Raffling Ryan

“Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else?” Ryan nearly growled. What had happened to him this morning? Had he suddenly turned transparent, his every flaw, his every lack, able to be seen?

“I would still be at practice, except that Timmy Wetherhold took a header straight into the goal and Coach had to take him to the emergency room. Man, was he ever bloody. It was cool. So, what’s for lunch?”

Bloodthirsty little savage, Ryan thought, then remembered his own youth, and how cool he had thought it the day Parker Soames had run into a lacrosse bat and nearly sliced off his ear. Parker had been fine, but definitely bloody, and Ryan, at the ripe old age of thirteen, still hadn’t figured out that injuries could be serious. That was a good time in life, when a kid believed himself and everyone else to be immortal.

It had been, now that he thought back on it, only about three years before his parents died in that plane crash.

After that, he had understood mortality, and his world had considerably sobered as he’d felt the need to grow up overnight.

He wondered why Zach didn’t feel that way, after losing his father. He was younger than Ryan had been, granted, but life hadn’t exactly been kind to the kid. And yet he was just that—a kid. A happy, extroverted, pretty cool kid.

Janna Monroe must be doing something right.