The Rebel of Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,27

own bubbling rage as I forge a path down the hallway once midday arrives, heading for the locker rooms.

This might actually be fun. Get out onto the field. Run so hard your lungs hurt. Feel your muscles burn. Remember you’re alive.

The track pants and the red ‘Raleigh High, Home of the Roughnecks’ t-shirt Maeve gave me fit well enough. I’d tossed them into my locker, fully intending never to use them, and yet here I am, two weeks into my Raleigh career, donning them in the hopes that I’ll be accepted onto the football team. At Bellingham, I did more than scorn the football team. I made it my own personal mission to disrupt as many of their games as possible. I flooded the field, stole the posts, spread manure from goal line to goal line, put Ipecac in the team’s Gatorade, until the principal finally began to suspect I had something to do with the repeat incidents and banned me from attending events or going within a hundred feet of the field. So now, stepping out onto Raleigh’s pristine, highly manicured field, this is all beginning to feel a little…hypocritical.

A tall guy with a ginger mustache is yelling at a kid on the other side of the grass, getting in his face as the kid stares down into the football helmet in his hands. He has to be a freshman. Must be. He’s reedy. Small, even for a fourteen-year-old. His immature physique isn’t helped any by the fact that he looks like he’s about to cry.

“How you’re related to your brother, I don’t fucking know. Your mom always was a little free with her affections. She spread her legs for a different dude every week when she attended Raleigh. Maybe she fucked the mailman and you, Oliver, are the unhappy byproduct. I don’t wanna see you back on this field until you’ve grown some fucking balls. You hear me? I don’t care if your brother runs this entire school. You won’t be embarrassing me by wearing that uniform until you’ve damn well earned it.” The coach glimpses me off to the right, watching the exchange, and he sets his jaw.

I learned at a young age to assess men very quickly; when you’re passed from pillar to post as often as I was, performing an accurate threat assessment on the guy who’s supposed to be looking out for you becomes a vital skill. This man is one of the worst kinds. I read a lot on him in the first three seconds when he straightens and faces me: power hungry, because inside he feels unvalued and worthless; ex-military, was probably deployed but sent home on health grounds. Mental health, I’m guessing. Guys like him don’t accept a fifty-one-fifty lying down. He probably fought it. Railed against the decision that he was unfit for service, and then became embittered and soured against the world when they forcefully ejected him from active duty.

He grew up without a father, which is how he inadvertently ended up here, pretending to be one to all of us poor, misguided miscreant youths. In the morning, when this harrowed, worn, rejected man gets out of bed and looks at himself in the mirror…he’s so unhappy with what he finds staring back at him that he takes it out on the world around him.

I have met his type before, and let’s just say this: it has never ended well.

“Alessandro Moretti. You don’t look Italian to me,” he says. There’s a large embroidered ‘Q’ on the left breast pocket of his ultra-white polo shirt. Presumably, this stands for Quentin—I already know this is the guy’s last name. It’s plastered all over the local newspaper clippings that are tacked to the notice board inside the locker room.

“Coach Bobby Quentin leads Raleigh Roughnecks to State.”

“Raleigh local, Coach Quentin, whips Roughnecks into shape pre-spring training.”

It all seemed pretty masturbatory. Grab a blue light and shine it on that notice board, and I’m fairly sure the whole thing’d be covered in Coach Bobby Quentin’s jizz.

I sigh down my nose. “What does an Italian look like?” I offer. “Isn’t that the same as telling someone they don’t look American?”

Quentin’s top lip curls up, signaling his confusion. “Don’t get smart with me, boy. You know what I mean. You’ve seen an Italian on T.V.”

This…is just about the strangest, weirdest, dumbest…fucking…thing I’ve ever heard in my life. “So…I’m supposed to look like Tony from the Sopranos? Five foot seven? Pudgy ’round the belly? Balding? Spaghetti sauce