Page 2 of Heart of the Race

“Go away, Aid,” I ordered. “I’m not coming, and you don’t need me, anyway. Really, truly, only you and the guys are required. Think about how long I’ve been gone.”

“You’re wrong, mate. You’re the only one who really matters. It doesn’t mean anythin’ if you don’t see it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I really was. I so wished it were different. I wished he were different.

“Open the door!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Aid,” I replied belligerently, annoyed now that he was persisting. He knew it wasn’t good for me, going back, but he was still pushing. That was really crappy of him. “Get off my porch!”

He banged the door hard with his fist, but I heard him retreat, and then the car started out on the street.

He was wrong. I knew Varro better than that. The only thing Varro Dacien needed was the rush of being on his bike and the blurring speed.

We’d been friends since the fourth grade. I was on the sixth of what I didn’t know at the time would be the last of my foster homes. The Rossers lived next door to Varro and his family, and I looked over one day—a week after moving in—and from my second-floor bedroom window, I saw him on the roof of his house. I would come to find out that the other boy with him was his brother, Nico. But really, neither of them was the real attraction at first glance. It was the go-cart he was sitting in, and the ramp it was pointed at.

When you’re nine, the thing you say when you open the window is not the same thing you’d say when you’re thirty-two. Now I would have yelled at him to get the hell down before he killed himself. Then, as I watched him put on a bike helmet and fasten the chin strap, I leaned out onto the sill and asked if I could have a turn.

His gaze took me in.

I waved.

“Yeah, come on!” he called back. “You can go next!”

Since I was alone in the house, there was no one to check with. I was downstairs, out the back, and knocking on the door of the three-story Georgian Colonial next door moments later. The woman who answered was, to me, stunning. Her long black hair, big and warm dark-brown eyes, her smile, and the smells emanating from the kitchen—I was in love at first sight.

“And who are you?” she wanted to know.

“Brian,” I answered. “Brian Christie. I live next door.”

“And what can I do for you, Mr. Christie who lives next door?”

“He said I could go after him.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who said you could go after him?”

“The boy on the roof.”

She gasped and grabbed my hand, yanked me into her house and—even though I didn’t know it yet—into her life, and both of us made it up to the slanted roof just in time to see the go-cart whip by. It hit the edge of the ramp, flipped over—there had been no way to get it flush against the wood shingles—and propelled the boy through the air and into the maple tree next to the house. The cart didn’t have the same luck. It hurtled to the ground, thirty feet below, and smashed into a hundred pieces.

The boy, her son, Varro Dacien, broke his right arm—I could tell from how it was backwards—was scratched and bruised, and had his left wrist run through by a branch, but was thankfully rendered unconscious on impact with how hard he hit the oak. The sound that came out of his mom, the high-pitched horrified scream—I had no idea anyone actually made sounds like that outside of the movies—scared me and nearly made me cry at the same time.

“I’m going inside to call 911. You watch him,” she ordered.

“Mom, I’m here,” the brother said to her retreating back.

But she wasn’t speaking to him.

“I knew I was gonna be in trouble too,” he grumbled, turning to look at me. “I guess you have to watch Varro now.”

I wasn’t looking at him. My gaze stayed on the boy in the tree, who was waking up. “Hi,” I said, waving to him.

His eyelids fluttered, and then he startled.

“Don’t move,” I instructed, smiling and getting as close to the edge of the roof as I could. “You don’t wanna fall.”

He groaned when he saw his wrist.

“Does your arm hurt?”