Read Tango with a Twist (Smashwords edition.) Page 22

  #scenebreak

   

  Gay. All three of those losers were gay. Fox. Corey. K-pop, too, apparently.

  Why didn’t Fox ever invite girls over to swim? That would actually make sense and might even be worth recording. Ugh. Twist was tempted to pull the camera when he got back to town.

  He closed the app and double-checked his email for the address from a guy named Mr. Magoo. The name had to be fake. The address was right, but the house was so boring. It didn’t look like a place where forbidden magic hid. Unless that was the point.

  He dropped his tablet on the passenger seat and walked up to the front door.

  The door opened before he could knock.

  “Can I help you?” The man was ridiculously pale, like a fish. His eyes were big, too.

  “Mr. Magoo?” Twist asked.

  “Mr. Twist?” the pale man asked. “You need to control someone and you have money?” When he smiled, his lips spread far too wide. “You have cash?”

   

   

   

   

   

  eleven

   

  So here’s what happened, the way I told it to K-pop.

  There was a student, nineteen years old. He had a major fight coming up, a title match, and his parents were on my dad’s case to make sure he was prepared. You know, work him harder, toughen him up for it, all that crap.

  A week before the fight, the kid came in kinda banged up, but his parents told my dad he’d been sparring with some buddies. Dad chewed him out, told him never to do that outside the gym. Dad was a Nazi about safety. Which was ironic.

  The kid wasn’t sparring. He’d been in a car accident and had some pretty heavy head injuries and whiplash. The doctors had told his parents to keep him out of the ring until they knew if there was any brain damage or clotting or anything. His parents were all, “Yeah. Of course we want to make sure our boy is safe.”

  Then they lied to my dad and kept on him to push the kid even more.

  I was there that day. My dad and the kid sparred in the ring. The kid’s parents yelled at them both to go harder and faster. “Knock him down, son. Get in there!”

  The kid hesitated. Even I could see he was dizzy. Dad wanted to take a break, but the parents yelled even louder, so the kid danced forward and took a wild swing that Dad blocked and exchanged for a haymaker that landed solid.

  The kid fell to his knees.

  Dad dropped down to see if he was okay.

  “I can’t see,” the kid said.

  Dad grabbed his arms. “It’s okay. You’re just dizzy.”

  He shook his head. “No. I mean. . . blind. I mean. . . blind. . .”

  He dropped forward like a sack of flour into my dad’s arms and died.

  Right there.

  His parents freaked. In front of the whole gym, they screamed that Dad was a killer, a violent sociopathic killer. Dad wanted to perform CPR, but they tore the kid out of his arms. “Don’t touch him, you monster!”

  It’s amazing how truth can be created by a lie told with sufficient force. Even after the kid’s doctors came forward and told the courts that the parents had known better, it was still too late.

  Dad had built the gym up from nothing. He literally started it in our garage in Austin. At the time of the accident, he had several partners and a huge facility. His partners all suggested the business might be better off if he sold his shares.

  So he did. He thought he was a monster, too.

  We only found out much later it was the kid’s parents who bought Dad’s shares of the gym with their insurance settlement. Dad told me it was the partners’ idea. With the grieving parents involved, most of the students felt they were doing some good staying in the gym. They felt less guilty about it.

  What I wanted to know was how the kid’s parents ever stepped foot in the building where their son died. Seriously. What the fuck was that about?

  Charges were never filed against them. It was too vague to prove. Dad didn’t want to ruin things for his students. His ex-students. As far as he was concerned, he deserved everything he got, so he didn’t fight back. That’s what’d caused the arguments with me. He hadn’t fought back, so we both lost.

  I kinda got it though, finally. It was like Corey. If he went to Tango and said, “It shouldn’t count ‘cause it wasn’t my fault,” he was an asshole. There are times when you do shit, that you actually do the shit, but it still isn’t your fault, and it’s not fair that you get punished for it. If there’s any moral to the day, that’s it.

  Which is why this story will never be on the Disney channel.