“Sketch!” Rush crowed triumphantly. “That’s it. That’s totally it. You like it?”
Roman loved it. He had never liked his real name very much anyway, and to have this boy, this young man, really, who was everything his older brother wanted to be but wasn’t, give him this name as a friend, to make him, essentially, part of his own tribe… well, Roman was speechless with joy. He just nodded his head vigorously, grinning from ear to ear.
“Looks like a ‘yes’ to me,” Rush laughed. “Sketch it is!”
Roman just sat there staring up at him, the young man worshipping the accomplished warrior, until Rush started feeling embarrassed enough to try to send him off to bed.
“OK then, Sketch. You about ready to crash out, man?”
“Yeah,” Sketch admitted.
“All right, buddy. I’ll see you in the morning, OK?
“’K,” Sketch said. He got up off the couch and headed back to his room, but he had only been there a few minutes before he knew for an absolute fact that he was not going to be able to sleep somewhere this silent, this lonely—not after sharing a bedroom with an infant in a thin-walled house with five other people besides.
He got up and padded back out to the living room, dragging the blanket from his bed behind him.
“Something wrong, Sketch?” Rush asked.
“It’s too quiet.”
“Oh. Yeah, I gotcha. You want to crash out here a while? I’ll be up playing a bit longer. Maybe it’ll help you sleep.”
Without saying a word, Sketch dragged the blanket onto the couch and curled up beneath it, placing the pillow from the end of the couch up against Rush’s leg, laying his head on top of it, and then promptly passing out from exhaustion.
Rush leaned back and stared at him in surprise, but eventually he just shrugged, letting the little guy sleep there while he practiced HRT Alpha: Year One, keeping his skills sharp and praying that his mother could get him back home before the August invitational.
12
Liaison Report
“Any problems at the airport?”
“No, sir. They all arrived without incident. They’re settling in now.”
“Good. How would you say it’s going so far?”
“There hasn’t been much time to observe their interactions yet. We’ll know a lot more after tomorrow.”
“And we’ll know a lot more than that by next week. But I’m not asking you next week. I’m asking you now. We hired you for your touchy-feely people skills, and I’m asking you, in your expert opinion, how things are going so far.”
“I’d say they’re going as well as can be expected of any group of kids who are only just meeting each other. There was some tension between Mackenzie and Samantha, but Mackenzie has proven herself exceedingly resilient in handling new situations. I think they’ll be fine. And Daniel and Kaitlyn are already demonstrating a natural fondness for each other—”
“Which I might care about if we had invited them here for a summer of matchmaking.”
“I’m just saying there are early signs of compatibility. Established relationships can form the central core of a new social group.”
“Or the pair can isolate themselves away from the rest. I read your brief.”
“That’s true, but I think we should be more worried about Ashton in that regard. He’s already chosen to isolate himself from the others. He appears to be here somewhat against his will.”
“Against his will? What good are the damn incentives we put together then?”
“They were good enough to get him here, obviously. But that might have been more his parents’ doing than his own. Achieving his presence is not the same thing as achieving his active participation.”
“Well then, I suggest you find a way to ‘achieve his active participation’ ASAP.”
“I still think the best way to do that would be to let them know what we’re up against, sir. What we’re trying to achieve here.”
“Then you’re going to have to come up with a second-best way because that is not an option. You’re a professional motivator, for God’s sake. Go be motivational.”
“Yes, sir.”
13
Orientation
When Daniel woke up the next morning in a strange bed, the smell of the sea having been replaced by an unfamiliar mix of pine forest and wood smoke, he felt uneasy at first, not entirely sure where he was or why he was there. But then a single thought floated into his mind, and he was settled again, everything falling into place, the day suddenly full of hope and possibility.
Kaitlyn.
He couldn’t explain it, but he felt as though he had seen her face a thousand times before. That thick, dark hair. Those beautiful brown eyes. The light peppering of freckles across her nose. She was not, at least according to popular standards, the most beautiful girl in the world, but he would have argued the point intensely if anyone had tried to say so in his presence. She was happy—genuinely happy—in a way that so few people were, and her smile just lit up the room.
He rolled out of bed, grabbed a pair of jeans and a random T-shirt out of his duffel, and headed straight for his guitar.
He sat on the edge of the bed, fine-tuning the strings and then strumming a few chords just to test the sound. Perfect. He didn’t turn on the amp because he didn’t want to wake anyone; he just started to play. He didn’t have any particular tune in mind when he started, but his fingers, as usual, had a mind of their own, and they started playing “Flower,” by Cody Simpson. The words flowed through his mind, but he was too embarrassed to sing, knowing that he shared the suite with Rush and Roman, so he just played through the song and hummed a little.
But when he finished, the tune still echoed in his mind. Hesitating for a moment, he finally plugged the guitar into the amp and turned it to the lowest setting, testing the volume in the stillness of the morning. He turned it up just a little bit louder, so he could sing along quietly and the guitar would still drown out his voice on the off chance that anyone heard him. He played the entire song again, and before the last note had entirely dissipated, his fingers started in on “Gone, Gone, Gone” by Phillip Phillips.
He sang through that one also, turning the amp up just a bit more and then launching into Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” The grin on his face just kept getting bigger, and after the final notes had echoed away, he was in such a good mood that he turned the amp up again and started singing “(I Can’t) Forget About You” by R5, just for fun.
At this point there was a rather insistent pounding on the door, followed immediately by Rush’s head poking through it.
“Dude. We get it. You like her. Could you please, by all that’s holy, play something that is not a love song. Seriously. Anything. Sketch and I are dying in here.”
Daniel narrowed his eyes at Rush without saying a word, flashed him his most villainous smile, and then turned the amp up even louder and plucked out the opening bars of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees with unmitigated zeal, popping his chin and rolling his shoulders to the beat with exaggerated flair.