Chapter 2
Watched

“And ten,” Luiz said as he grabbed the bench press bar I was holding and guided it to the rack. “Wow! Three sets of ten at two-twenty-five. Jake, your muscles must be on Miracle-Gro,” Luiz declared. “If you don’t feel sore mañana, then you’re not normal. Some government agency is going to lock you up for some pokin’ and proddin’.”

I never should’ve told Luiz that I didn’t get sore after working out. Luiz didn’t realize it, but normality was my holy grail. His comment about pokin’ and proddin’ had just pushed me further away from it.

I sat up and brushed my sweaty brown hair out of my eyes. I glanced around at the high school weight room. Other than Coach Ferguson, we were the only boys left. Coach slipped his keys out of his football jacket and spun them on one finger. Coach had a soft face but I could see it hardening under his baseball cap. Keeping him here late wasn’t the best way to say thank you for opening the weight room for us every afternoon. Luiz and I had pretty much finished working out anyway. We yelled a thank you and hurried to the locker room.

“Hey, you want to play Xbox at my house?” I asked as I stripped off my sweaty tank top, exposing my tan, muscular chest. Some of the other boys must have showered because the locker room air felt damp and sticky. It smelled like old socks, too.

Luiz was my best friend. I was pretty young when Luiz’s family moved from Mexico to the Salt Lake Valley and eventually settled right here in West Jordan. I don’t even remember when he and I first met. It seemed like he’d always lived just around the corner.

“No, I gotta work,” Luiz reminded me. He worked at the Taco Time down the road from the high school—the one just past ninetieth south.

My shoulders sank in disappointment. Luiz must have noticed because he cracked a grin. He liked to mock my pain. He forced a fake frown and tapped a fist to his heart. “!Pobrecito!” His fake frown made him look older, like his dad. Luiz was about five-ten, three inches shorter than me. He was thin and wiry—though his muscles had started to take shape over the last year. He had his dad’s long nose and thick but short black hair.

“Yeah, yeah,” I replied, giving him a friendly shove. I slipped a T-shirt over my head. It stretched over my chest and felt a little tighter than I remembered. I’d been putting on muscle fast this summer. Freakishly fast, actually.

“I can’t believe you punched Mike.” Luiz shook his head. “Do you think you broke Jason’s nose?”

“They’ll be fine,” I scoffed.

“You want a ride? I have my mom’s car. I’m just going to shower here.” He grabbed a towel from his bag.

“No, I’ll walk. See ya.”

¡Luego!” he called to my back.

I preferred walking because that meant another half hour not being home. I hated going home to Mom and John, especially with no one else around. My younger sister Justine, half-sister actually, wouldn’t be home either. Sis would be hanging out with her latest guy. Sheesh! She sure went through them fast.

The other jeeks were busy. “Jeek” is a term I came up with to describe us geeks who are also jocks. Luiz was a jeek, too. He was a pretty good football player, but he was also a chess team all-star. If forced to choose between the two, he would choose chess. The other jeeks were Kevin and Ethan, but I wasn’t as close to them as I was to Luiz. Anyway, with all the jeeks busy, I had no one to ask over to my house to run interference between my parents and me. Except as I walked through the school hallway, I did notice that Dylan and a few of his piss-ant buddies hadn’t left yet. “Piss-ants” was my term for the obnoxious kids in my high school who used to tease us a few years back when we were just geeks. Of course, now that we were jeeks, everyone wanted to be our friends. We ignored them, mostly. I was almost tempted to stop ignoring one of them, if only to save me from going home to Mom and John alone. I decided to just bite the bullet and deal with going home alone.

As I walked I shoved some ear buds in and turned on some music. I was a little surprised Dylan hadn’t been part of the trio torturing the band kid earlier, but come to think of it, he hadn’t really been quite as obnoxious the past two years.

I stepped outside the high school doors. Ouch. What the . . . ? I rubbed at the skin on my chest. It felt like something had just hooked me and tugged. I scratched at it with my nails, but when I peered down inside my shirt, nothing was there. Still, the tugging on my skin wouldn’t stop. I had no idea what it was. I tried to ignore it and started walking south down the sidewalk toward home. It stayed with me for about a block before going away, and I forgot all about it, just like you’d forget about hiccups after they pass.