Oscar has never tried to fit in and has never wanted to, but when his party friend, Max, is revealed to be mafia prince, Marcus Gallagher, suddenly being a 'lone wolf' is no longer an option; not if Oscar wants to woo his prince and get out alive!
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It was getting late, the sun had already faded well over the horizon, but the sky wasn't completely dark just yet. The halo of light blue still clung to the tallest buildings in the heart of Kingsport, and everything else had dimmed to featureless black silhouettes.
Oscar flipped on the headlights and the radio.
"There is freedom within, There is freedom without..."
The song echoed dreamily through the cab of the Honda Civic, between the smell of the ugly air freshener that he didn't like and the car seat in the back for a kid that he didn't have.
Without any warning, he snatched the air freshener and chucked it out the window. The cool night air rushed in, and mingled with the chorus on the radio.
"Hey now—Hey now! Don't Dream it's over—"
He didn't toss out the little stuffed turtle seated on the dashboard, which was just cute and pathetic enough that it had the privilege of keeping its position as his only accomplice, and that's the way Oscar liked it.
Other people always just complicated jobs like this and got in the way. He did his best work alone. After all, Oscar was the quintessential troubled youth, from a poor broken family who'd been enveloped in a life of crime from a young age.
But Oscar had the distinct feeling that his good luck was running out. He wasn't a minor anymore, and the older you got, the less people generally gave a fuck about you. Except for his Grammy and his state-appointed therapist. Oscar liked his therapist.
He didn't figure that she really cared, but she was damn good at pretending, and that was fine with him, because if he was going to have to waste an hour and a half, two Thursdays a month, with the same person, then the least they could do was pretend they cared about daddy never being around, and mommy never loving him as much as her cocaine pipe. She'd also given him a prescription for medical weed, which easily put her number at the top of his contacts.
But the truth was that Oscar had accepted what a lot of bright-eyed, well meaning, therapists and social workers wouldn't—that some people were just born to be the bad guys so that everyone else could be the good guys.
Kingsport needed young men like him so that the 6 o'clock news had stories that the upper and middle class could shake their heads at, prompting them to ask their perfect families, "What is this city coming to?"
"They come—they come—to build a wall between us," the radio sang.
Oscar glanced over at the little beady eyes of the turtle who sat quietly on the dash, watching him with a look that had gone from empty to mildly judging in Oscar's opinion. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his leather jacket and placed one between his lips while he searched for a lighter...
