(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 1; bad people

There was no such thing as good people.

All his life, those words rang true to Jaylin. There was no such thing as good people. Only people doing good for the sake of themselves.

He saw it in the way his high school crush flew off to Sri Lanka to volunteer with elephants. She said she didn't like what humans were doing to Mother Earth and left to ease the collective guilt on her shoulders.

He saw it in the way his father swapped his liquor for a bible—the way he prayed to his Christian god every night, the way he repented. But beyond the church doors, Jaylin saw the shrewdness that festered in his eyes. He condemned anything different with the point of his mallet, spoke like he could always taste the bitter ink of the bible. And Jaylin watched that damnation eat away whatever humanity he had.

His father had opened his eyes to the greed of this world. His arrogance woke something in Jaylin. And after he saw it in his father, he saw it at school, on television. He'd come to find that ignorance had a special kind of emanation; you could feel it when it settled into the air, thick, like a smog. But even to think about these things, to want to rise above the crudeness—that was hypocrisy in its own. Because he even saw it in himself on occasion. That urge to be a better person, if only to hate himself a little less. It was a hopeless human flaw, stamped deep down into the bone and he was never going to escape it.

He was human and humans were inherently terrible things.

"Did you see that?" Tisper spun around so fast, her ponytail cut the air with a whip. When she realized that he hadn't been watching, her cheek-to-cheek smile wilted away and she lowered her archery bow with a huff. "Seriously, Jaylin? I make a perfect shot and you're in a different galaxy."

He blinked, roving over to the target board, twenty feet across the field. Tisper had a talent for hitting only the white rows, but today she'd managed a single perfect shot through the heart of the bullseye.

"I'm sorry," he said, and he meant it. He'd had too many things on his mind.

If anyone understood him, it was Tisper. Her shrewd expression eased and she twirled around with a sigh, trotting the turf to collect her arrows.

For the past two months, her shooting practice had been his waking call. Tisper refused to practice with the other girls in her archery club and instead, she insisted on coming to the field at a drab and chilly six AM.

Even in the middle of a scorching summer, the track field was an icebox in the mornings. There was a perfectly good club room for practice, open to members all summer long. Jaylin had been there once before, nestled on a comfortable lounge chair in a temperature-controlled environment. But Tisper preferred the bone-chilling cold of an open field—and at the ass crack of dawn no less. As long as there was no one around to accidentally bludgeon with her arrows, her instructors didn't seem to mind. They'd even let her rent out a shooting board for the occasion.

It was nonsense to drive all the way to campus in the middle of summer, but watching her practice gave Jaylin the opportunity to get out of the house, and for some reason, it gave Tisper the comfort she needed to shoot an arrow straight.

"Guess we should get going, huh?" she asked, marching over to her things. "You've got places to be and I've got a pinch of summer left to enjoy before school starts again."

She gathered her equipment into her gym bag and Jaylin tapped out his cigarette on the icy bleachers.

"Mind if we stop by the house to check on Mom first?"

There was a slight catch in her eyes as Tisper glanced to him and slung her bag over her shoulder. She knew not to linger on it. "Sure, Jay."

He heaved himself up, ass numb from the cold, and they cut through the turning entrance bars toward the busy bus stop at the edge of campus. Summer was a sticky season in Washington. The icy tundra of the stadium would turn humid and heavy once the sun rose over the emerald city, and the earth would breathe a hot sigh on the back of every man and woman caught in her wake.