Thomas Prescott Superpack Read Online Free PDF Page B

went from roughly one to eight, to one to none, in a matter of twelve seconds. If you’ve never seen a maladroit seagull, you’re one of the lucky ones. It’s almost painful to watch these birds expend so much energy simply to hover. It was the aviary equivalent of only paying the interest on your credit card bill. But enough about birds.
    My right quadriceps tightened after a quarter mile and I stopped to knead the muscle with my hands. My right quadriceps was visibly smaller than its left counterpart, my fingers subconsciously finding the bullet’s entry and exit wounds. Both scars were roughly the size of a nickel and it looked, and felt, like the tissue was made of cork.
    When I set off again, the sun had officially broken the horizon, its rays slowly riding the waves toward shore. It took me twenty minutes to cover the distance to Owl’s Head peninsula, smack the sign with my open palm, and turn around. I covered the distance back in about half the time, sprinting the final three bellows of the foghorn before collapsing in a heap on the white sand.
    I glanced into the bay and saw Lacy treading water about thirty yards out. Lacy had been an All State swimmer in high school and had been attending Temple on a swimming scholarship when she was diagnosed with MS. With the onset of her temporary blindness, she began treading water daily for forty-five minutes to keep fit. She must have heard my sandy collapse and screamed, “Conner called ten minutes ago. He said that if you aren’t there in the next ten minutes, he’s hiring a lawyer, then killing you.”
     
    The Verona Rowing Club was a large red brick structure surrounded by high terracotta walls. There was a group of four women milling around the club entrance, all peeking in my direction as I approached. I wasn’t sure if it was fame or infamy that brought about the stares, either way it was unpleasant, and I picked up the pace as I made my way past them. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have walked like I was squeezing a quarter between my butt cheeks, but hindsight’s twenty-twenty. Get it?
    As I made my way through the front entrance to the outdoor lockers I could make out Conner stretching on the other side of the bridge, an oar over his shoulders, bent over at the waist. I grabbed my rowing shoes from the locker and ran the last hundred yards up and over the bridge.
    Conner caught my last final strides and straightened. He had his shirt off and his initials, CED, tattooed across his ripped abdominals. I must have been a sight because his initials were vibrating wickedly.
    He said, “What? Rowing isn’t enough of a workout, you have to get a ten mile jog in beforehand? You look like you just escaped your own grave for Christ’s sake.”
    I would have laughed, had I not been throwing up. Conner tossed me an orange Gatorade, “Holy shit. You aren’t gonna die out there, are you old-timer?”
    I rinsed out my mouth and killed off the entire contents of the Gatorade. “Call me old-timer again and you can start calling that oar Bubba. You got that Ellis?”
    Connor bit the inside of his right cheek, something he did every time someone called him by his middle name. And about the threat, it was empty. Conner was like Godzilla and I was a fleeing three-foot-five Asian, yelling ill-timed English outbursts. Conner was twenty-seven, a couple inches taller than me, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a physique the likes of Batman’s armor.
    The women from the entrance had made their way outside and I noticed a brunette pointing me out to a newcomer. She was either saying, “That’s the guy who threw up all over the bridge,” or, “That’s the guy who walks with his butt clenched like a queer,” or, “That’s the guy from that Eight in October book.”
    All the options were equally painful and I was ready to shy away from the paparazzi. I cocked my head at the water insinuating it was time to ship out and Conner slipped into the front slot of the shell as I hopped