you go first, and if it’s good enough, we’ll strike a deal, and you’ll get out of here without a broken nose. That is if Daria gives me permission not to kill you.” Penn looks over at me, and I nod.
Gus blows out air. “You want a secret? One that’d save my skin? All right.” He looks over at Via, regret in his eyes. She sees it, too, and coils into herself, preparing for the blow.
“When I was born, my mama put me on the steps of our local church. The pastor knew her from around the neighborhood, so instead of doing the right thing and handing me over to the police, he gave me back to her. I guess she was too embarrassed not to take me back. He said he and the church would help us, but of course, the fucker never did. Your, er, stepdad, Rhett…” He coughs. Starts walking around in circles. Marx, no wonder we were all so terrible to each other. “He came to see us often. He used to talk about Penn like he was the next Jerry Rice. That’s what got me into football in the first place. Said Penn’s gonna make it big and buy his entire family mansions, and I wanted it, too. I started pursuing Via because I wanted to be close to Penn, but Penn was never close to anyone other than Cam and Kannon. Years passed. We all went our separate ways. And when Penn came to the snake pit months ago, drunk off his ass…” He trails off. “I gave him my best fighter, Vaughn, because I was hoping—praying, maybe—that he’d kill him. I didn’t want the competition. I need a scholarship, goddammit. Need out of this shithole before I become the help to the same people I grew up with in high school.”
There’s a beat of silence as his words soak into everyone’s brains.
“Your turn, Scully.” Knight grins beside me, squeezing my shoulder.
Penn turns around to look at me, so everyone else does, too. Even though I should be embarrassed because of everything that went down, and because practically everyone here knows all of my secrets, I’m surprisingly calm.
“I owe you two truths. One, I’ll give you now, Skull Eyes. But the other…” He takes a deep breath. “The other you’ll get if you decide to stick around. If Lady ends up with Tramp.”
He walks over to me and lifts my chin up with his finger. I stop breathing. Everyone circles us in a backdrop of faces and blurred figures. He’s the only thing I see, and maybe it’s always been this way. Maybe I needed to look for him when I still could and demand he took all my firsts as if I owed them to him.
“The truth about the holes in my shirts is as follows: My last recollection of Stan, my dad, was when he left us. I was five, and I’d been climbing on the tree in our backyard, trying to create a makeshift treehouse. I was fucking obsessed with treehouses. And forts. And sand castles. Looking back, I probably just wanted a real home, something I didn’t have. My dad didn’t want to spoil us, so he refused to help me build one. Anyway, I ended up falling on my ass, but on the way down, my shirt got caught on a branch, and a huge hole opened right where my heart is. It was a close call, for sure. My mother was already halfway addicted, so she just told me to be more careful next time. My dad’s mom, though, went berserk. Ioanna Scully is every shade of insane in the coloring book. The kind of religion that believes in curses and spells. She said I was an unruly boy, and I called her an old hag because that’s what my mom called her. Of course, I didn’t realize Mom was saying those things behind her back for a reason. At any rate, Ioanna cast a spell on me. She said my heart will be broken until I find the one. That I’m going to walk around with holes in my shirts to symbolize what I don’t have until I experience true love. But until then, I will be miserable. Naturally, I thought it to be bullshit. But then weird things started happening to me every time I didn’t wear the holed shirt. One time, I almost got run over. The other, the money I stole from my mom