get ready for kaz!

 Against all prior expectations, I will be publishing every book I planned to publish this year... probably? I think? I have three weeks left and thirty thousand words left of rewrites, so as long as my cover's done by the end of the month, Kaz at the Approach will be published by the end of the month. Below is the first chapter. Enjoy.

 

 

. chapter one .

 

It all started because of my dad.

            See, my parents are divorced, and while my dad really doesn’t care about me, he likes to pretend he does, and so every weekend I drive down to visit him and his new mid-life-crisis wife thirty minutes out of town. He’s from a farming family and when him and my mom divorced, his parents were in the mood to give him the farm and move to Arizona or something, and so my dad and Brenda are living down there with acres and acres of land and neither of them really do any work because they have enough land that my dad just sort of hires people to do everything for him. But he still likes to pretend to be a good dad, even though he really stopped loving me in the fourth grade because I accidentally came out and even though a lot of people think a fourth grader can’t know they’re gay, my crush was a boy. So my dad started distancing himself from me then.

            Either way, it saw me driving for half an hour on Friday nights and Sunday mornings.

            And like I said, my dad lives out in the country, on gravel. I have an SUV, so even in the winter it’s not really an issue, but this gravel road that leads to the highway, it’s about three miles long. And every Sunday afternoon, on this one approach about half a mile from the highway, stands Kaz O’Neill.

 

×

 

I have to be clear with the fact that Kaz O’Neill and I are about the most different two people could be. For one, Kaz has friends. They’re shitty people who absolutely ruined me when I was in eighth grade, but they’re friends. He’s short and blond where I’m tall and dark-haired. He’s always wearing a dirty old hunter-orange hoodie no matter the weather and I war mostly black. His family has no money and both my parents make a ton. Beyond my dad and his farming adventures, my mom’s the kind of artist that makes you think she might be involved in money laundering schemes, her shit gets sold for so much. I do get along well with my mom, to be clear. I’m just like, not sure on her sculptures being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

            Either way, absolute opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to friendliness, economics, everything. He’s also, as far as I know, deeply straight. Like, he’s got girls all over him constantly. They are trailer park girls who mostly drop out and get pregnant (there are definitely at least a few mini-Kaz O’Neill’s running around), but they are girls. Like I said, I don’t care about girls. I don’t really care about much, honestly. I’m mostly just white-knuckling my way through high school so that I can fuck off to college.

 

×

 

I don’t care about Kaz O’Neill, but I do pick him up every Sunday morning. I’m a dick, but I’m not that much of a dick to make him walk thirty-five miles back to town, especially not when he looks like he’s about to keel over, which is generally how he looks when I pick him up on Sundays. Skinny, shaking, beat up, sometimes. I don’t know who’s beating him up and leaving him out in the middle of nowhere because I’ve never asked.

            I know, I know. Dick move, seriously. But I do give him a ride. We just don’t talk. I pull over, he hopes in, I take him back to his trailer park, he leaves me a weed cigarette in the cupholder. I’m not like, a stoner or anything, but I save them for when I come home from school fending off a panic attack.

            It started on a Sunday like any other. I was driving away from my dad’s house at nine in the morning, it was November, and I live in Minnesota, so it was cold, and I saw Kaz standing at his usual approach, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his hoodie, shivering like crazy, so, like usual, I pulled over.

            But something different happened this time.

            He talked.

 

×

 

Kaz O’Neill is not a profound person. He’s a half-homeless stoner whose dad’s in jail for meth production and whose mom, I’m pretty sure, is a prostitute. He has jackass friends and skips most of his classes that aren’t around lunch, which he gets free because he’s poor.

 

×

 

“Hey, Aiden?” he said, and I nearly put the fucking Expedition in the ditch. I gave him a sideways look. He wasn’t huddled in the corner sleeping like usual. He was sitting up, his hands braced on his knees like he was trying to force his way through a bad stomachache or something. He cleared his throat and I thought he was going to vomit, but instead he looked over at me. Met my eyes for a second before I had to look back at the road.

            “What?” I said.

            “Thanks,” he said. “For this, I mean.”

            It was quiet for a second as I tried to process it. Mostly it was having to process Kaz O’Neill talking to me; we were not guys who talked to each other. Not only do I not talk to… well, anyone, but his friends—I mentioned they were dicks, right? Kind of guys that had sent me home for half of my eighth grade year?

            “For… what,” I said. “Not driving past you when I see you all alone in the middle of nowhere?”

            “Yeah, pretty much,” Kaz said. He laughed, a little. I looked at him again. He’d relaxed, in a miniscule fashion, but his fingernails were still digging into the worn denim of his jeans. He’d painted his nails, or his sister had, or his girlfriend had; they were chipped off black. “I mean, you’re… not the friendliest guy on the block?”

            “Not friendly doesn’t mean the worst person in the world,” I said. “And anyway, your friends have given me plenty of reason to not be friendly to you guys.”

            “I know,” Kaz said. We were coming up on town now and I slowed down a little. He shivered and shook out his sleeves, and I slowed and stopped at the stoplight. Don’t ask me why my town has a stoplight as soon as you enter town. It’s idiotic. But it did give me time to look at Kaz.

            He was looking at me with like, puppy-dog eyes, and I flushed and looked back at the road. “Why today?” I said.

            “Huh?”

            “Why do you want to talk today when you haven’t before?”

            Kaz was quiet for a second, and then I heard his clothes rustle as he huddled back into the seat. “I dunno,” he said, finally. “Felt like a good time to. Hey, if you don’t want to take me all the way back to the trailer park, you could just drop me off at Wal-Mart or something and I can call Danny to pick me up.”

            “It’s fine,” I said. “I can take you home.”

            I glanced at him again, briefly, and he was looking out the window. Maybe he didn’t want to go home—but I also didn’t want to give anything up to Danny Scott, who was the absolute worst of Kaz’s friends.

 

×

 

Kaz had three friends.

            The least offensive was Toby Klosterman. Toby mostly seemed like he was drifting along after everyone else and if you could get him on his own he was OK, but he was definitely a follower and the kind of guy to watch the door when his more aggressive friends kicked the shit out of you in the locker room, for example.

            Then there was Will Sanderson, who was a bitch and a half. Will didn’t like me because I was smarter than him. Every class we had together (which was most of our classes, just due to our GPAs) was a constant battle, and I, seventy-five percent of the time, came out on top. I’m sure if he’d had the same lack of social life as I did he could’ve evened the score a little, but fact was, Will had friends and I didn’t and that meant I was better at school. There is a chance that I was smarter than him in general, but he wasn’t stupid.

            The worst of the worst was Danny Scott. Danny Scott had been a chubby kid, and then middle school had hit and some of that fat had transferred over into muscle when he learned about things like football and protein bars, and his favorite pastime, after the aforementioned football and protein bars, was shoving my head in the toilet. Now that we were seniors he’d let up most of the time, unless I happened to be in his line of sight or something, but middle school had been absolute Hell.

            Kaz never really seemed to fit in with them. I guess he was the goofy, laid-back stoner of the group, but he was definitely poorer than all of them, and he was the only one of them who was definitely not going to college. Danny and Toby weren’t exactly the academic powerhouses that Will was, but they got good enough grades and Danny would probably get an athletic scholarship or something to help pad his way. I guess it was just elementary friendships lasting the whole way. It was a small enough town that that was possible.

            I guess.