Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer Read Online Free PDF Page B

ready for five; not so much in the afternoon. But in the afternoons, his temper was short from a long day of dealing with the likes of me, so he was more inclined to shoot for five.
    I took five that day. Perhaps my frequent flyer status was built into the equation somehow.  
    In spite of paying the price, however, I was too naïve at that age to understand how things really worked in the world. At the time, Dan was an assistant principal at another school in the district. I guess it only made sense that he knew McQuig.
    Perhaps McQuig called to tell Dan of the favor he'd done him by tanning my hide. All I knew for a fact was that when Dan got home from work that day, he felt compelled to bellow at me for what seemed to me to be a thousand times, "You wanna fight? You wanna be a boxer? Is this what you wanna do? You wanna embarrass me?"
    Of course the  questions were all rhetorical. They were not to be answered with my words, nor Dan's.
    The answers were in Dan's knuckles.
    He beat me all the way through my fear and my pain, leaving only a crusty residue of anger and hate that I carried to school the next day, where a hundred snickering laughers pointed at my bruised face. Humiliation is such a powerful motivator in seventh grade.
    So on the fourth day, when Benny returned to school, I found him in the hall. He smiled at me the way he always smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile back. Instead, I beat him down. With each pound of my fist, Dan's anger rolled through me and down to Benny. And when I was done, Benny looked like me, with fresh blood running from his mouth and nose. He had hollow, helpless eyes that understood something new about cruelty in the world.
    I got eight swats from McQuig that day. Perhaps a new record. I got suspended, and Dan beat me daily until I went back. But what the fuck; he probably would have beaten me anyway.
    What I should have learned about catharsis that day was the lesson that eluded me every time I ever I let my anger run free. Catharsis is a bullshit concept.
    Benny had been my best friend for years before that fight. After I beat him in the hall, he never spoke to me again. All that catharsis did for me was cost me a little piece of my humanity.
    Slaughtering Whites for what Mark did to Amber was like that. When the rage flowed and the Whites died, it felt like something, something with a frightening name. But after, I felt like a death camp Nazi who’d finally looked into one too many pairs of sunken eyes.
    And now I sat in a humid charnel house of my own making, having tried to assuage a vindictive rage with the murder of the wrong people. Mark had to die for the world to ever be right again. In my mind, it was a necessary step. But I knew that was also an indulgence of the darkness, a choice to forever cultivate a hate. It was a backward path. And to chase Mark down that path, the easy path, was to shower myself in the blood of the Whites until my luck ran out and I was as dead as the pile infected at my feet. And would Mark be in that pile? Not likely.
    But what real choice did I have? To move forward instead? To what?
    I’d only ever been an isolated spectator to an endless parade of tragedies. Being alone in the dark was all I knew. All my life I’d collect acquaintances and discard them before they became real friends, before they became too much of an emotional risk. And as much as I had needed to find Amber, as much as I needed now to know what had happened to Steph, in my choices, I’d scraped off Murphy, Mandi, and Russell and isolated myself again. The cycle of my habit was at work under the guise of rational choice.
    So what was forward for me?
    That hard path was to pick up the fragile pieces of a nascent chance at life, a life that I’d very handily scattered across a dying city. That path seemed so difficult and so urgent, but the hard part, if I was still alive at the end of the day, was to chance a real relationship with another person, with other people.
    And I