High school senior
Lanny Keating has it all. A three-sport athlete at Lauserville High School
looking at a college football scholarship, with a supportive family, stellar
grades, boy band good looks… until the fateful day when it all falls apart.
Seventeen-year-old
Trevor Ladd has always been a publicly declared zero and the high school
bad-boy. Abandoned by his mother and sexually abused by his legal guardian,
Trevor sets his sights on mere survival.
Lanny seeks out
Trevor’s companionship to avoid his shattered home life. Unwilling to share
their personal experiences of pain, the boys explore ways to escape, leading
them into sexual experimentation, and the abuse of illegal drugs and alcohol.
Their mutual suffering creates a lasting bond of friendship and love.
When the time
finally comes to get clean and sober, or flunk out of high school, only one of
the boys will graduate, while the other spirals downward into addiction. Will Lanny and
Trevor find the strength to battle their demons of mind-altering substances as
well as emotional vulnerability?
Clean takes the
reader on a gritty trip into the real and raw world of teenage substance abuse.
Excerpt:
PROLOGUE
Lanny
Trevor wouldn’t even
look at me when I walked over to the gas station this morning to say hi. And
Jimmy’s Fuel Stop is like three miles
from my house so it took a major effort to walk there, especially since I’ve
been feeling like total crap lately. Another one of my shaky human bonds bites
the dust. I need to go out and get myself a cat.
“Can’t you see I’m
working, Keating?” That was all he said. But I’ve always been good at reading
between the lines. I could tell what he was thinking as he stood beside the gas
pumps, totally caught up in not looking at me. “Take a hike before you get me fired, loser. Some of us got goals in
life....” So I took off before he had a chance to make me feel like I
shouldn’t have ever made an appearance on the planet earth. But I still know it
would have been better had I never been born...maybe Joelle would still be
okay.
It’s Saturday
afternoon and nobody’s home. Mom and Dad are probably off at the park with
Joelle, sloshing through the wet snow together so she gets her daily exercise.
Or maybe they took her to the make- your-own-sundae-place to improve her fine
motor skills by sprinkling sweet toppings on big scoops of ice cream. I’m in
Mom and Dad’s bathroom, bent in half with my head stuck in the closet,
searching the cluttered shelves for anything that will get me high enough to
escape. And I mean anything.
That’s when I see
the cough syrup. The bottle in front is almost new, and there’s an older bottle
of a different brand right behind it, little more than halfway full. Seeing
these medicine bottles reminds me of something Chad suggested about a week or
two ago— that we should try robo-tripping.
He told me that if we drink enough cough syrup, the DXM in it would get us high
in a “super blissful, tingling-body-parts way,” which sounded pretty decent to
me then and still does now. Not completely surprised I remembered Chad’s exact
description of a DXM high, I thank God for this dextromethorphan stuff that
suppresses nasty coughs, because it looks like I’m going to find my much-needed
buzz after all.
Pleased that I don’t
have to resort to sniffing glue from the tube on my father’s basement workbench
or huffing my mother’s hairspray—and believe me I came close—I snatch the
bottles with a shaky hand. They’re both sticky with the syrup that dripped down
the side last time one of the Keating’s had a major head cold accompanied by a
hacking cough. Licking my fingers provides me with a hint of the cherry flavor
I’m probably going to be barfing up later tonight. But I don’t care. I can’t
get through a single day without some help, and by that I don’t mean help from
my human friends, seeing as I have
none left.
The walk to the shed
seems longer than ever. It’s an effort to so much as put one foot in front of
the other. I haven’t eaten anything for a full day; I’m sure that’s why I feel
like such crap. And it’s not like I want
to think about this stuff, but I can’t stop myself. The “stuff” I don’t want to
think about is really people. The
people I have hurt so much lately because of my bad habits.
This list starts
with my little sister Joelle, who I told to “stuff a sock in it” when she asked
me to read that goddamned book about a kid going to school—for the zillionth
time! “School’s not all it’s cracked up to be, Jo. Stop being so damned excited
about it! Those kids are gonna tear you to pieces and won’t even wait until you
turn your back to do it!” It hurts too much to remember the expression on her
face right after I told her that, so instead I stare beyond the leafless trees
into the gray sky and think about my parents.
I’ve hurt Mom and
Dad a lot too, because they know I’m sick, they just don’t know exactly what’s
wrong with me. And I’m not sure how much they care. Their plates are too full
already with Joelle’s problems, I guess.
I glance down at the
two bottles of cough medicine dangling from between my fingers and remember
Chrissy and Robyn, who I use like toilet paper. They can do way better than me
in the study-buddy department.
I trip over a root
that crosses my path and fall to my knees, but just as quickly drag myself back
to my feet. A stray root isn’t enough to stop me from getting to where I’m
going.
I’m almost at the
shed now, and I can’t avoid thinking about him any longer. Trevor hates me. He
never calls anymore, never asks me to go to the shed to drink some beer and
fool around. He just looks at me in the hallway at school with angry disgusted
eyes, and tells me every chance he gets “you’re fucking up your life and I’m
not gonna let you fuck up mine.”
Trevor Ladd...the
ultimate untouchable. If I could’ve made somebody like him want to be with me, I would’ve surely been able to win my parents back. Well, no such luck. I’m
more of a zero to Trevor than I ever was...and Mom and Dad still don’t care.
Blew my entire life sky
high. Which is where I’ll be soon, if all
goes according to plan. I lift each bottle of sticky sweet cough medicine
to my lips and kiss them, one by one.
Just the sight of
the tiny, beat-up brown shed fills me with an indescribable sense of relief, probably
like the feeling of coming home after years at sea. As soon as I push open the
door, I see that Trevor isn’t here and I’m illogically disappointed. But Trevor
can’t save me from myself. He did his duty; he tried to get me clean, and he
got clean in the process.
Way to go, Trevor.
Alone in a frigid
shed in the middle of the woods, I’m more than eager to suck down a couple
bottles of cough medicine so I can be somewhere else...someone else. A vision of Landon Keating forms in my mind—not
Lanny, the student, or Lanny, the athlete, or Lanny, the son and brother—but
the near-future version of me when I’m “simultaneously mellow and stimulated,”
if the online experiences I’ve read about taking DXM are accurate. Sad truth
is, I’ll take just plain disoriented. Any effect will be fine if it whisks me
away.
I drop down to the
cold floor and without ceremony open one of the small bottles. The cough
medicine goes down more easily than I thought.
Cherry-berry-sweet-thick-burning-soothing-
pleasure-pain. It doesn’t take too long.
Itchy as hell...belly’s on fire....
“Read to me, Lanny...read it again!
”Can’t feel my legs at all....
“Wishes don’t wash dishes, son.”
Can’t stop barfing.... So sick....
“Take a hike, Keating—you filthy, no-good,
loser boozer-druggie!”
Blew it with Trevor...blew it with everybody.
Can’t breathe...need a breath....
Gonna die here
alone.
Mia Kerick is the
mother of four exceptional children—all named after saints—and five
nonpedigreed cats—all named after the next best thing to saints, Boston Red Sox
players. Her husband of twenty years has been told by many that he has the
patience of Job, but don’t ask Mia about that, as it is a sensitive subject.
Mia focuses her
stories on the emotional growth of troubled young men and their relationships,
and she believes that sex has a place in a love story, but not until it is
firmly established as a love story. As a teen, Mia filled spiral-bound
notebooks with romantic tales of tortured heroes (most of whom happened to
strongly resemble lead vocalists of 1980s big-hair bands) and stuffed them
under her mattress for safekeeping. She is thankful to CoolDudes Publishing,
Dreamspinner Press, Harmony Ink Press for providing her with an alternate place
to stash her stories.
Mia is proud of her
involvement with the Human Rights Campaign and cheers for each and every
victory made in the name of marital equality. Her only major regret: never
having taken typing or computer class in school, destining her to a life
consumed with two-fingered pecking and constant prayer to the Gods of
Technology.
Author Linka:
Goodreads
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26954465-clean
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ReplyDeleteI loved them all. but Us Three and Intervention are on top of my list. Cathybrockmanromance@gmail.com
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