Indigo Sky

CHAPTER ONE

"I don't want to go to school."

I stood there in my parents' bedroom doorway. They hadn't even gotten dressed for work yet, hadn't even had their morning coffee, and I was already begging them to keep me home for the day or the week—or, you know, forever.

As if Mom could afford to lose another day at the gym she owned. She had already kept the place closed for months while Dad continued to work on and off as a construction foreman.

But I wasn’t thinking about that.

Honestly, it was hilarious that, at eight years old, the thought of walking into elementary school with a fucked-up face and a missing eye seemed like the absolute worst shit to ever happen. You know, moreso than the fucked-up face and the missing eye, but at this age, your entire world revolved around what was going on at home and what was going on at school, and for me, shit at home was fine.

Shit at school though?

Not so much.

It had been three months since the Fourth of July. Three months since Dad had blown my face up with a firework—and, yes, it was a fucking accident, so don't even think about asking, all right? I don't want to hear it.

Anyway, it had been three months since the accident. Doctors did what they could to fix my face, but there was no fixing the eye. They said I would adapt to living life with only the one, and honestly, that had been the easiest part of it. I'm not saying it didn’t suck. I'm not saying I didn’t go through months of pain, between healing and surgeries and healing some more. But let me tell you, nothing about all of that sucked nearly as much as my late return to school in the middle of October.

Like I said, kids were brutal, and they did not take too kindly to Mrs. Matthews making a spectacle of me in front of my second-grade classroom.

"Kids," she said, gripping my shoulders with what she probably thought was reassurance, but instead, I felt like I was being forced to stand there and be stared at, like some fuckin' circus sideshow. "Many of you have known Revan Waters since kindergarten, and you probably remember him looking a little different last year. But accidents can happen to anybody at any time—even you or one of your classmates—and over the summer, Revan suffered an accident that made him, uh … different . But! He’s still the same old Revan, so I hope you’ll treat him that way.”

God, that bitch.

I don’t think she purposely intended to make my life a living hell that day. I think she genuinely thought she was doing the right thing by drawing attention to the elephant in the damn room and making it seem like not such a big deal. But then she had to go and do that—she stumbled . She didn’t want them to treat me differently, but she alone had treated me like a freak show. She had singled me out, pulled me aside, forced me to come to the front of that classroom, and made me stand there while telling those kids that I wasn’t different … but I was . And, boy, did they know it, and they didn’t let me forget it my entire first week back.

This one kid, my old best friend, Joe Weston … on the first day, he threw a crumpled-up wad of aluminum foil at the bandage I was still wearing over my right eye—er, where my right eye had been—and forehead because he wanted to see if it hurt. And when I cried because it had hurt, he laughed.

A whole lot of those kids laughed, so I made it a point to not cry in front of them again, no matter how much I wanted to—and believe me, that was a long week. It was hard to be an eight-year-old without friends. It was hard to have an entire grade of kids avoid me because they didn’t know how to treat me, so they treated me badly, and I begged and begged and fucking begged my parents to not send me back there to a class of kids who remembered a version of me that had been whole.

But they said it would get easier.

They said I’d learn to live with it.

They said the more I treated it like it was nothing, the more those kids would too.

But I didn’t believe them because they didn’t treat it like it was nothing. Dad could hardly look at me—which, by the way, I understand now was more out of guilt than disgust, but you gotta realize, at the time, I thought he saw what everyone else did: A freak. A yo-ho-yo-ho fuckin’ pirate. A monster .

So, anyway, that second Monday, my mom dropped me off at school with zero regard to how much I’d begged to stay home. And I muddled my way through the first half of the day, painfully aware of the stares and giggles and whispers, until I made it to the cafeteria, where I found the table occupied only by this one kid with the worst case of BO you’d ever gotten a whiff of in your life and this girl who insisted on eating tuna-fish-and-jelly sandwiches. I took my new place at the farthest corner from the girl with the nasty sandwich, wished I’d lost my nose and sense of smell instead of my eye, and opened my lunch box.

Enter Nathan Manning.

This kid waltzed into the cafeteria the way he did every other day—with the presence of a pit bull and the attitude of a pissed-off gorilla. Every day, he was mad at the world—why, I didn’t know at the time, but … well, we’ll get there—and he took it out on anyone who crossed his path. It seemed like he picked someone new to torment depending on his mood, and on this particular day, he set his sights on me.

He started to walk over, barreling through like a bulldozer, not giving a single fuck about whatever got in his way, and I could only begin to imagine what he was about to say or do or … I didn’t even fucking know. But before he could make it to my little table of misfit toys, some dick of a kid tossed an empty juice box at my blind eye.

The kid—not Nathan, the little shit who had thrown something—snickered and said, “Nice catch, Revan ,” like my name itself was an insult.

I squeezed my fist around my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich to keep from crying.

“Hey!” Nathan barked, and I thought he’d been talking to me. But when I looked up, he was standing over the kid who’d thrown his trash at my face. “The next time I see you throw something at him, I’m gonna snap your stupid glasses in half—you got that?”

I dropped my gaze to the sticky mess in my hand. What? No way was Nathan Manning defending me. Nathan Manning didn’t defend anyone but himself.

“Hey.”

I looked up slowly, carefully. Terrified that if I made one false move, he’d bite me, shove my head in a toilet, throw my backpack in the trash—some fucked-up shit that would give me no choice but to cry, and I did not want to cry in front of him . Abso-fuckin’-lutely not.

But what stood over me shocked the shit out of me because I wasn’t looking into the eyes of a kid who wanted to make my life a living hell. No, I was looking at a kid who got it . I mean, okay, he never had kids throwing shit at him ‘cause they wouldn’t dare, but kids avoided him like the plague. And whether that was his doing—for reasons I didn’t know at that time—or not, the dude was lonely as hell, and no kid should ever feel that alone. The world was big and freaky enough as it was, but for a little fuckin’ kid? Shit … you might as well throw a little guppy into an ocean full of great white sharks.

And just like that, Nathan Manning didn’t scare me anymore, and I could see very clearly through my one eye that he wasn’t scared of me either.

“Come sit with me,” he demanded before walking away.

I didn’t know it at the time but …

You could say that my first mistake was following him.

But, you know, I guess that all depends on how you look at it, right?

***

Long story short, Nathan and I became friends.

Well, initially, I hung around him to keep him happy and to keep the other kids from fucking with me. But eventually, I grew to kinda like him.

Nah, scratch that. I liked Nate a lot.

As luck would have it, his house was only a couple of blocks over from mine, and soon after that first incident in the cafeteria, he was coming over every single day until it got dark and my parents were warning me about bedtime. On the weekends, he slept over.

It was one of those friendships where we never seemed to get tired of each other, and if we started to get on each other’s nerves, he’d go hang out with my dad or watch TV with my mom, like he was one of us. And I thought, after a while, my parents even started to see our friendship as a bright and shiny silver lining to The Accident. I had finally made a real friend, one who wanted to know me, not one who had been forced to out of social obligation or something. Like Joe Weston, who never again thought it was funny to pick on the half-blind kid.

Nate was funny, too, which had surprised me at first ‘cause he wouldn’t have been caught dead laughing or even smiling at school. But, yeah, the kid was quick, really witty.

There was this one time on the Fourth of July—exactly a year to the day after Dad nearly killed me. Nate had come over—because he was always over—and he asked my parents if they’d gotten any fireworks this time. Man, everyone got so quiet, you could’ve heard a mouse fart.

After a moment, Mom finally said, “No, we thought we’d skip them this year.”

Nate quickly replied, “Oh, thank God, ‘cause my next question was gonna be if you had the ambulance on speed dial.”

And, okay, looking back, it was probably way out of line and insensitive or whatever, but, man, he lightened the mood. We all laughed, and even though Dad never could talk about The Accident without hanging his head in shame, he was still able to relax a little once we started joking around about it.

Nate did that.

He used to say, “If you can’t laugh about shit, you’re just giving it permission to kill you,” and for a long time, I agreed with him.

It’s just that, you know … some shit … you shouldn’t laugh about.

Some shit just has to die in order for you to survive.