Extra Life by Derek Nikitas Read Free Book Online Page A

butane burning.
    Of the many forces my best friend Connie feared in his life, close-range fire, especially the sizzling kind, was way up at the top of the list. I’d already pushed him to the point of hyperventilation. He was a slow gas leak, and here was the ignition. At the sight of Bobby’s lighter flame, Connie squawked and keeled over fast.
    Paige and I sprang for him, but he sagged down past our reach. He dropped to the floor, wedged between two stools, with his arms viced on either side of his head. When Paige knelt beside him, he hunched against her, one hundred and seventy pounds of dead weight.
    “Lord almighty!” Sally called from across the counter. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
    “Well, it’s been real,” Bobby announced.
    Who could blame him? Our meeting had escalated into an incident , something the gossip media could spin against him: Bobby Keene-Parker threatens neurotic Cape Fear boy with lighter. His best bet was to slip away and deny any knowledge. Even I knew that.
    Bobby stepped over the odd pile of people on the floor. Savannah followed him, no big shocker. Her apologetic shrug wrung out my dishrag heart.
    I watched the two of them get into the Aston Martin Rapide and speed off with a gut-punching engine roar. Her silken hair fluttered out the open passenger window like exit music before the fade to black.

Y OU KNOW that trick where a master magician yanks away the red tablecloth from under a fancy five-course meal, disturbing nothing? Well, I was an amateur. I had my Big Day on a silver platter, and I brought the whole damn thing crashing down.
    The paramedics strapped Conrad to a gurney and carted him away.
    All I wanted was to crack him out of his shell, give him something to boost his self-esteem, an acting gig that would dig down into his psyche. But I shoveled too deep. Worst of all, his nurse mother was on shift at New Hanover Hospital so she’d get the scoop the minute he rolled up. Given my contributions to Connie’s nervous breakdown, this was possibly bad enough for a permanent friendship boycott on the likes of Horace Vale.
    Paige stormed off with hardly a word and zero footage on her camera. Slouching home by myself, I wished so bad that she would’ve torn me a new one. Because a lecture on what I did to Connie would mean I was forgivable. Instead, I got Paige’s silence. She was giving up on me—and this girl had a life mission to never give up on anyone , not even the tragic cases down at the women’s shelter where she worked. People who’d trashed their lives, or had their lives trashed for them. Let’s face it—everybody Paige met was a fresh chance for her to save her brother, in a sense.
    Everybody now except me.
    In all the chaos, Connie’s backpack got left behind at the diner. I took it home for safe keeping, weighted with books and binders and lost friendships and ruined chances and humiliation by a TV star and a throbbing pain in half my face. Not to mention my flame for Savannah Lark, engulfed in the inferno of Bobby Parker’s industrial strength lighter.
    In my kitchen, on my mother’s white board calendar, a thick red line ran straight through the middle two weeks of April. It was under my name, headed by the big block-letter word: SUSPENDED. The verdict was in. Suspended, splendid. All my efforts to recast Horace Vale as a hero were lost—same little shit I’d always been, as far as friends and family were concerned.
    Upstairs in my room, I made a valiant effort not to look inside Connie’s backpack. But then I did. Clusters of Dr. Who action figures, some Playstation games, folders full of homework and two massive novels by Neal Stephenson.
    Then, I found my script. “Take The Leap,” the movie I meant to shoot at the Silver Bullet. Connie had gone through it and written in the margins the carefully-considered motivation behind each of his character’s lines. Notes about how to say a phrase, accent marks where he meant to emphasize words.
    On one