The 17 by Mike Kilroy Read Free Book Online Page A

close or she could lose her nose. On the other side, they saw a scene in stark contrast to theirs. There was a wooden shack, separated from a rocky terrain by a large body of milky water. The sky was a swirl of orange and red.
    It was like a different world.
    “Oh my God. I see someone,” Jenai cried.
    Zack moved his head to see through another gap. There was someone—four someones to be exact—on the porch of the shack. Their heads were green, their eyes big, round and red, and they wore long, brown robes. When they made gestures with their hands, Zack could make out webbed fingers.
    Jenai blurted, “They look like Gorn!”
    She was full of surprises .
    “You watch Star Trek?”
    “Uh, yeah. Best. Show. Ever.”
    Zack watched the figures on the porch. It appeared as if they were having an argument.
    Zack was startled by a scream from Jenai, who quickly backed away from the hedge barrier, trembling.
    “What?” Zack asked.
    Jenai just pointed.
    Zack peered through the gap in the hedge where Jenai was positioned and saw two red eyes staring back at him, and then quickly pull away. Zack could see the back of a green figure’s head moving rapidly away from him.
    “He’s just as scared of us,” Zack said, watching the Gorn-like creature sprint toward the milky water and jump in, swimming and splashing back to the other four, who leaned over the railing of the porch, webbed hands held out.
    Jenai hesitantly moved closer. “That was so creepy. Who do you think they are?”
    “Just like us,” Zack answered. “Just like us.”
     

Part I
    Chapter Four
    So Emo
    Zack pushed the paper football across the table and it stopped just short of the edge.
    Jenai smiled and slid it back toward Zack. It stopped woefully short, prompting a playful protest from her. “No fair. The table is smoother on my side. It’s all warped and cracked on your side.”
    She had a point. The table wasn’t much of a table really, but more like a few planks of redwood nailed together. Some of the cracks between the boards were big enough for the paper football that was carefully made from a sheet torn out of an empty journal that was left in the bedroom Zack shared with Brock and Harness, to fall through.
    The girls shared a cramped room as well. In an old cedar desk in each room were diaries with black leather covers for each of them. Zack had concluded their captors wanted to provide them with an outlet for their despair.
    Instead, Zack used a page in his to make a paper football that now slid and perched with the tip hanging over the edge of the table in front of a discouraged Jenai, who shook her fists and curled her lower lip into a pout.
    “No fair.”
    “Touchdown!”
    Jenai tossed the paper football back at Zack and he giggled as it hit his chest. She made a goalpost with her fingers and Zack lined up his kick, flicking his index finger and sending the paper football soaring end over end through the finger uprights. It smacked off Jenai’s forehead, prompting a loud laugh and snort from her.
    For a fleeting moment he felt normal. For a fleeting moment he was a just a seventeen-year-old kid again, not an animal in some zoo.
    As with most nice moments in this place, it didn’t last.
    Harness, a harbinger of gloom, doom and constant ridicule, sauntered into the kitchen like he always did: chest puffed out and full of bravado. He saw the scene at the table play out before him and scoffed. He filched the paper football off the table and stuffed it down the front of his tattered jeans.
    “If you want it, Jenai, come and get it.”
    Jenai stood and folded her arms. “You are so gross.”
    Harness laughed. “Zack, you can come get it, too. You’re probably a fag anyway. You’d enjoy it.”
    Zack had known many Harnesses in his life and their method of operation was always the same. He was a bully, maybe because his father put too much pressure on him to win at everything, maybe because his mother didn’t love him enough, or maybe