Zeke (The Powers That Be, Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

course,
that could mean only as friends, but I couldn’t help but hope it
meant a little bit more.
    Damn it.
    ~*~*~*~
    “So what’d you
learn today?” I asked Lane when I picked him up from basketball
practice.
    My
fifteen-year-old brother sat staring straight ahead, the muscles
jumping in his jaw.
    Uh oh.
Something had to be up with Candice, his new girlfriend of a week.
He’d told Grammy and me about her over dinner the other night and
I’d never seen him talk that way about a girl before. He was
totally enthralled with her, which was new for him. He’d had
girlfriends before but they’d been typical middle-school crushes
and such. This Candice, though, seemed to be someone he was really
into.
    “Lane? Did
something happen?” I questioned carefully.
    He sighed and
pushed a shock of dark hair out of his face, looking so much like
our dad when he did that I had to chuckle. Lane’s head shot toward
me and he frowned thinking I was laughing at him.
    “Sorry, bud. I
wasn’t laughing at you. You just looked like Dad then,” I explained
which got me a small smile from him.
    I actually
looked a lot like Dad too with my dark hair and brown eyes, but
that’s where it stopped. Everything else I’d gotten from Mom: her
medium build and her facial features including an aquiline nose and
wider-set eyes. People had always told her she looked like a blond
Catherine Zeta-Jones, so I guessed that meant I resembled the
actress too, but Dad must’ve carried the dominant genes because
neither Lane nor I had Mom’s blond hair or green eyes.
    We also didn’t
get her selfish outlook on life, thank God. She’d left Dad when I
was a freshman in high school which meant Lane had only been five,
saying she couldn’t do the “family thing” anymore. So because Dad
was a truck driver and was gone a lot, we’d moved in with Grammy
right after, and by doing so, she’d helped by giving us a place to
stay and we helped by keeping her young, or so she said.
    Shortly after
Mom left, we’d learned that she’d really liked credit cards, as in really liked them, so as soon as I was old enough, I’d
started working at The Breakfast Nook, or The Nook as Jay and I
called it, to help out because Dad was doing all he could to pay
off her enormous bills. Grammy couldn’t help much because of her
back surgery and her scant Social Security check once a month only
went so far. So here we were ten years later, Dad was still working
to get everything paid, and needless to say, we didn’t have a lot
of funds to go around. I’d had to take two years off from school to
help out which had killed me, but now that I was back at Hallervan,
I was more focused than ever because I didn’t want to live this way
anymore.
    And that’s why
Zeke Powers was an unnecessary distraction.
    Lane cleared
his throat then looked out the windshield and said, “Candice broke
up with me.”
    “What? Why?”
That was a surprise. Lane was a heartbreaker and having a girl
break up with him was definitely a first.
    He frowned as
he continued staring straight ahead. “There’s a dance this weekend
and some of the kids are going out to eat before. She told me she
wanted to go too and I know she expected me to pay so I had to tell
her I couldn’t. She went all psycho on me and told me she couldn’t
be with someone who was… who was poor. She said it in front of
everyone.” He now hung his head in shame.
    Shit.
Shit!
    It didn’t
matter that I couldn’t have things. I could deal with it. But I
wanted Lane to have everything, damn it, and that’s why it was
necessary for me to stay focused and on track.
    I nodded
slowly a couple times knowing exactly what this Candice girl was.
“Well, bubba, here’s the deal. Candice? She’s a bitch.” He turned
to look at me again and I saw the shock on his face because I
rarely cussed around him, trying to be a good example and all. “She
is,” I stressed raising my eyebrows at him as I nodded again. “Any
girl who would