Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 149510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 748(@200wpm)___ 598(@250wpm)___ 498(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 149510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 748(@200wpm)___ 598(@250wpm)___ 498(@300wpm)
“With condoms!” Cassie exclaims, shifting her smacking over to her husband again. “Good grief, Thatch. Have some decency.”
“The kid chose this college because it has the word ‘dick’ in it, and you think he’s thinking with anything else?” He snorts. “Get real.”
“Excuse me! He did what?” Cassie’s eyes go wide as she turns her attention back to Ace. “You did what?”
“Mom, relax. Dickson is a great university. Does it really matter why I chose it?”
The three of them start bickering again, so I take out my headphones and put them on. Nine Inch Nails seethes in my ears as I do too, all the things that have added up to this moment running through my mind.
My rich, ridiculous roommate may have chosen this college on a whim, but I came to my decision a little differently.
Almost two years ago, on the day before my seventeenth birthday, while my dad was gone on a bender, I stumbled upon his journal from several decades prior. I thought it was just a place he used to scribble his shit music notes at first, but a couple of pages in, the contents changed entirely. Instead of writing songs, he detailed all the ways he’d screwed it up—how he’d abandoned his young family, changed his last name, and run away to start over. After years of fucking around completely, drinking, doing drugs, and committing any manner of crimes, he finally decided to settle down…with my mom.
In the span of five years, they had my older brother Reece, then me, then the twins, Jack and Travis, and last but not least, our baby sister Willow. And that was that. He never looked back.
Jeff Hayes moved on, but the world Jeff Winslow had created prior to me and my siblings didn’t. He has a whole other set of kids—ironically, four sons and a daughter, too—who are an entire generation older than us, and one of them is a professor here. In fact, he’s the head of the English Department, and my first class on Thursday is with him.
Professor Ty Winslow is in for the surprise of his life, and as much as my dad is the asshole in this scenario, I can’t wait to give it to him.
I guess I’m an asshole too.
Thursday, September 5th
Finn
Rain pelts me in the face as I make the stroll from my dorm in Graham Hall down 120th Street in the direction of where the Newton Building sits on the corner of Broadway. This is my first official class of the semester—English Lit with Professor Ty Winslow.
Other kids run and shriek like the water will melt their skin away, but I bask in the feeling of each cool drop on the heat raging inside me. A brewing ball of anticipation and excitement and a tiny sliver of anxiety churn in my stomach as I think about the look on my target’s face as I turn his world upside down.
From all my research on the Winslow family, I know that Ty Winslow’s had an easy time with money and an even easier time with getting whatever the fuck he wants. He and his brothers are all wealthy—though, I’ll admit, he’s the least silver-spooned of all of them—and it appears they’ve never known struggle, thanks to their cushy life here in the city.
Ty taught at NYU before transferring here to head up the whole English Department at Dickson, and his younger brother Jude owns and runs a PR company for some of the most lucrative clubs in New York. Flynn was by far the hardest to find any information on, but he’s got a huge penthouse in the city and some kind of high-profile name in the engineering world. Winnie, the baby sister of the group, is married to the owner of the New York freaking Mavericks pro football team, for goodness’ sake. And the eldest, Remington, is an investment broker and day trader with a net worth even Google has an estimation for—like he’s some kind of celebrity or some shit.
My three brothers and sister and I, it seems, would have been a lot better off if our dad had abandoned us too. Instead, he drank heavily and got mean nearly every night, and our mom is a hollow shell of herself because of it.
I shake my head to clear it. I don’t need to think about that bullshit. I need to think about how I’m going to deliver my first blow to my half brother.
A gust of wind blows as a girl runs past me in her navy-blue cheerleading uniform, a guy in front of her with combed dirty-blond hair already in the alcove of the building, standing and laughing at her as she sprints through the rain. She turns back to say “Excuse me!” as her elbow brushes mine, and a crack of lightning and thunder a mere hundred feet away startles her just as she’s finishing the motion.