The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (4 page)

Having her choice of forty ice cream
flavors didn’t hurt, either.

She and Kayla hit it off quickly and
soon they were carpooling to work and hanging out whenever they had
free time. They didn’t have any of the same classes at school but
still saw each other during lunch.

Kayla plopped a piece of chocolate
cake onto her tray as she moved down the line to the
cashier.

“
You sure you don’t want
more mac and cheese?” asked Haven. “Right now you only have enough
for your next three lunches.”

“
Speak for yourself,
Cornbread Queen. Tell your hips to watch out.”

“
Your kid’s kids are gonna
be fat if you finish everything on your tray,” said
Haven.

“
That’s where ‘marry rich’
comes in. Money fixes everything, don’t you know that?”

They paid the cashier and turned
around to find a table.

“
Oh my god!” said Kayla.
She stopped walking and stared ahead.

“
What’s wrong with
you?”

“
There’s your boyfriend!”
She nodded to a table a few feet away.

Jason Turner sat at one of the round
cafeteria tables, surrounded by a group of his friends. He smiled
and laughed easily, and always seemed to be in a good mood whenever
Haven saw him.

“
Shut your mouth, Kayla!”
she hissed between her teeth. Haven sidestepped around her friend
and walked quickly to the other side of the room, looking away from
Jason’s table as she passed. She took a seat at the first empty
table and faced the wall.

“
Geez, you’d think you’d
never seen a hot guy before,” said Kayla. She placed her tray on
the table and sat next to Haven.

“
I just don’t appreciate
you announcing it to everyone around, that’s all.”

“
Nobody heard me, you
nutcase,” said Kayla. “And besides, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing
if somebody—oh my God!” She stopped talking and looked behind
her.

“
Would you stop saying
that?”

“
He’s coming over
here!”

“
What? Who?” Haven turned
and saw Jason walking over toward their table. She spun back around
and stared at her tray. “What’s he doing?!” she
whispered.

“
He’s still headed
straight for us!” said Kayla.

“
He’s not turning
away?”

“
Nope.”

“
Is he looking at
you?”

“
Yep.”

Jason sat on the empty seat next to
Haven. “Afternoon, ladies.”

“
Hi!” said Kayla. “Oops!
Forgot a napkin. Be right back.” She stood up to leave but Haven
had a tight grip on her leg. Kayla lightly slapped her hand and
smiled sweetly at Jason before walking away.

“
So,” said Jason. “How’s
it going?”

“
Uh, fine,” said Haven.
She mentally slapped her own forehead.
Uh,
fine. Uh, fine.

“
Look, I’m not trying to
embarrass you or anything, but I heard you wrote my name on the gym
wall.”

Her face flushed with heat and her
eyes felt like they grew to the size of saucers. He left out the
part about the giant heart, so maybe he was trying to break it to
her easy. “You sure have a funny way of not embarrassing someone,”
she said. She kept staring at her food tray. “Who told you it was
me, anyway?” Haven could tell she was getting defensive, even
though she wanted nothing more than to be as casual toward Jason as
he was being toward her.

“
Yeah, hey, it could have
been anybody, right? I didn’t mean to say that you would
draw
my
name
instead of another guy’s, it’s just that if it
were
my name, I think it would be, I
dunno, kinda cool.”

Haven blinked. “Did you say
‘cool’?”

“
Yep.”

“
Don’t you mean creepy or
pathetic or something?”

“
Nope. We should hang out
sometime. If it was me, I mean.”

“
If what was
you?”

“
The name you were writing
on the wall,” said Jason.

“
Oh, right.”

“
I’m not asking you to
marry me or anything, I just thought it would be nice to get to
know you.”

“
Oh.” She thought for a
moment. “It wasn’t you, but yeah, let’s hang out.” She looked at
him. “It wasn’t you.”

He smiled. “Fair enough. Listen, I’m
having a party at my house tonight. You and your friend—Kayla, is
it?—you guys should go.”

Haven heard herself speak before she
even thought about an answer. “Okay, sure. We’ll be
there.”

“
Great!” Jason stood up.
“Everyone’s showing up around nine.” He walked away and Haven heard
his friends teasing him about the visit.

“
Oh my God!” said Kayla as
she came back to the table and sat down next to Haven.

“
Seriously, Kayla! Broken
record!”

“
What did he
say?”

Haven shrugged in an attempt to hide
her excitement. “He just wants us to go to some party tonight at
his house.”

“
Oh my G—I mean, wow,
neat. So we’re going, right?”

“
I said yes before I
really thought it out. My curfew’s still ten, but what about you?
You have to be home before the party even starts.”

“
Haven’t you ever snuck
out of the house before?” asked Kayla. “My parents go to bed
early
, so I can leave
whenever I want as long as I’m quiet. Just tell your parents
you’re
not
going
out, then wait until they’re asleep and then
boom
, you’re at a party with the
hottest guy that’s ever talked to you.”

Haven thought about it for a moment.
“They usually go to bed around nine if I’m not out of the
house.”

“
So we’ll be a few minutes
late. Big deal. It won’t really get started until we show up
anyway.”

“
Oh, yeah, we’re real
party animals,” said Haven.

Kayla hugged her. “That’s the
spirit.”

6

C
olton started the long walk back to his apartment from the
homeless shelter. The path he always took wasn’t the quickest, but
he thought it was the most scenic. He passed three parks along the
way, their wide, grassy fields providing a calm, momentary escape
from the concrete jungle everywhere else in the city.

The apartment building where he was
staying was just on the edge of Parkchester in an area that barely
clung to the image of wealth and power that had been slowly
receding for decades. Even with the steady decline in real estate
value, apartments in the building where Colton lived still cost a
small fortune to rent. He tried to convince Reece to move someplace
more affordable, but Reece needed what he called “the flash”. He
didn’t seem to care that they could be paying half of what they
shelled out every month and still live in a decent part of
town.

Reece’s family had money.

His father was a partner at a major
law firm in Manhattan and his mother was a well-known news anchor
in the city. It was impossible to walk downtown without turning a
corner and seeing a bench or a billboard plastered with one of
their smiling faces. His father’s picture was on the benches, and
as such suffered the wrath of marker-wielding teenagers who never
stopped inventing new ways to draw a mustache on his
face.

Colton looked up at a huge banner
hanging on the side of a tall building as he walked past. “Channel
8 News: Your Source For Truth”. Reece’s mother smiled down at him,
beaming with confidence, sympathy, and wisdom all at once. If
Colton actually watched the news, or any television for that
matter, he would probably watch her show. Reece hated his parents’
success—even though it allowed him to live comfortably—and quickly
changed the channel every time one of their advertisements
aired.

“
Lousy phonies,” he would
say, shaking his head. “If people only knew!”

Colton had met them at a dinner party
months ago when he first moved to New York. They seemed genuine
enough to him, and as he watched their interactions with Reece over
the course of the evening, he figured out that they were
embarrassed by their son. Reece resented them for thinking they
were better than everyone else—just not enough to stop taking the
checks they sent him every month.

Eventually, the small divide between
Reece and his parents turned into a chasm. His father told him that
they would pay for him to go to any college or trade school, but
Reece sneered at the offer and told his father outright that it
would never happen. He continued to accept the sizable checks they
sent him every month, but beyond that he had no contact with his
parents whatsoever.

Reece’s biggest problem—as
Colton saw it—was that he had never really had any true ambition.
When he became old enough to realize that he could get away with
not working a day in his entire life—thanks to the copious sums his
parents raked in every year—he decided to become a “student of
life”, casting aside all responsibility and doing his best to live
every day as if it were his last. Usually, that meant throwing as
many parties as possible and drinking himself into unconsciousness,
but every once in a great while he did something
really
stupid just to
mix things up.

Colton had barely been able to
tolerate that crazy lifestyle before he got his new job at the
shipping depot and was even less tolerant afterward. The long hours
left him exhausted and the only thing he wanted to do when he got
home from work was sleep. Reece had done his best to be respectful,
which for him meant one or two halfhearted attempts to keep the
noise level to a minimum, followed by willful ignorance that there
was ever a problem in the first place.

It was getting to the point where
Colton was seriously considering moving out and finding his own
apartment. There was no way he would find a place anywhere remotely
as nice as where they were staying now, but he could see himself in
a mid-grade studio apartment with a decent view of the city
sometime in the very near future.

He probably would have moved out a lot
sooner, but he and Reece had been friends for almost five years and
Colton felt like he owed him a little more time to get his act
together. In high school, Reece had jumped on the back of a bully
that was standing over Colton and kicking him repeatedly in the
stomach. The bully—Kyle Hanoway, the biggest linebacker on the
school football team—easily plucked Reece off his back and threw
him to the ground. Reece shouted insults at Kyle the whole time the
gorilla of a football player was kicking the two skinny kids lying
on the ground. Eventually a teacher saw what was happening and ran
over to separate the flailing mass of arms and legs.

Colton and Reece became quick friends
and stayed close throughout high school. They had their fights, as
all friends do, and when Reece moved to New York City right after
graduation, he left an open invitation for Colton to come join him.
After things with his own father had deteriorated past the point of
repair, Colton took Reece up on his offer and moved to Parkchester,
bearing witness to his slow but steady decline into alcoholism and
self-loathing.

Colton was just opening the front door
to his apartment building when Reece walked out of the lobby
elevator. He was wearing tennis shoes—a rarity, since he almost
always wore sandals—and runner’s shorts.

“
Uh-oh,” said Colton as he
walked into the building.

Reece smiled and spread out his arms
so Colton could admire his new clothes. His blond, messy hair hung
down over his eyes and stuck out in random clumps. “Uh-oh?” he
said. “I don’t think that’s what you meant.”

“
You don’t
exercise.”

“
It’s never too late to
start.” He walked past Colton and slapped him on the back. “Come
on, I need your help with something.”

“
Man, I’m tired and I need
to eat. I just want to go upstairs and relax.” He tried to keep
walking toward the elevator but Reece grabbed his arm and steered
him back to the front door.

“
Plenty of time for that
later, amigo. This is important. You only live once,
right?”

“
The last time you said
that you went missing for three days,” said Colton.

“
And I have one of the
best stories in the world because of that experience. No regrets!”
He pushed Colton through the doorway. “Come on, this way,” he said.
He made a laughable attempt to stretch his arms and legs before
walking away at a brisk pace.

Colton sighed and jogged to catch up.
“I hope we’re going to get food,” he said.

“
In a bit. First there’s a
little project I’ve been working on.”

“
Can you at least tell me
what it is?”

“
If I did, you wouldn’t
help me.”

“
Probably not,” said
Colton. He sniffed the air. “Are you wearing cologne?”