mr. Mitchell’s obnoxious tone that was filled with a false sense of authority. Then they disappeared.
    I’d lived beside Ace Bosse and the four other legendary sisters for six years at that point, and over that past two, I had been working a little harder each day to ignore her.
    Mr. Mitchell’s short fingers stabbed the buttons on the phone with a level of vehemence that I could nearly taste. I knew what he was doing, he was calling my mom.
    Shit.
     
    I looked back at my mom and the anger ebbed when I saw the defeat on her face. I hadn’t applied for college. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a stack of mail with a magazine sitting on top, advertising cruises to Alaska. It triggered my memory to a conversation that I had a couple of years ago when I broached the topic of my dad with Grandma Miller and asked if she ever wondered where he was. Her eyes had gotten misty as she told me that his older half-brother contacted her a few years prior and told her that they’d gone up to Alaska and joined a fishing crew. She retrieved a small postcard and allowed me to read it and then agreed when I asked if I could keep it. I never told my mom about the conversation, or the postcard that I kept tucked away in a binder of baseball cards in my closet. I never wanted her to feel inadequate, like she wasn’t enough for me. My mom was one of the only adults that didn’t look at me with disdain, and the greatest person on the planet, but at that moment I could see she was precariously close to that edge.
    I lay in bed that night, picturing her face as she told me I needed to figure things out, and somehow my mind traveled to that Alaskan cruise ship, and a new resolve that I’d been fighting with became clearer. I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t him. I wanted to find him and see why he left, because as many times as my Grandma and my mom assured me that my dad didn’t leave because of anything to do with my brothers or me, that thought had always haunted me.
    My mom was reluctant about me going. I never had explained to her why I felt the need to find him, but I’m sure she knew. She had been telling me for years that I was nothing like him and that I didn’t need to fear getting close to people. Eventually, she seemed to understand and accept that I was going and slowly became more supportive of my decision.
    Alaska was beautiful. It looked like another world. Filled with pine trees, mountains, and endless amounts of green. In fact,