Hailey's War Read Online Free Page B

shirts and dark-blue jeans for T-shirts and faded, ripped Levi’s and casually unlaced basketball shoes. Though I could always spot him in the halls because of his height, sometimes I barely recognized the skinny country cousin I’d first met.
    In our second year of high school, CJ got his driver’s license, and not long after he bought a twenty-year-old silver BMW that he’d seen advertised “for parts” and rebuilt it from the ground up. He also won a starting spot on the baseball team, where he vexed opposing batters with the deep sinker and nasty screwball that Porter had taught him.
    I don’t know if my cousin ever had the kind of life-changing moment that I did in the bookstore, but he told me a story about the time when, as far as he could tell, school turned around for him. It was in the middle of that sophomore year. CJ was getting books from his locker when a pretty black girl, a new transfer from Oxnard, tookin his height—he was six-three then, on his way to six-five—and said teasingly, “Do you hang off the end of your bed?”
    CJ had winked at her and said, “Only recreationally,” and not only had she laughed, the kids around her had, too.
    By the end of that week, CJ and the girl from Oxnard were going out, and suddenly the entire female population of our school discovered, seemingly all at once, the aphrodisiac qualities of a Southern accent. CJ, of course, was happy to help them enjoy that discovery.
    By our junior year I saw very little of him on weekends, not just because he was out with girlfriends—though he often was—but because once he got his car running, he could go to Los Angeles without waiting to ride along with friends. CJ wasn’t antisocial, but his interest in L.A. wasn’t the same as that of his friends. They went to surf and drink around campfires on the beach. CJ went to sweet-talk his way into L.A.’s music venues, the eighteen-and-over or twenty-one-only clubs where the new hip-hop acts debuted. All the money he earned repairing cars for his father went either to gas money or to two-drink minimums. He kept his grades up just high enough to stay on the baseball team, but that was all.
    Teachers sighed and shook their heads about CJ Mooney, but there was no animus in it. The guidance counselor, she of the mobile eyebrows, saw that he’d inherited the Mooney gift with cars, put him on the graduation track, and loaded his schedule with shop classes.
    They didn’t see what he was. Back then, none of us did.
    Sure, it was obvious that he loved music. But in high school, what kid doesn’t? Even the fact that he was a white boy in love with black music didn’t raise any eyebrows; that was a story older than Elvis Presley.
    Then, after our junior year, he dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles to try to find work in the music business.
    Even in poor and rural areas, that doesn’t happen so much anymore. It caused a stir. At school, the teachers were shocked, the baseball coach cursed the loss of his best pitching arm, and the girls wentinto mourning. But his parents took it hardest. Several Mooneys of their generation had dropped out, but they’d made damn sure none of CJ’s had. They were convinced he was on the road to ruin: just seventeen, talented but with no marketable skills, in a town that ate gifted youth for breakfast and sent them home broke and failed. Both Porter and Angeline called me, asking me to talk to him. I said I couldn’t; it was his life. Secretly I believed what everyone else did—that in a year or two CJ would get disillusioned and come home—but I couldn’t be disloyal enough to say it aloud.
    After that, CJ’s parents regularly asked me for news about their son. It wasn’t that he didn’t call them, but they thought I was getting the true, uncensored news of his life in L.A. “Really, how’s he doing down there? Is he