Twelve by Nick McDonell Read Free Book Online Page B

away.
    â€œWe’ll be seeing that one again soon,” says Lionel.
    â€œYou seen my cousin?” White Mike asks.
    â€œWho?” Lionel is thumbing the cash.
    â€œYou know, Charlie. He put us together. Goes to college now. Still deals.”
    Lionel thinks back to the feathers flying up in front of his eyes as the parka exploded under Charlie’s face. The other kid flashes through his mind too, down on the pavement.
    â€œOh, yeah.”
    â€œIf you see him, tell him I’m looking for him.”
    â€œYeah.” Lionel peaces himself out and walks off quickly, to go back uptown and get stoned.
    â€œFucking guy,” White Mike is muttering under his breath as he catches a cab.
    Where is Charlie? Charlie has been on White Mike’s mind a lot recently. He grew up with the kid, after all. Charlie is his cousin. His father’s sister is Charlie’s mother. But she and her husband were all fucked up.Way too much money, in the gossip columns all the time, party-party-party, and it was houses in Tuscany and chartered boats off Bali. Their family is much wealthier than White Mike’s father. For most of Charlie’s life, it was either live with the nannies or live with White Mike. So Charlie just used his parents’ house when he wanted to throw a party or something. He kept that address, but he really lived with White Mike. They were almost the same age and looked like brothers; people used to mistake them for twins. The big difference between them was that Charlie was a very bad student, or just didn’t care, or both, and was sent away to a bad boarding school in eighth grade. It made him grow up faster, in a funny way.
    White Mike always looked forward to Charlie’s return during vacations: it always brought interesting adventures and eventually tutorials in drug dealing. When Charlie came back home this time, though, he was different. Maybe it was the new school, or maybe it was just that he was doing more drugs than usual— college didn’t stop that—but he had been distant. Like his mind was on something. He went off without White Mike for basically the whole vacation; doing what, White Mike couldn’t guess. So the hell with Charlie. The whole deal is making White Mike cranky.

Chapter Twenty-Six
    JESSICA STRUTS DOWN Fifth Avenue, anticipating, her high, shapely ass swinging and hair flying, beautiful in the light streaming through the sky at the tail end of dusk. She takes her purple Discman out of her bag and puts on the headphones, the kind that wrap around the back of your neck. She is listening to a mix a boy made for her. Jessica walks on, hand in her pocket, fondling the tiny Baggies.

Chapter Twenty-Seven
    â€œ WHY DON’T YOU do drugs? You deal ’em; why don’t you do ’em?” asked Hunter as he handed White Mike the bong disguised as a highlighter that he bought in a smoke shop downtown.
    White Mike looked at it and handed it back. “I don’t know. I just never had the urge to.”
    â€œNot even to try?”
    â€œNo.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight
    WHITE MIKE IS thinking about Charlie again. About the time when, as usual, his cousin’s parents were out of town and he wanted to cut school and fly down to Florida. It wasn’t even spring break, but Charlie and a couple of buddies were going to stay in some resort in Key West and get shitfaced and laid all the time.
    Charlie routinely took thousands of dollars from the checking account his father kept to run the house. His father knew this, of course, but kept putting more money in. There was no lack of it. This time, for some reason, there wasn’t enough money to cover the plane tickets.
    But Charlie really wanted to take the trip, and his mother had some expensive jewelry, so he went into the safe in her dressing room and took this one necklace and pawned it to a jewelry guy he found who had a kind of storefront shop over on Ninth Avenue in the Fifties.