Rush by Tori Minard Page B

boxing match.
    “So tell me,” I said.
    Trent drew in a huge breath. “He killed
our little brother.”
    “What?” I stared open-mouthed at him.
That couldn’t be right. No.
    “I said he killed our half-brother. The
son of his dad and my mom.”
    “But...why? Why would Max do something
like that?”
    “I don’t know.” Trent raked his fingers
through his pale hair, making it stand on end. “He always claimed it was an
accident, but I didn’t believe that.”
    “Why not?”
    “He never seemed to have much remorse.”
    “But...he seems so normal.” More or
less. “I can’t imagine him wanting to kill someone.”
    Trent’s eyes narrowed into cruel slits. “You
have been seeing him.”
    “No, I haven’t. I just ran into him on
campus once.”
    “I’m not sure I should believe you.”
    “You can believe whatever you want. I’m
not seeing him.”
    Trent loomed over me. “You’d better not
be.”
    I lifted my chin. There was no way I’d
back off from this one. “Are you threatening me?”
    “No. I’m warning you.”
    “Don’t even think you can tell me who I
can and can’t see,” I said, beginning to pace again. “How did it happen?”
    “He shot him with my stepdad’s gun.”
    I halted to close my eyes. “Oh, my God.”
    “It was bad, Caroline. Real bad.”
    “Was he playing with the gun?”
    “Yeah. He claimed he thought it was
unloaded. It went off by accident.”
    “But you didn’t believe him.”
    “No. And I still don’t.”
    I put my hands to my forehead and blew
out my breath. “This is so not what I thought you’d say.”
    “What were you expecting?”
    “I don’t know. Joyriding. Breaking and
entering or something. Maybe robbing a gas station, at the worst. Not murder.”
I looked over at him, knowing my expression was as bleak as it could get. “How
old was he?”
    “Max or Carter?”
    “Both.”
    He reached into his back pocket and
pulled out his wallet, flipping through the pictures he kept there until he got
to the right one. Then he handed the wallet to me, displaying a snapshot of a
smiling, blond toddler. The kid was preciously cute, with big blue eyes and a
dimpled grin. He’d kept a picture of Carter in his wallet and yet somehow I’d
never known it was there or that he’d had a little brother. “Max was ten.
Carter three.”
    I blinked. Ten? Ten years old? “He was
just a little kid himself, Trent,” I said with a frown.
    “Some kids are just evil. You’ve seen
news stories of murdering psycho kids.”
    “Are you saying Max is a bad seed? A
psycho?”
    “He killed Carter in cold blood. For no
reason, except maybe it was his idea of fun.” Trent’s blue eyes were hard and
cold. Like glacier ice. He really despised Max.
    “I’m just so shocked. I can’t believe
it.” How could I have liked someone so horrible? How could Max have done those
things? I couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion that the Max I thought I knew
had deliberately murdered a little boy, his own half-brother.
    “You should. And you should be careful.
Stay away from him. You see now why I warned you?”
    I nodded slowly. I felt like I had a big
chunk of concrete attached to my heart and it was dragging me down into deep
water. “Yeah. I do.”
    “Good. Let’s go eat. I’m starved.”
    I, on the other hand, had lost my
appetite.
    ***
     
    “Don’t you love fall weather here?”
Paige said, kicking at a pile of leaves on the sidewalk as we walked together
to the campus gym.
    The air was full of the musty scent of
fallen leaves, the air was bright blue against the gold and red and orange of
the leaves still on the trees, and everything looked as beautiful as I could
imagine. We’d had some wet days; today was a sun break. Soon the rain would
start in earnest and it would all turn gray, but for now it was in autumn
Technicolor.
    Max was a murderer.
    I couldn’t get that thought out of my
mind. I didn’t even know why it bothered me so much, why it made me feel