My book, Ghostboy, Chameleon & the Duke of Graffiti, will launch next week on Amazon US and UK. To celebrate, I’m publishing the first twenty chapters of Ghostboy on Wattpad. If you’ve never heard of Wattpad, it’s a fantastic and FREE reading and publishing tool. Writing for me isn’t about making money; it’s about reaching people, and Wattpad allows you to reach millions of people.
However, for those of you who don’t want to sign up to yet a new website, I will upload one chapter per week to my blog, think TV series-in this case, a story series over 60 weeks. The idea wasn’t mine, but I think it will make for a great reading experience. I hope many of you will follow Ghostboy. And remember that comments are welcomed and expected.
Chapter 1.
In retrospect, spray-painting an enormous white penis on Principal Matthews’s Volvo woodie was not the idea of the century.
“What’s gotten into you, Duke?” my mother yelled the second she burst into the principal’s office.
I cringed. She hadn’t taken the time to change out of her tennis clothes.
“I’m so angry! Your father’s coming home early tonight to have a word with you.”
Crap. My father never came home early.
My mother dropped into the free chair facing Principal Matthews’s desk. There were so many coats of polish on it that I could see his clenched jaw without having to look up.
“Mr. Matthews, we’ll take care of the damages. I’ll have my husband’s driver pick up your car this afternoon. If you could just give me the keys.”
“That’s kind of you, Mrs. Meyer,” he said, “but I need to get home.”
“I arranged for a rental. It’ll be in the parking lot this afternoon.”
His jaw loosened a little. That was a good sign. Right?
“You’ve thought of everything,” he mused.
His eyes fixed me; they were very light, nearly see-through. I’d never looked at him that close, not even when he’d found me with the canister of white paint still poised in midair. I’d noticed his skin tone changing from pale to red though.
“Is there any way we could keep this off Duke’s record?” Mom asked.
I suspected my principal wouldn’t agree to it; the man was a stickler about rules and good behavior. He probably filed his taxes ahead of time.
“It would go against our institution’s policy to falsify records. However…”
My mother leaned forward so abruptly I thought she might fall off her chair.
“If Duke puts in one hour of community service after school for a month, I’m willing to write that it was a misconstrued art project. Does that sound fair, Duke?”
I gaped at him. A month!
“Duke?” he repeated.
“He’ll be free after school every day for however many hours you need him,” Mom said.
I bit down on my lip. Great. There goes my social life. “But I have basketball practice on Tuesdays and Thurs—?”
“You won’t be playing for a while,” Mom snapped.
“But the championship’s mid-May.”
“You should’ve thought about that sooner. And you can forget about playing on the weekends too,” she added. “Actions have consequences. You’re also grounded for the next four weeks at home.”
I gasped but didn’t argue for fear of her extending my sentence to my seventeenth birthday, or my eighteenth. “What sort of community service am I going to be doing?” I muttered.
“You’ll be helping Mr. Darcy.”
“Help him do what?” I snorted. “Clean the school?”
When he said, “Yes,” Mom sat up much straighter.
A Meyer janitor—I doubted there’d ever been one in our family. I nearly smirked at the thought. Nearly, because the reality was that my buddies were going to have a field day with my new line of work. Plus spending time with the janitor wouldn’t earn me popularity points at Francis Academy. Not that I had to earn any. My two best friends and I ran the sophomores. Okay, maybe we didn’t run them, but we were the guys every girl wanted to date and every guy wanted to hang out with.
My mother squirmed in her seat. “Is there any other job you could offer Duke? Perhaps some accounting or—”
“No.”
Her green eyes and newly Botoxed lips rounded into large Os. I could see the wheels spinning full speed in her head. What would she tell her friends? What would she tell my grandma? Actually, Grandma Preiss would probably get a kick out of my predicament. I rolled up the sleeves of my white shirt. Even with the fan blasting the office, it was hot, which was unusual for the month of March in Connecticut.
“You can start this afternoon.” Mr. Matthews stood up, adjourning our meeting. “Mr. Darcy will be waiting for you in the teachers’ lounge.”
While my mother shook hands and pocketed the car keys, I headed for the door and drew it open. She flew past me, blond ponytail swishing furiously all the way down the stairs. I walked her out to the parking lot where her dark green Maserati was parked across two spaces.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, as she flung her door wide.
“I should hope so. What got into you?” she exclaimed.
“It was just a stupid dare,” I said.
“Who dared you?”
Since I couldn’t tell her who’d dared me—because I’d taken an oath of secrecy—I said, “It doesn’t matter.”
She folded her arms. “It matters to me. Was it Owen? If it was, I’m going to have a word with his mother.”
“It wasn’t Owen,” I said.
“Then who?”
“Let it go.”
“Let it go? Someone made my son do something stupid, and you want me to let it go? I will absolutely not let it go! Give me a name.”
“Why?”
“Because I think your friend is as responsible and should suffer the same consequences. I won’t have my son be the only one picking up trash!”
“Whoa…Mom, relax. It’ll be fine.”
“Don’t tell me to relax! I’m furious! So furious!”
I placed both my palms on her shoulders. “On the upside, it’ll make a good essay topic for my college applications,” I said, mainly to calm her down. I wasn’t delusional. The next month would suck.
Mom sniffled.
“Don’t cry.”
A few tears plopped out, so I hugged her.
“I promise it won’t happen again.”
And it wouldn’t, because I would never get a second chance to join the Alphas.