The Lonesome Young Read Online Free PDF

two years younger than Ethan and half as smart; he’d inherited both my dad’s leanings toward drunkenness and Anna Mae’s greed, which made for a really bad combination in a wannabe criminal. I’d heard whispers that it had been something Jeb had done (or failed to do) that had sent Ethan to jail, but the two of them had seemed amicable enough at the barbecue yesterday.
    Then again, I’d seen Ethan smile and shake Junior Koslowski’s hand just before he broke Junior’s nose, so I didn’t really believe Jeb was off the hook for whatever it was he’d done. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t want to know, not that anybody at this petri dish of a high school would believe it. Most of them probably figured I was involved. When Ethan went to jail, one of the senior girls had asked me in a breathless voice if I’d been the “wheel man.”
    She was a moron, but the gossip and speculation were at least partly my fault.
    My brothers’ reputations had always washed over me like an overflowing septic tank, and at first I’d been young and ignorant enough to like it. Nobody messed with a Rhodale boy, for fear of Ethan, and I’d swaggered through elementary school and junior high like a preening rooster until I’d discovered the dark side of borrowed infamy.
    Maybe nobody messed with a Rhodale boy, but nobody let their daughters date a Rhodale boy, either. Nobody wanted their kids to be friends with a Rhodale. Parents who’d been afraid that Ethan would get riled up over some slight—whether actual or only in his over-active, quick-to-take-offense imagination—didn’t even want their boys to play ball with me. Not that I could blame them after he’d gone after my Little League coach with a bat for yelling at me.
    I’d tackled Ethan before he’d done any real damage except to put a dent in the batting cage, but I’d been banned from the league for life after that. Not a big deal, maybe, unless you were a ten-year-old kid who lived in a town where baseball was one of the only things to do all summer.
    In a twisted kind of way, a lot of what he’d done had been because he’d been so protective of me. Of all of us, especially Caroline, even before . . . well. Before the incident. Not the drugs, but some of the violent stuff for sure stemmed from wanting to protect us. But nobody in town saw it that way, and everybody was always quick to think the worst of me, by association.
    “Trouble always breeds true,” they’d said.
    “The Rhodale streak will show up in him sooner or later,” they’d said.
    My mother had told me to ignore them, but instead I’d proved them all right when I turned sixteen, saw two boys roughing up my half sister, and lost my mind.
    “Mickey!” My buddy Derek angled his bicycle into the rack, but didn’t lock it. It was a real POS and nobody would bother to steal it. Derek was one of the few kids whose parents weren’t afraid of Ethan or of me—probably because they were preachers and believed God loves everybody. Or maybe because they didn’t actually know who Ethan was or what I had done; they weren’t exactly the type of folks to gossip. I’d never brought it up with them, so I wasn’t sure which was true. I swung my leg over to dismount the Harley and headed toward him.
    “I heard about the fire. Holy crap, was it really Caleb? I thought he was working for old lady Whitfield. What was he doing hanging out at a meth lab? Was he a drug dealer?” Derek’s questions tumbled out so fast that he was making my brain hurt. He looked around and then lowered his voice.
    “Was Ethan involved? Doesn’t look good, with him just getting out of the big house.”
    I raised an eyebrow. “The big house? Have you been watching too much Netflix again?”
    He punched me in the shoulder, and I pretended it hurt. When your best friend was short and skinny, sometimes it was good to make him feel like he was bigger than he really was. Especially when he’d been the only one from high