Her brown eyes met mine in the mirror. “For hottest guy at school.”
In a small town like Blackwater, it was slim pickings when it came to guys. I had forgotten that any girl in school would have been able to spout the most eligible guys in our class off the top of her head.
“I personally think Trent is cuter,” she said.
I remembered Trent. He had black hair and perfectly imperfect features. Before I’d left town, he’d already been arrested three times, ranging from small time drug dealing to underage drinking. If Ashley referred to him as a bad boy, chances were he hadn’t changed his ways during my time away.
“And you already know who holds the number one spot,” she smirked.
Chase.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek. “Can we talk about something else?”
She blushed and ducked her to head to reach for another hair clip.
“Oh, uh, sure.”
I’d embarrassed her.
“What are you doing tonight?” I asked.
For one, I wanted her to know that I wasn’t going to ditch her after she finished dying my hair; I wasn’t in a position to turn down friends. Also, I didn’t want to go home.
Her eyes widened with hope. “Actually, there’s this party over at—”
“Sounds good,” I interrupted, offering her my best attempt at a real smile.
Chapter Five
Chase
My dad had inherited a repair shop in the town square from his father, who’d inherited it from my great-grandfather. There was a 1950s sign out front that boasted, “If it’s broken, we can fix it.” As a kid, I’d learned how to fix everything from toasters to washing machines, but my real forte was repairing vintage cameras. We didn’t get many of them in the shop, so few in fact that my dad had always cast them aside to me. It wasn’t worth his time to learn how to fix them.
I broke the first four cameras he gave me. They were difficult repairs, but tinkering with them felt like a puzzle, a puzzle with big payouts in the end. Vintage Polaroid cameras went for a hundred dollars, but restored Leicas could go for a couple thousand. Leicas were my specialty.
I still took in cameras from the repair shop, but the quantity couldn’t compare to the ones I found online. I usually spent a couple hours a week searching around for rare finds, the specialty cameras that hadn’t worked in years. Those were the most fun to fix; they taught me that there was value in trying to fix something even when everyone else has given up.
I hopped down from the bed of my truck with a box of vintage cameras in tow. It was the last box of the day and I rested the corner of it against my hip as I closed my lift gate, hoping the pile of rust would stay intact for another day.
Harvey stuck close to me as I walked up the sidewalk and into the house. He’d been confused all day, following me back and forth for each trip to and from my truck. Neither one of us was sure of what to make of our new home.
I pushed opened the door to my room and Harvey ran in first, sniffing the carpet around the bed. It smelled different than our house, a fact he picked up on even more than me.
Coach Calloway had insisted he was giving me a spare room, but I knew that wasn’t the case. The stack of boxes with Elaine Calloway’s name scribbled across the side of them proved it. This was her room, and I felt like an intruder.
I glanced around, looking for some space to carve out as my own, but the stack of boxes in the corner kept grabbing by attention. I dropped my cameras on the bed and turned toward them. If I was going to be an intruder, I might as well start acting like one.
I pulled the top off the box on top. An empty perfume bottle rattled against the side as I rooted through the contents. It looked like a bunch of junk, but at the very bottom I found a photo of a young Elaine Calloway sitting between her parents. She was the spitting image of them both. Her mom had her arm wrapped tightly around her, leaning over as if shielding her from the world. Her dad wore a sharp expression, his dark brown eyes staring straight into the soul of the person snapping the photo.
Her dad.
The man who’d started it all.
Fucking prick.
I tossed the cardboard lid back onto the box and stood up.
“Let’s go, Harvey,”
I slid on my running shoes without untying them, picked up his leash, and flew down the stairs.
Chapter Six
April 1985
Blackwater, Texas
Elaine Calloway had always prayed for a sister, a guardian angel, or a hero. She’d sink to her knees in the back of her family’s trailer and clasp her hands together until her knuckles turned white. Her prayers didn’t drown out the sound of her father’s blows; there was no escaping them in their doublewide, but that didn’t keep her from trying.