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  For the Best

  TEXT COPYRIGHT ©2013 LJ SCAR

  Published by LJ Scar at Smashwords

  All Rights Reserved

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. To the extent any real names or individuals, locations, or organizations are included in the book, they are used fictitiously and not intended to be taken otherwise.

  For the Best is told in two overlapping stories by the characters Hanna and Tanner. Be sure to note character name in bold when a passage changes voice.

  This book is dedicated to the cancer survivors. For the patients, family, and friends who struggle not to give up and when all is lost struggle to go on.

  Prologue

  4th grade, 8 years earlier

  Mr. Hamm led a new boy into our 4th grade class. He was a mess of brown hair, and brown eyes. All my classmates turned to inspect – Tanner we are told to call him.

  Mr. Hamm brought him to a seat across from mine. Seven seats deep, G for him and N for me. Both of us were saddled with long hard to pronounce last names. A future Mr. G and Ms. N.

  I snuck a look and gave a hesitant smile – my offer goes unnoticed. Never new, I wondered what it felt like to be unknown. Tanner sounded like a targeted name, another bull’s eye for gym class. I imagined a rocket propelled dodge ball flung from boys too strong to have a rubber weapon in a class of weaklings.

  The sound of the old world map unrolling distracted me. Another day of Florida history, particularly the first coast history, drilled into our spongy brains. Ponce De Leon, the fountain of youth, Fort Matanzas down in St. Augustine. Every year of elementary seemed to repeat the same events.

  Mr. Hamm stretched followed by a yawn, “Who needs a break?” The young teacher liked to give thirty minute recesses in the morning to accompany the one at lunch.

  Mrs. Renn’s special needs education class was already on the playground. Several of my classmates hesitated. Undeterred, my friend Della and I went to the teeter totters. Another playmate, Peyton, climbed on my end to add weight since Della had twenty pounds on me.

  “What’s your name?” One of Ms. Renn’s pupils approached.

  “Hanna. What’s yours?”

  “Trevor.”

  The R didn’t purse, sounding like a W. Annunciation was my specialty, as I spent two years in speech. “Nice to meet you Trevor.” I offered my hand like Daddy taught me.

  Trevor sported a goofy grin. His size didn’t lend me a clue to his age and with Ms. Renn’s class all lumped from kindergarten to sixth grade I couldn’t guess.

  “Aaahh, look Hanna banana has a new retard friend,” Benny, one of the mean boys, taunted from the swings.

  Benny scared the crap out of me. Once he cornered Della and me on the merry go round when no teachers were present and stuck a frog up my shorts. Then he bragged he’d touched my privates to all the boys. Since that incident, I steered clear of him.

  I whispered to Trevor, “He’s just a big bully. Ignore him.”

  Della stopped teetering looking uncomfortable. No way did she want Benny to start in on her. Trevor began crying and I looked for an adult but Ms. Renn and Mr. Hamm were up by the gate talking, probably about First Coast History.

  “It’s okay Trevor.” I patted his arm in sympathy.

  “Tanner,” Trevor cried and looked toward a dark haired boy four swings down, the new kid in my class.

  Trevor’s volume increased. “Tanner, Tanner, Tanner.”

  Tanner swung back and forth, pretending not to hear.

  I ran to the swing and grabbed Tanner’s hand. Startled he looked at me with dark tear filled eyes. I leaned in, so only Tanner could hear. “Don’t let Benny see you cry. He gets meaner. I’ll distract him.”

  “Last 4th grader to the merry go round is a rotten egg!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. Dusty sand trailed those challenged as attentions shifted. I fell behind, lagging to make sure Tanner attended to Trevor.

  Chapter 1

  Present Day February

  Hanna

  I woke panicked. In the fragment of the dream that remained, I couldn’t tell her I loved her, my mouth was full of pennies, the metallic taste a memory on my tongue. My mom was standing in my bedroom doorway, saying goodbye, but I couldn’t hear the sound.

  If anyone asked me at sixteen what I most wanted, my answer would have been for my mom to be cured. I would have given up years of my life just to have more time with her.

  If the same question was posed to me now, I wouldn’t have an answer. At eighteen, my life had crumbled to the point that my only objective was to get through each day.

  Back before my world collapsed, I talked to God. Really, I bargained with him, made plans. None of it worked.

  God doesn’t negotiate, I thought walking in the dark through my subdivision. Tripping on a buckle in the pavement, I cursed my neighbors who didn’t have their porch lights on to light my way. While I was at it, I flung a few F offs to the guy who still had but didn’t deserve my love. Said boyfriend, a.k.a. Tanner, lived in the subdivision next to mine. All I had to do was walk out of my cul de sac up to the privacy fence, slide two loose boards, slip through into the easement owned by the utility companies, and trespass across Mrs. Couch’s yard.

  From the curb, I watched the drunken antics through the bay window like staring at tropical fish inside the tank. The music blared from within as the crowd chanted along with a lyrical drinking game.

  The door cracked, a guy stumbled outside, spotted me, waved and yelled Hanner. I cringed in distaste. The melding of my name with Tanner’s had occurred last year, our junior year, when we catapulted to the “it” couple.

  I ignored the distraction. Tanner’s older car was in the drive boxed in by the more expensive rides of our classmates. I reached in the open window and hit the trunk. Three black non-descript book bags were trapped in the grocery netting. I picked up and felt each. The heaviest held textbooks. I tossed it back. The two packs with the tell-tale rattle of pills I took.

  A couple was locked in an embrace on the side of the house. Freezing, I listened not wanting to be caught. Their hushed voices told me I’d gone unnoticed. As I closed the trunk, their silhouette moved in unison and their words fell into prehistoric grunts and moans.

  Slinging a pack on each shoulder, I disappeared.

  9 Years Earlier Summer before 5th Grade

  “Ok, I’m Steve Irwin Crocodile Hunter, you’re my wife, Terri, and Trevor you be our family dog, Sui,” Tanner exclaimed as he perched with his fake Bowie knife on the banks of the retention pond behind his house.

  Tanner was always making me play his wife, or girlfriend role from some TV show. Mostly, I just went along with it. We’d been playing together since that first day we met on the playground. On the bus ride home, we figured out he lived in the subdivision behind me. I thought it helped that I liked to include Trevor. Trevor was great to play with because he filled many big character roles: Chewbacca from Star Wars, Hagrid from Harry Potter, and various animals that Tanner made up. At that moment, he was slinking down the embankment portraying a crocodile.

  “I don’t want to be Terri! I want to hunt crocs too. Crikey!” I laughed while Tanner slipped as
the kayak slid on the slick bank.

  “Too bad. Only one girl travels with Steve Irwin and that is Terri.”

  “You’re getting too close to the water. Remember when the police came out and pulled that alligator out of the pond last year? What if it had babies?”

  “Hanna, I mean Terri, don’t you know crocs are way meaner than gators?”

  “No Steve,” I drew out the name in exaggeration, “I don’t know how much meaner crocs are than gators. But if Trevor gets caught in the pond by the homeowner’s association again we are going to all be in trouble.”

  Trevor was elbow deep in sludge. Before he could take a swim, Tanner and I each grabbed one of his legs as he writhed and rolled imitating the footage he’d seen on Crocodile Hunter. We were no match for one boy who equaled our weight.

  “Trev, come on please,” Tanner begged.

  Trevor hissed like a croc and flipped. Tanner and I rolled into stale black water on the clay pond’s edge.

  As we stood knee deep in the guck, Tanner climbed out and held his arm out to me. “Terri, my one true love, I think we just caught the nastiest croc ever.”

  Chapter 2

  Hanna

  I was zoning. A blue heron was outside my government class window. Not sure why, no pond, no fish but it was there. The giant bird spread its wings and took flight, a sign.

  “Hanna?” I looked up at the teacher.

  “Yes.”

  “I have a note that your presence is requested in the principal’s office.”

  When the bell rang, I was still being hard pressed for answers. A prescription bottle for a pain killer that was written for my mother had been confiscated from another student. The snitch said lots of pills were floating around at parties. I knew they were all leftover medications from my mother’s cancer treatment.

  I’d reluctantly enabled Tanner to sell the pills, mostly by being complacent. Pain relievers, anti-anxiety – he kept those, the others he researched online. If the drug listed a side effect of hallucinations or had a warning not to operate a moving vehicle, it was deemed worthy of popping. I even sat back as he refilled prescriptions.

  I could still hear Tanner’s words. “Don’t worry Hanna, they would never suspect me. We can sell the pills. You need the money.”

  Of course, he was right. No one would expect Tanner, one of the prospects for valedictorian, the guy getting a full-ride scholarship to the only school he bothered applying. The evidence led straight to his girlfriend, the depressed, below average student who lost her mother earlier in the year. It was a no brainer. My last name matched the one on the prescription.

  “Hanna, you have had a rough year. I can sympathize with your circumstances but not your choices. I haven’t notified the police and I don’t plan on getting them involved. However, you leave me no choice but expulsion. I’m sorry to say this will be a stain on your permanent school records.”

  Rough year, I thought. My mom was dead. My dad ditched us about a year and a half ago. I’d been living alone for months, in a house that the bank was taking. I was flat broke. I had no one I considered a friend at school, except Tanner and he had essentially ruined what was left of my life. Rough didn’t quite describe what I’d gone through. What little emotions left in me went numb. Expelled…three months shy of a diploma!

  His words became garbled as he informed me, “You will not be allowed back for any extracurricular activities such as sporting events or prom. Your disappointing mistake will be permanently etched into your high school transcripts.”

  I left without offering a defense. No stopping at my locker to gather my things, just down the stairs, through the exit and eventually into the parking lot. I reached my mom’s black sedan. Her perfume still lingered on the leather seats. It was just another bill to me. The bank would take it too.

  My mom was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when I was barely a teen. She was the picture of health, just a little hoarse and fatigued. The chemo came. She lost her hair. Her beautiful face changed shape. Doctors called it moon face, some kind of swelling from the treatment. She kept a brave front.

  Dad was a road warrior, always gone for his job as a regional manager for a pharmaceutical company. During Mom’s first bout of cancer, he was supportive, even shaved his head. Mom went into remission several times, healthy then dying, healthy then dying. It was emotionally draining on our family. My father became apathetic, and as the months passed, he distanced himself from her and eventually from me.

  Life changed for the worst before my junior year. Way before Tanner and I became the “it” couple. My mom started to become weak again, in bed by seven, losing weight, strange skin pallor. She started to give up, and with no one but Tanner privy to my plans, I did everything I could think of to stop that from happening.

  She had taken me for one of our special mom daughter walks on the beach.

  Curious, I asked, “Why didn’t you and Dad ever have more kids than me?”

  She paused, weighing her words. Finally, she said, “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Why?” I asked wondering if she had been sick even back then.

  “I don’t know. Once we holed up in the house for a week because of a hurricane. The whole area was boarded up and we were told to evacuate but your father and I were young we decided to wait it out. Seven days with no electricity and not much to do but talk and play board games. We didn’t make love once.”

  I was lagging, contemplating her explanation when she broached a painful to me subject. “Hanna, are you sexually active?”

  Honesty would have disappointed her, so I didn’t offer it. “No, we’re waiting.” She wouldn’t have wanted to know her daughter lost her virginity on the beach tipsy on pilfered booze at fifteen.

  She smiled. “Keep waiting, Hanna. You only get one first. My first, I thought I loved him but he wasn’t right.”

  “Because he wasn’t Dad?” I asked. No daughter wanted to think about her mom having sex with anyone but her dad. I didn’t even want to know about Dad.

  She didn’t answer. For some reason, it popped into my head that it really was Dad. That he wasn’t right. She sighed. “You don’t know what I mean, do you?” She stroked my hair as we continued walking.

  I remember the wind caused the sand on the beach to whip and sting our legs as we walked. I remember thinking, I know what you mean. I should have said it.

  I pulled into my driveway and noticed his car. He had carpooled with some group to the capitol. He wouldn’t be home for hours.

  With my key in the deadbolt, I watched my old Akita mix, Gator, barking at me through the side window of the entry. Inside he sniffed me up and down sizing me up. After a few scratches behind his head and his rump, Gator determined I passed inspection. He went over to the backdoor for me to let him out to pee and then progress on that hole he was digging to China.

  Opening the living room closet, I walked to the back, the storage area under the stairs where the Christmas decorations I would never use again waited. I grabbed the hidden backpacks. Dumping their contents on the closet floor, I counted all the bottles. They were all accounted for, but some were almost empty. I couldn’t guarantee that Tanner didn’t have a stash of meds stored in plastic baggies somewhere. Still I gathered what I had and placed them in a harmless looking department store bag.

  I had missed National Take Back Day in September. On that date, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) coordinated a collaborative effort with state and local law enforcement agencies focusing on removing potentially dangerous controlled substances from the nation's medicine cabinets. I could have surrendered the unwanted, expired, and unused pharmaceutical controlled substances and other medications to law enforcement officers for destruction then. Tanner convinced me not to relinquish them.

  I knew Tanner was taking as well as dealing. It sickened me and I felt like it was my fault. I should have protested when he proposed selling Mom’s remaining medications. He had been so persuasive, telling me it may as well be u
sed to get me some cash. His point that most of the kids who would buy would get them from somewhere, why not from him, was accurate. I’d seen my share of pill popping at parties. Tanner started way before my mom died. Then the pharms were harder to come by.

  The signs were evident when he used. He would be irritable, evasive, so defensive he’d tell me I was paranoid or overreacting if I questioned him. I knew the old Tanner would have never done the things he did to our relationship, our lives, and me if he had been clean.

  Making the decision I should have made months prior, I called the police department to ask if they were taking controlled substances on other days throughout the year. The officer had been kind, telling me of course they would. It was imperative that they not be flushed down the toilet or the drain, burned or trashed contaminating the environment by getting in drinking or ground water. I planned on dropping them off at the police headquarters.

  I listened to my voice mails. Against my better judgment, I played the one from my dad. The principal had called. He was on the warpath. I deafened my ear but still caught mention of military school. Then I laughed. Who sends a daughter they had written off to military school when she is three months shy of graduation? The strangest part of the conversation was the end.

  My father asked, “Are you okay?”

  After the funeral, after I had the breakdown at the wake and told my dad I hated him and wished he had been the one to die, my father asked me the same thing. I hadn’t answered his question that day either.

  I tried to remember the insanity of that moment. I had been through so much. My dad hadn’t spoken to me for almost a year before the day of the funeral. He had brought my stepmom and stepsister to his ex-wife’s funeral. Two women who looked the same, pale almost white hair, ivory skin, translucent blue eyes, they reminded me of porcelain dolls. They were strangers and enemies who battled me for the attention of my father, a person not worth the war.