The Adored by Tom Connolly Read Free Book Online

you guys care about each other. Promise me, I won’t come between you.”
    Ball kept the promise. He never made another pass at Eddie’s girl-friend, but he did find himself longing. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he had met to that point in his life with her athletically proportioned body, her long brown wavy hair always blowing in the afternoon breeze at the beach, and her tanned freckled skin. He felt he could do so much for a young woman who had no money, no strong economic future. But it was not to be. This time Eddie had won out.
    So as the brothers pondered Conetta’s great questions the seven had grown to eight. Valerie had been accepted. It turned out to be the only way Eddie Wheelwright would stay focused, if Valerie was included; otherwise, when the boys got together as they did almost daily, if Valerie was not there, neither would Eddie. Or if Eddie was there and Valerie was not, he would be daydreaming about her. She was constant in his thoughts.
    Winston Trout, the smartest, offered up his great question as they sat on the grass on the rolling hill of his father’s estate overlooking Long Island Sound: “How will I solve the energy crisis?” Given that his father owned Trout Solar, a start-up solar panel inventor and developer; it was a logical problem to set out solving.
    The smallest boy in the group, Kish Moira, felt his future and one of the great questions for him lay in, “How to adequately feed the world?”
    “Somehow we’re not breaking out of our known cosmos,” Gideon Bridge said.
    “What do you mean, Gid?” an intrigued Valerie asked.
    “Kish, your family comes from the most undernourished country on the planet. Winston, your dad is solving the energy crisis. We’re doing what we know—where’s the challenge?”
    “Gid, the challenge is there. If you’ll notice, gas for your Audi has almost doubled in the last two years,” Winston Trout shot back with a smile.
    “Guys,” Valerie began, “does your teacher mean what your parents want you to do or what you want to do?” The girl didn’t have money but she did have brains.
    Sebastian Ball laughed, “Is there a difference?” Not to Ball who was already committed to his father’s vast and rich hedge fund. At eighteen Ball worked two afternoons a week at Ball Enterprises.
    “Sure, there’s a difference,” Wheelwright added.
    “And?” Ball challenged.
    “We need to decide what we need to do to make a difference.”
    “What the Peace Corps. You and Val?” Ball laughed at the thought Eddie and Valerie had proposed earlier.
    “Yes,” the female part of the Wheelwright/McGuire brain said. “How can we share democracy with countries where freedom is rare?”
    “Come on, Val.” Where are you gonna find that? Russia? You and Wheelwright trotting off to Kiev to unleash the Communist downtrodden.”
    There, he had done it again: Sebastian Ball in all his omniscience, challenging, rejecting and ultimately putting down in irony the ideas of his friends. The brothers and Valerie loved him, for he was superior to them in his world view and in his sense of power. But there were those times when he headed to deep space on a lone ship.
    “Nice, real nice, asshole,” Gideon Bridge, who took nothing from Ball, enjoined. “For Christ’s sake, Sebastian, grow up. For one of us, you’re the least of us,” the conscience and debater of the group reacted angrily. “You really gotta stop this, ‘I’m the lord of the Riff’ bullshit, Ball.”
    A chastened eighteen-year-old Sebastian Ball saw the fire in Bridges eyes. Gideon was the one member of the group whose command of the English language and balls to stand up to him kept Ball in his place. Not above them but one of them.
    “How about you, Gid?” Tray Johnson, the Admiral’s son asked.
    “My great question? I don’t know, Tray,” a calmed Bridge replied. “I think it’s going to be, “How can we help the poor?” I mean we have so much, yet we see so little