I raised my eyebrows at him.

“Alright, alright.” He shook his head as if to clear away the brainfart that I’d actually go sweat up in the Dean’s office for who knows how long. “So where are we going?”

I dug my keys out of my jeans pocket and slipped on my sunglasses. “Does it matter?”

“So what are you going to do with the money?” Madoc asked as he checked out his new ink.

We’d blown off school and tracked down tattoo artists that didn’t ask for I.D. We found a place called The Black Debs— “debs” being short for “debutantes” —which hadn’t really made sense to me until I’d looked around and noticed that the entire staff was female.

We were under eighteen, so not legally allowed to get tattooed without a parent’s consent, but they didn’t seem to care.

Some chick named Mary had just finished “Fallen” across Madoc’s back, except the “e” was inked to look like flames. Kind of looked like an “o” to me, but I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t asking questions about what my tattoo meant, so I wasn’t going to open a can of worms.

“Only so much I can do with the money right now,” I answered, grunting as the needle sliced through my skin over a rib. “My mother put most of it in a college fund. I can have it when I graduate. But I was

able to get some of it now. I’m thinking of buying a new car and giving the GT to Jax.”

My maternal grandfather had passed away last year, leaving me some land and a cabin near Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. The cabin was falling apart, and it didn’t have any real sentimental value to the family, so my mother agreed to let some interested developers buy it. She put most of the money into the bank under lock and key.

I actually felt proud of her for insisting. It wasn’t normal for her to make such responsible, adult decisions.

But I wasn’t at all interested in going to college, either.

I didn’t want to think about how things were going to change when I finished high school. My phone rang, and I silenced it.

I closed my eyes, while Crossfade’s Cold played in the background, and reveled in the sting of the needle carving into me. I hadn’t tensed up at all, and I hadn’t thought about much of anything since walking into the shop. My arms and legs felt weightless, and the ton of shit on my shoulders had faded away.

I could get addicted to this.

I smiled, picturing myself ten years from now covered in tattoos, simply because I liked the pain. “You wanna take a look?” Aura, my tattoo artist adorned in dreadlocks, asked when she’d finished. I stood up and walked to the wall mirror, eyeing the words on the side of my torso.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 683