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  The Reading Buddy

  Bryce Gibson

  Copyright © 2017 Bryce Gibson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the authors written consent. For permission write to the author at:

  [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, names, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Humblenations.com

  The Reading Buddy/Bryce Gibson – 1st edition

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Bryce Gibson

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty one

  chapter twenty two

  chapter twenty three

  one year later...

  The End

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  About the Author

  chapter one

  A SET OF KEYS JANGLED in my hand. The keys were my lifeline. One of them would be what saved the day. I held onto them as tightly as I could.

  I was being followed. The man running behind me was my stepdad, Morris Heyward. He was holding an axe.

  I didn’t want to look over my shoulder to see how close he was getting, and I didn’t have to. I could hear him. Since the yard had not been mowed in weeks, the weeds were high and made a swishing sound against his jeans.

  I wish it would have been as easy as calling for help, but my phone was useless; the screen was shattered. Minutes earlier, Morris had yanked the phone from my hand and crushed it with his steel-toed boot.

  I followed a foot path into a slim set of trees and could already see the street lights on the other side. Soon after I emerged from the tree cover, the tall, uncut grass gave way to scattered gravel around the edge of the train tracks. My bare feet stumbled over the iron rails. I nearly tripped but managed to catch myself before I fell flat on my ass.

  There were no cars on the road. It was nearly midnight. Nobody drove through the small town of Ridge Spring, South Carolina at that time of the night.

  To my left was a line of businesses. The buildings had been built in the 1800’s when the town was founded. My destination was straight ahead.

  Heyward Pool and Supply was located in what had once been a gas station. The streetlights reflected from the windows that stretched across the front of the brick building.

  I grasped the keys tighter in the palm of my hand. I was almost there.

  I had picked up the keys by accident. In a panic to get out of the house, I’d grabbed the wrong set, but after trying to unlock my truck door, I realized my mistake. And so I had made the decision on the spot—I would go to the store.

  The smooth, black asphalt of the parking lot was a relief underneath my bare feet. As I got closer to the front of the building, I could see my reflection in the glass. I was shirtless and wore a pair of jeans. My chest was smeared with drying blood. I caught a glimpse of movement behind me. I knew that what I was seeing was Morris.

  After turning the key, I pushed the door open, slipped inside, flipped the lock, and spun around to face what was behind me. There was no sign of Morris anywhere. I stumbled through the dark store. I knew that there was not a phone on the property. For years Morris had been using his cell as his business line.

  Everything smelled like chlorine and plastic. Giant, inflated pool toys—a whale, alligator, and an inner tube—hung from the ceiling tiles over the main aisle.

  I helped at the store after school and on the weekends so I knew my way around. I made my way into the stockroom and crouched down between the desk and the bathroom wall.

  This gave me a moment for things to begin to settle in my brain. For the first time, the sickening realization of everything settled over me.

  My best friend—Davey Steep—was dead.

  He had been killed with an axe. The same axe that Morris held in his hands now.

  Davey’s blood was smeared across my chest. The thought nearly caused me to puke, but instead, I started to cry.

  I reached to the top of the desk and fumbled around until I found what felt like a thin rag. I grabbed onto the piece of fabric, yanked it down, and knocked over a cup of pens and pencils in the process. I realized that what I was holding was a company t-shirt. As I tried to clean the blood from my chest, the cotton fabric only smeared the half-dry blood and pulled at the hairs on my body.

  Then I heard the loud shattering of glass from the sales floor. Without seeing the action first hand, I knew what had happened—Morris had made his way into the store.

  I jumped to my feet and bolted across the narrow stockroom, pushing through the back door in a matter of seconds.

  I made my way around the building to where a display model of the store’s bestselling in-ground pool was standing on a trailer that had been parked on a thin strip of grass next to the highway. The nice, curvy shaped pool—The Big Dipper—was strapped to the trailer so that it stood upright, making the inside visible to passing cars.

  From out of nowhere, a weight crashed into me, knocking me sideways. I landed with a thud against the inside of the pool display.

  I tried to stand up and fight my way past Morris, but his free hand was reaching and grasping at me. He shoved me back again. When I landed against the pool, I felt the entire thing shake. I grabbed onto the edge and pulled myself forward only to meet Morris’s attack again.

  I felt the shift of the pool against its restraints. My butt slid across the smooth fiberglass as the whole thing began to fall forward.

  Everything else happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to think. There was a brief moment when Morris wasn’t fighting me. Instead, there was a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face, and he was frozen in place. When he looked up, a dark shadow swept over him.

  The pool had come loose from its strapping and was falling on top of us. There was only a split second of my understanding this fact before instinctively shielding my head with my hands and falling to the ground. The pool landed with a loud crack and covered the two of us in darkness.

  A TOWN UTILITY WORKER found me at daybreak.

  From underneath the pool, I heard a man’s frantic voice as he made a phone call. Then, just a few minutes later, there was the sound of vehicles and slamming doors.

  “Move as far back as you can,” a woman yelled out to me. “We’re coming in with a forklift right about here.” Through a narrow gap that was between the pool and the ground, a flashlight beam danced around the grass. I scooted as far away from the light as I could and watched as two enormous metal prongs were pushed toward me.

  When the overturned pool was finally lifted off of me, I saw that a small crowd had gathered around the scene. I heard shocked gasps from several of the onlookers.

  I was placed onto a stretcher that several EMTs immediately began to roll away. I looked toward my stepdad’s broken body that lay on the ground in the same spot where th
e pool had fallen on top of him. I tore my eyes away from what I was seeing, and when I flopped my head to the other side, I was met with the faces of the crowd.

  Mixed in with the expressions of concern and sorrow, there was something else that I saw on the faces of the spectators. It was judgment.

  From there I was sent to a mental hospital where I was kept under close watch, and a woman from Social Services was assigned to work my case.

  After two months in the hospital, Social Services placed me to live with my father until I turn eighteen and free to live on my own.

  My parents got divorced when I was five. Mom remarried when I was seven and then died in a car crash five years later. After Mom died, Morris had been given custody over me.

  I don’t remember much from the years when Dad, Mom, and I had all lived together. There are only small, brief images that come to mind when I think about that span of time—a white picket fence, a small baby goat, and the green tops of carrots growing in a garden.

  chapter two

  “BLAKE, IT’S TIME TO go.”

  It was my father yelling from downstairs.

  I was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, tying the laces on my boots. “I’m coming,” I yelled toward the bedroom’s closed door. “Just give me a minute.”

  “You’ve already had thirty minutes, Blake. We’re going to be late.”

  I looked at the clock on my nightstand. He was right. The appointment with my therapist was in less than ten minutes.

  I stood from the bed, ran my fingers through my hair, and grabbed my favorite cap.

  “I’ll be in the car.” Dad yelled up to me.

  I heard the sound of the front door slamming shut. The impact rattled the old windowpanes on the wall.

  I knew that Dad was pissed.

  As I made my way down the creaky staircase, I heard something else. It was Wolf, my dad’s black Labrador. She was slapping her tail against the inside of her metal crate.

  Standing at the bottom of the steps, I peeked into the den. Wolf looked at me from behind the crate’s door, tilted her head to the side, and made a pathetic whimper.

  From outside, there was the sound of Dad’s horn.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m coming,” I mumbled under my breath.

  When I opened the door, Dad’s truck was already running, and he had put it into reverse. The red brake lights illuminated the gravel driveway.

  After shutting the front door to the house, I hustled down the driveway and opened the truck’s passenger side door. “I overslept,” I told him. “It’s not that big a deal.” By then I was sitting down. I buckled my seatbelt and slammed the truck door.

  “It is a big deal, Blake. You’re my responsibility now whether you like it or not.”

  The truck’s tires crunched over the gravel as Dad spun out of the driveway.

  Up until the past few years, Dad had lived in Georgia. I visited his home in Edgefield often, and I had already been living there for two weeks, but I still studied the outside of the house like I was a visitor.

  The 1800s-era farmhouse was covered in white clapboard. There was a tin roof that was rusted in several spots. A wide front porch stretched across the front. The roof on the right side of the porch was sagging and being supported by a thick balustrade that was pressed into the ground.

  Not long after backing out into the road, the truck barely paused at the stop sign at the end of the road before Dad turned the wheel to the left and drove toward town.

  It was only three miles to the town limit sign, but sometimes riding with him made it fell like an eternity.

  “After I drop you off, I’m going to the store,” he said. “Destiny is supposed to be at the house around six. Supper is at six-thirty.”

  Destiny was Dad’s fiancé. I had only been around her a few times. She seemed okay.

  “I’m thinking spaghetti,” Dad continued. “How does that sound?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s fine with me.”

  “Blake, Destiny has been looking forward to this all week. Please, just try to show a little bit of enthusiasm.”

  I had always been shy, but recently it had gotten a lot worse. On the first visit with my psychiatrist, she told me that I was showing all of the signs of PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that the social anxiety was probably stemming from that.

  I thought about the pamphlets that I had flipped through in the waiting room. According to what I had read, and what Mrs. Reynolds had told me about my “journey to recovery,” there are stages to combating anxiety.

  People in stage two have admitted to themselves that they have a problem.

  I was in stage two.

  Just a week earlier, I had been folding towels in the laundry room when I knocked over a bottle of bleach. The plastic bottle hit the floor, the top popped off, and the harsh smelling liquid poured out onto the hardwood floor. It smelled like chlorine. Like the pool supply store. Dad found me an hour later crouched down, trembling, between the washing machine and dryer.

  The passing landscape of fields and orchards eventually gave way to sidewalks and prestigious antebellum homes.

  Even though the two towns were less than twenty miles apart, the town of Edgefield was a stark contrast to Ridge Spring, where I had lived before. Ridge Spring was a single strip of stores, businesses, grain silos, and a train track that ran perpendicular to all of them. The center of Edgefield was a quaint, grassy square that had a gazebo at its heart and a looming brick courthouse that overlooked everything else. Because of Edgefield’s violent past, legend had it that every inch of the square has been stained by blood.

  “Here we are,” Dad said as he brought the truck to a grinding stop in a space on the far, back corner. “I’ll be back to pick you up in exactly one hour.”

  I got out of the truck, shut the door, and watched Dad drive away.

  Mrs. Reynolds, the therapist, worked from home. The house was an old Victorian that was just off the square next to a pottery studio and museum. I walked down the crushed brick walkway to the back of the house where her office was located.

  Inside, several posters had been tacked to the walls. One of the posters read PTSD—POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER—HOW TO KNOW IF YOU HAVE IT. There was a window that looked out onto a neatly mowed yard and a bookcase that was so loaded down with books that the thin, wooden shelves sagged in the middle. A potted flower sat atop a metal filing cabinet in the corner. Other than the flower, the room seemed to be devoid of any kind of personal touches.

  “How have you been since our last meeting?” Mrs. Reynolds was sitting behind her large, metal desk. A manila envelope was on the desk in front of her.

  I sat across from her and told her about the incident with the bleach.

  The therapist didn’t respond right away. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and looked me in the eyes. “Blake, I think that reading is something that you need to get back to doing. Is it a trigger? Is that the reason that you have pushed it to the side? It’s normal for people in your situation to lose interest in their hobbies, but...”

  “It’s not a trigger. I just don’t want to do it anymore.”

  It seemed like Mrs. Reynolds thought that everything had the potential to be a trigger that could bring back memories of that night.

  “Just let me pass this along to you.” She opened the folder that was sitting on her desk. “I’ve compiled a list of people that you can friend on social media. This is a reading buddy program...”

  “Really? A reading buddy? I’m not ten years old.”

  Up until then, my only knowledge of reading buddies was from elementary school when the teacher had paired each student with a high school mentor. Mine had been a senior named Bethany Crane. Bethany wore the shortest shorts that I had ever seen and was always sucking on a breath mint. She was my first crush.

  Mrs. Reynolds slid a pamphlet across the top of the desk.

  “They will know nothing about you personally. This is just a way for yo
u to baby-step into somewhat of a social relationship, and, at the same time, you’ll be picking back up an old hobby. It will be preparing you to take action.”

  It felt weird to only be seventeen and have someone refer to something you used to do as being old.

  And by “take action”, I knew what she meant—make a friend.

  I picked up the pamphlet and slid it into my back pocket without looking at it.

  Mrs. Reynolds continued talking. “You are at such a crucial time in your life. It is imperative that you overcome this. You mentioned at our last meeting that you wanted to know why your stepdad did those horrible things.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you?”

  She nodded her head. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong for looking for that sort of closure. I understand that need. I really do. But the truth of the matter is that you may never fully understand.” She reached to the open folder and picked up another sheet of paper. “Here. Let me give you this.”

  I took the paper from her and turned it so that I could see the front. A single line ran diagonally from the bottom left to the top right where she had clipped a narrow strip of star-shaped stickers. Six circles were evenly spaced along the line and labeled with the steps to beating social anxiety—pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination.

  “It’s a progress chart,” she said. “Take it with you and mark your achievements.”

  While I was sitting in her office, I peeled two of the stickers from the paper and stuck one on each of the first two steps. The idea seemed silly, but it made me feel good. Like I was accomplishing something. Two steps down. Four to go.

  AFTER THE SESSION WAS up, I went outside to where Dad was in the truck waiting on me.

  I opened the passenger side door and flopped myself onto the seat.

  He was smiling. “Hey there big guy, how did it go?”

  Dad was one of the most flippant people that I knew. On the way to town he had been on my case about being late and now, just an hour later, he was calling me big guy? And smiling?