Rule Breakers (Off Limits #2) - Nicky James Page 0,33
was vindictive and cruel when she wanted to be. The older I got, the more I understood why she and Dad had never worked. For all Dad and I fought, it was nothing compared to the loveless relationship I had with my mother. Neither of them were going to win Parent of the Year, but at least Dad tried in his own way.
When I’d told Dad I wanted to take a year off after high school, he’d let me. When I’d decided to take a second year, he’d yelled for three days straight about the importance of college and getting a degree and a career and not ending up like him.
His parenting methods needed work, but at the end of the day, the reason we fought so much was because he wanted me to have a better life than him.
Mom lived in a suburb outside the city, a neighboring little town that boasted a population of two thousand. It was an area that had once flourished. When two of the chemical plants in the city had closed down in the late nineties, the wealth that had once populated the idealistic little suburb relocated. Property values had plummeted, leaving the once gorgeous homes at the mercy of those who didn’t deserve them. With the drastic shift in status came a steady decline until the houses became rentals, and the once quaint little shops were left empty with boarded-up windows. Drugs, prostitution, violence, and crime all increased until the little town had become known as the slums.
Mom lived in a government-subsidized townhouse. Her landlord did nothing to maintain the building, so it fell apart a little more year after year. Her neighbors on both sides and many of the people on her block were living off welfare, selling and doing drugs on a regular basis. Their children ran wild, their animals were uncared for and nearly feral, and their vehicles rusted and rotted away in what was beginning to look like an automobile graveyard lining the street.
I hated visiting her.
The worst part, though, was the lack of public transportation. The city bus ran to and from her little suburb until five o’clock at night, then it quit. I could get to Mom’s without a hitch, but getting home again had always required a phone call to my dad. Mom and her flavor-of-the-month boyfriend were never in a state of mind to get behind the wheel. Ever.
Thankfully, Uncle Denver had promised he’d collect me around seven when he was finished with some meeting. Dad and I hadn’t spoken all week, and I felt weird calling him when no one seemed to want to talk about what had happened.
Surrounded by textbooks I had no intention of reading and a term paper that was never going to be written at this rate, I hemmed and hawed while checking the time repeatedly to ensure I didn’t miss the last bus out of the city.
The windows running the length of the library showed another snow squall in progress and near whiteout conditions. I couldn’t see more than five feet into the courtyard beyond, and the drifts gathering against the building were over four feet high in places.
The weather had been brutal for the better part of a week. Each day saw an accumulation of more and more inches of snow.
Every time I turned around, another class was canceled, which just meant my professors emailed us the required reading and workload—hence why I’d made a nest in the campus library earlier that day. The work was piling up, and I couldn’t seem to focus at Uncle Denver’s house. When I was there, my mind was miles away from school, tied up in a tangle of limbs and forbidden pleasure that we didn’t speak of. Unfortunately, the library wasn’t proving to be far enough away from those thoughts either.
There were only a handful of other students in the vast, double-level library building. Two guys who were playing cards at a table a few away from mine, a girl snapping her gum at the photocopier, and a mixed group I’d seen disappear up the open staircase about thirty minutes ago, backpacks slung over their shoulders.
The hum of the fluorescent lights was giving me a headache, and watching the snow fall was putting me to sleep. I’d sat under a heat vent, and the steady blast of hot air was starting to make me nauseous.
While the blank Word document stared back at me from my laptop, I doodled on the corner