Page 5 of Fighting For You

"Hey! Have you had dinner?"

"Yeah, Jesse ordered pizza for the group." He dropped his bag by the door and kicked off his shoes.

"What project are you working on?"

"Something for history."

"Cool." I pulled a blanket over my legs and muted the TV. "I brought you some chicken tenders. They're in the fridge. You can have them for lunch tomorrow."

"Nice!" He was already halfway down the hall. "Is it anything like the tenders from Chunky's?"

"Nah. Sadly. But they're good. Just not as good."

He opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. "Ah well. I don't think anything's ever gonna come close." He cracked the cap and took a long drink.

"Shame."

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "How was work?"

"Hellish as always." I tucked my feet under the blanket. "I spent most of the afternoon with my fingers in somebody's neck wound. And then a kid got dumped on our ramp with a stab wound in his leg."

"Cool!"

"No. Not cool, Ian. He was about your age. Most likely got stabbed over something gang-related."

Ian stopped with the water bottle halfway to his mouth.

"How do you know that?"

"We get a lot of dump and run cases. Someone gets hurt, their friends drive them to the ER and take off before anyone can ask questions. Metro sends a detective every time."

"That's wild." He took another drink. "Did he make it?"

"He went up to surgery. Should be fine." I looked at him. "Just promise me you'll be careful out there."

"I'm always careful." He screwed the cap back on. "I'll just go shower."

"I'm heading to bed in a bit."

"Goodnight!"

His door closed. The shower started a minute later.

I sat back down and pulled the blanket over my legs. The cartoon was still on.

In a lot of ways, I was lucky. If working in the ER had taught me anything about teenagers, it was that not every kid Ian's age was as easy as my brother. And Ian had more reason than most not to be. Our father died when he was nine. Our mother handled the grief with alcohol, then pills, and overdosed two years later when Ian was eleven. I was twenty when I became his legal guardian and I was rarely home, trying to juggle school and work to keep us above water. I could only give Ian my early mornings before he left for school, a few hours at night before he went to bed, and not much in between. It wasn't ideal, but it was what we needed to survive.

Ian had every reason to make this hard for me. He never did.

The cartoon finished. I folded the blanket, turned the TV off, and closed up for the night.

Sometimes when the shift ran too long or the weight of things got too heavy, I came up to the roof, sat with my back against the warm stucco, and just looked up at the night sky. You couldn't see much. Vegas took most of the stars. The Strip put its light into the western sky and washed out everything above it, so what was left was a handful of bright ones and the rest just darkness. On a clear night I could find maybe ten if I really looked.

It was silly. I knew it was silly. But I liked to pretend that everything was already written up there, and if I stared long enough, it would start to make sense. That everything we'd been through and everything that was coming had a shape to it like a pattern that someone decided before I was born, and I wasn't just stumbling through it alone.

It had been a long day. So I went to my room, climbed through the window, and sat on the roof.

Something streaked across the sky. For half a second I thought it was a shooting star. Then the blinking lights caught up with it and it was just a plane heading into Harry Reid.