“I’ve been so selfish,” I told Blake. We were in my car, with the top down and the seats reclined, looking up at the clear night sky. It had taken only eight weeks, but I finally had scored from the three-point line. He’d celebrated as if he’d just won a state championship. But his celebration had died quickly when I’d told him that I needed to cut back on spending time with him so I could be home more.
“What do you mean, you’ve been selfish?”
“Harry hates me.”
“What?” he laughed.
“I’m serious, Blake.”
He must’ve known it, too, because he sat up, pulling the seat with him, and turned to me. “What are you talking about?”
“He hates me,” I repeated, my words strained as I held in my sob.
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m leaving.”
He sighed heavily. “Then he has a point.”
“Blake.” I glanced up at him, but the sadness on his face was too heartbreaking, and I had to look away. “You’re not helping.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Chloe. That I think it’s great that you’re leaving in a week?” He reclined his seat back down and continued to stare up at the sky. “I’m not going to lie to you. And you shouldn’t lie to yourself, either. You had to have known there’d be this kind of reaction.”
“You don’t understand, Blake. He was yelling at me. He told me to fuck off and to never come back!”
“Quit sulking,” he said. “I’m sorry that he spoke to you like that, and that your feelings were hurt. But I’m not sorry he said it. Maybe you need to know that what you’re doing—The Road—it’s not just your journey to take. Your plans affect everyone. And I know that you did your best to keep people from caring about you—or whatever—but you’re pretty hard not to care for. You’re pretty hard not to love.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Really hard not to love.”
My eyes drifted shut. I tried to settle the thumping of my heart before I spoke. “Lucky you don’t love me.”
He didn’t say anything, just reached over, took my hand, squeezed once, and never let go.
Blake
I had barely stepped foot in the house before Dad’s voice filled my ears. “You have a meeting with the recruiter at Fort Bragg after school tomorrow.”
I squared my shoulders and raised a hand to my head, saluting him. “Sir. Yes, sir!”
He looked up from his position on the couch in the living room. His hands tightened around the glass of what was, no doubt, whiskey in his hand. “Don’t bring that fucking smartass attitude with you tomorrow, Hunter. You’re not playing a useless game on a basketball court. This is real life. This is your future.”
Chloe had offered to come with me on the hour-and-a-half drive to the army base, but I’d told her not to. She’d just be sitting around doing nothing, and after what she’d told me yesterday about needing to spend time with her family, it would have been selfish of me to agree.
Officer Hayden, the recruiting commander, was in his late twenties. He’d done three tours in Iraq before deciding to stay home with his wife and kid and “settle” as a recruiter. He said that my dad and he had spent a good chunk of time on the phone while my dad basically ordered him to show and tell me exactly what he wanted me to hear. Hayden laughed about it, said that he encountered army dads on a daily basis but none as extreme as mine, which didn’t surprise me at all.
He skipped the formalities of Dad’s standards of the meeting, like showing me around post and introducing me to what career choices I would have if I chose to enlist. He said that after talking with my dad, he’d figured I’d heard and seen it all by now. Instead, he took me to his home on post and introduced me to his wife and his little girl. I didn’t know why we’d ended up there, but I wasn’t going to argue.
He set out two deck chairs in his front yard, facing both his house and the American flag that flew proudly in front of it.
“Why do you want to enlist?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the flag.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s a shit answer.” He kicked his legs out in front of him, getting more comfortable. “Do you want to do it for you or your old man?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. I was getting edgy because I hadn’t expected questions. I had come there to keep Dad off my back and had expected a standard run-of-the-mill meeting. The same ones I had been through the past two years. No one had asked me any questions before.
Hayden sighed. “My old man, he works at a cardboard factory. Has ever since he was sixteen—same job his entire life. He’s sixty-seven and every day he wakes up at four in the morning, drives to work, puts on his gloves, and does the same old thing . . . makes cardboard boxes.”
“So?”
“So, that’s his job, Hunter. Making boxes.”
I rubbed my jaw, confused by why he was talking about his dad’s work. “There’s nothing wrong with making boxes, sir. It’s an honorable job.”
“You think so?” he asked, looking back at the flag.
“Yes. The world needs cardboard boxes. His job serves a purpose. There’s honor in that.”
A slight smile appeared on his face. “Is that what you want out of this? You want to serve a purpose?”
“I don’t really—”
“My mom’s never had a paid job. I have three brothers, seven nieces and nephews. My dad has always supported the family on his cardboard-box-factory wage.” He paused for a beat. “I’ve only ever seen him cry once. You want to know when?”
“Sure.”
“When I told him I was enlisting.” He was silent a long moment before he cleared his throat and added, “I remember him getting off his chair and walking to me, then wrapping me in his arms. He said, ‘I’m proud, son. You’re doing something with your life,’ and he used the same word you just used. He told me that what I was doing was honorable.” He laughed once. “What he didn’t know was that I was an eighteen-year-old-punk and wanted to enlist purely because I wanted to shoot shit.”
I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to tell him that I thought he was stupid.
He laughed again, louder this time. “I know what you’re thinking. That it’s stupid . . . my reason for enlisting.”
“A little, yeah.”
“Obviously, my perspective has changed,” he said quietly. “But that’s the difference between you and I, Hunter. I enlisted for a stupid reason. You’re considering enlisting because you want to serve a purpose. You probably think it’s honorable, right?”
“I guess.”
“But like you said, you could work in a cardboard factory, and you would serve a purpose. You would be doing something honorable.”
My gaze dropped to my lap as I took in his words.
“Your dad,” he continued, “he’s kind of intense. The way he acted had me intrigued about you, so I looked you up. High school basketball star, right? Division I college prospect . . . set for the NBA?”
I exhaled a shaky breath and shut my eyes; the weight of his words coming down on me full force. “That’s not relevant.”
“No?” he asked, the surprise at my response evident in his tone.
I shook my head.
“Hunter,” he sighed. “I’m not here to convince you to join the army, even though that’s my job. The choice you make has to be yours. It’s not something you want to regret ten, twenty, thirty years from now. I’m just going to say that the army, hell, the United States of America—we’d love to have someone like you on our side. We’d be honored to have you serve our country.”