Everything to Lose

Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Mrs. O’B (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Landry (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Novels by Andrew Gross (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#ulink_b14ab263-4ed3-5f45-a0c1-53e37fe28575)

The two of them lay together in the breezeless night on the banks of the Arthur Kill, overlooking the dark container ports of New Jersey.

He knew this was the last time they would be together.

This was their spot, on the blighted western shore of Staten Island, beneath the shadowy trusses of the Goethals Bridge and by the chained wire gate of the shuttered-up soap factory that years before had given Port Ivory its name. The ground around them was pocked with deep man-made holes. He’d always been told that the government had dug them, connected to a network of tunnels as part of a defense project during the Second World War. Now they were just the open, unhealed sores on the face of the abandoned landscape that protected him from the outside world.

The dark world that was encroaching on him tonight.

“You don’t have to go,” he said, his voice cracking as he stroked her apricot-smelling, honey-colored hair. His life was as gray and drab as the world around him. She was the only thing that added beauty to it.

“Yes, I do. You know I do. We’ve known that from the start. We both have to get out of here. Next year it’ll be your turn.”

His turn … He was poor; no one in his family had ever gone to college. With his father gone, how would that ever happen now?

“C’mon, you’re smart.” She smiled and stroked his face. “You’ll go far.”

Yes, he would go far. He felt it, no matter how everything seemed stacked against him. “I don’t know.”

And he was smart. Though sometimes he had trouble convincing his teachers, who were really stupid themselves and had no idea what was inside him. In a couple of days she was headed off to Canisius College in Buffalo. He’d known from the start that one day she would leave him behind. But now that the day had come, it felt no different from all the other hurt in his life. She was the first person he had truly known, who saw what was truly inside him. Not just the part he showed to others. Though they kept their time together hidden from everyone else. They made up names—she used his nickname, Streak. In the third grade it was given to him because he ran faster than anyone else. But since then it had morphed into something else, something his stupid younger brother had come up with that he hated.

Mean Streak.

For the kinds of urges that rose up inside him. Things he couldn’t control. Things the family saw. But his brother was a lying little pest who he should have dealt with long ago.