Kindle Edition
Amazon
Blue Attitude Books
Category:
Young Adult/Teen
Publisher: Blue Attitude Books
ISBN-10: 1517546745
Type: Fiction
Pages: 200
Copyright: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN-13: 9781517546748
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
What do you do when your best friend is being hurt? And you're falling in love with him.
JoJo and Sam have been best friends since he moved in next door when they were five years old. JoJo has always liked the ways Sam is different from other boys, but now that they’re both 14, he’s changing in ways she’s not so sure she likes. Just when she thinks she’s getting used to his new muscles and the way other girls are looking at him, she sees the bruises on his back and knows his step-father is beating him. JoJo tries to get Sam to leave, but he says he can’t desert his mom and step-sister. He makes JoJo promise not to tell anyone or he’ll be sent away to live with his grandmother in Tennessee. When Sam’s mom witnesses the abuse for herself, she finally stops drinking and stands up for all of them, but that’s when Sam’s step-father turns deadly.
Excerpt
Chapter One
The day I saw the bruises on Sam’s back, I knew his stepfather was beating him. I also knew somebody needed to kill the SOB for it. I just didn’t know who, when, or how.
Looking back on it now, I realize Sam had already been acting strange for a while that year. I thought it was just some kind of hormonal craziness he was going through from being fourteen.
Then I saw the bruises.
Of course, I’d known Sam was different from other boys since the day he’d moved in next door, when he was just a little five-year-old blond kid staring at me through the fence. For one thing, he always seemed older than me, even though our birthdays were only two days apart. And how many five year olds can read books like The Wizard of Oz? Heck, I could barely struggle through The Cat in the Hat back then, and Sam already had a real library card.
Sam was my best friend from the first day we met, and I liked all the ways he was different. He was so smart he could make even a bonehead like me understand things like algebra and the Cold War. And he was always good at coming up with ways to help me control my temper when I got mad, which was all the time since I’m a redhead. Sam hardly ever got mad about anything, even when his stepfather yelled at him in front of me.
Speaking of his stepfather, Russell Hart made my skin crawl from the beginning. Something about the way he looked at me made me think of the Big Bad Wolf eyeing Little Red Riding Hood. Sam always said I needed to give Russ a chance because he’d taken care of Sam and his mom after his real dad ran off and left them when Sam was a baby. My mama and daddy were always saying how good it was of Russ to adopt Sam, but they’d never seen him when he was drinking. They’d never heard Russ call Sam names like faggot and Mama’s boy because he wouldn’t fight back whenever Russ picked on him.
When I asked Sam why he put up with that crap, he defended the jerk the way he always did and said Russ didn’t really mean any of it. He claimed it was just the drinking that made him act that way, and he made me swear I wouldn’t tell Mama and Daddy about it. I didn’t buy the drinking excuse for a second and didn’t want to keep quiet about it, but Sam had a way of talking me into things. I could never seem to tell him no when he really wanted something.
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