Lost King Piper Lennox (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📖

knotted into a mess he won’t even recognize, by the time I’m finished.

“Maybe music is your purpose,” I whisper. I can’t bring myself to look at him. “Making people feel things when you play.”

Theo lifts his chin off my head. I feel his lips replace it. It’s almost a kiss, but more of a pause. Just resting his mouth there while he thinks, and the music buzzes all around us.

After a while, we pull apart and start skating again.

“Maybe I’m scared,” he says suddenly.

I motion to his rock-steady legs, and his arms swinging freely by his sides instead of death-gripping the wall. “Nah, I’d say you’re doing fine, now.”

“Not about skating.” He rubs his neck. “I was talking about being a musician. Or any job, really.”

I spin and glide backwards in front of him. “What’s there to be scared of? Failure?”

“Well, that,” he says, “and.... What if I end up like my dad, you know? Doing something I absolutely love, but then the world convinces me it’s not enough...so I give it up?”

“You already have.” Part of me winces at telling him this harsh truth, but I know it needs to be said. Not really fair to humor him. “By not even trying in the first place, you’ve basically given it up.”

Theo looks at me from under his brow, then back to his skates. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“But you can get it back,” I point out. “It’s never too late.”

“Maybe you should write inspirational posters,” he quips, then smirks when I spray him with some more ice. “So: now I know the ‘why’ of you cleaning houses—tell me about the how.”

“The how?”

“You know, how you got this job. Why you moved from Jersey to clean in the Hamptons. Was it specifically Bayside that brought you out here?”

Nope, I think bitterly. Just a fully-baked revenge scheme and half-baked intentions, combined with a very limited résumé.

“I kind of fell into it. And it’s pretty much the only thing I have experience in. I started when I was little.” My answer comes out before I can actually think about it. “My mom cleaned houses, too.”

“Back in Jersey?”

I nod. It’s not really a lie. My mother did clean houses in Jersey in the off seasons, along with one or two other jobs to keep us afloat.

And why does it matter whether it’s a lie or not? It wouldn’t be the first one I’ve told him. And it certainly shouldn’t be the first time I actually care.

“What’s she do now?”

“Retired,” I say quickly. Another half-truth.

I decide a change of subject is in order. This one’s unlocking some Moral Objection folder in my head that shouldn’t even be there.

“What about your mom?” I ask, glancing back at him. “What did she do?”

What I really want to ask is how she died, but holy shit, what a horrible segue. And it’s hardly the day to be stirring up painful memories for him.

But, judging from the way he stops in his tracks, I’ve still managed to do just that.

“Blogger.” He pushes his hair off his forehead and sighs heavily through his nose. He leans on the wall with both elbows. I glide up beside him and do the same.

“It, uh...it was back before the whole ‘mommy blog’ trend was really a thing. She was one of the first ones. Started it when she got pregnant with me.”

“Oh.” Given his pained expression, I braced myself for serial killer or drug dealer. But “mommy blogger” sounds about as harmful as “grocery cashier.”

Theo must hear this in my voice, because he sighs again and scratches his jaw, trying to explain. “My entire life was online before I even had a name. I’m not talking about how most blogs are, with some photos and anecdotes, maybe even the kids’ real first names. I mean my whole. Damn. Life. Everything short of my Social Security number.” He glides one of his blades back and forth, forming a groove in the ice. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Oh,” I say again, but longer this time. “That makes more sense. So she was the over-sharer type.”

“God, the most textbook case you can imagine.”

I laugh, but keep it quiet. Theo doesn’t seem to find any of this amusing. “What kind of stuff would she post?”

“Everything. Constant updates on what I did and said, a million photos and videos...but the worst part was that she’d outright fake shit just for views and traffic.”

He pushes his hair back again. He’s so tense, it hurts my scalp just to watch.

“Staging photos, scripting me, editing shit so it looked exactly how she wanted—it was this weird compulsion for her, I think. She didn’t blog about our lives; she structured our lives for the blog.”

“That sounds awful.” At least most over-sharers are only invading their own privacy. There’s something supremely shitty about sharing every last detail of someone else’s life.

And damn...do I know how it feels to get your life, even one infamous moment, plastered everywhere without your permission.

Anger flashes in my stomach. It feels less like the ember it usually is, and more like a spark fluttering through the air. Dead before it can touch anything else.

I try to think of more questions that aren’t too personal, but that’s the irony of this topic. I’m dying to know how invasive she got, which is pretty invasive to ask.

And Theo keeps giving me a side-eye that suggests he knows precisely what I want to ask, anyway. “Think of literally any detail, no matter how personal or insignificant,” he says, “that a parent could possibly know about her child. That’s what she’d post.”

“Well...I mean, not every—”

“Yes, Ruby.” His jaw