And the cherry on top was that the summer heat was sticking around.
Sol, Arvo, and me—we were enjoying a sunny Tuesday afternoon by our wall. The kids were coming and going, delivering the latest news. It was all dumb shit, petty quarrels and awkward hookups, but those are the little things that can become important if you let them fester with the wrong people. A King can never let his guard down or his mind wander. There’s always an angle to consider.
“Where’s Biba?” Sol asked absently.
“The fuck should I know?” I muttered. She’d been avoiding the boys lately. It annoyed me, though I guess I understood. Sol acted like he’d taken a vow of silence recently. And Arvo was his usual skeevy self. I couldn’t blame her for avoiding that. . . .
“Just asking,” Sol replied.
“Well, I got enough on my mind without worrying about Biba Quinn’s whereabouts.”
Sol sighed. I gave him a look. Don’t you get pissy with me too, Stamos.
He pushed off the wall and started walking off.
“Where you goin’?” Arvo shouted.
“I have things to do, okay?”
“What things?”
Sol didn’t reply. He picked up speed as he got closer to the school like he couldn’t wait to get away from us. Or maybe that was just Sol being Sol. He was all business when he was about the Kings’ affairs, but it wasn’t easy to loosen him up when it was time to chill. And what was with his interest in Biba these days, anyway?
“What’s his fuckin’ problem?” Arvo laughed.
“Always seems to have half his mind somewhere else these days.”
“You can say that again.”
Arvo was pretty quick to reply there. I gave him a sideways glance. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, almost like he regretted speaking out of turn.
“What does that mean?” I asked him pointedly.
“Nothing, Zeph.”
Still not looking at me.
“You’re not telling me something,” I pressed. “I won’t have secrets between the three of us, Arvo. That is what killed the Kings all those years ago.”
“Yo, Tess!”
Arvo’s piece of freshman ass was walking between classes. The second she heard him call, she ran over like a trained spaniel—a spaniel with a tight little body and magnificent tits. There was a decent chance Arvo was trying to distract me from my line of questioning, but what the hell? He picked a great way to distract me.
Tess fell into Arvo’s arms and pulled his face to hers. They frenched noisily. It was all a little sloppy for my taste, but who was I to criticize young love? His hand crawled up along her ribcage and squeezed that perky, round breast. She groaned with delight.
“You miss me, girl?”
“You know it,” she whispered in his ear, but her eyes kept darting back at me. That was the thing about Tess—she constantly stole looks at me when we were all together. Honestly, it made me nervous: I had a pretty good idea of what it was about. Arvo was talking me up to her because it made him seem big by association. The man next to the big man.
That was one of Hurley’s less appealing qualities. He didn’t wear power well. It fit him like a designer suit cut half a size too small.
“Tell you what,” he said to her, “you come to my room tonight in a t-shirt and nothing else, and I’ll make you never want to leave.”
She giggled uncontrollably. “Sounds nice.”
“One more thing. One of these nights, we gotta bring Zephyr over, right? Let him have a taste of you.”
Her face dropped. It wasn’t a look of disgust or anger, more surprise and confusion. She didn’t know if he was joking.