Under the Orange Moon

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No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the permission of the publisher.

The only exception to this is if a reviewer would like to quote short passages for reviewing purposes.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
 

Cover Photo Credit:

Jupiterimages/Couple Holding Hands Outdoors/Photos.com

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www.adriennefrances.webs.com

For Kristi, who loves my characters as much as I do
.
Thank you for reading everything I write. I would be lost without your endless brainstorming and your thoughtful words of encouragement. You are a true friend, indeed.

Dylan Mathews stood on the tiptoes of her filthy feet and peered out the kitchen window. Her little nose pressed against the sill, while her big green eyes watched the oblivious boys playing in her back yard.

She would have adored being out there with them. The parched desert air was sizzling with little comfort from the air conditioner her parents placed on high. The more she stared, the more inviting her pool seemed to be. 

Her oldest brother, Brandon, smiled and waved discreetly when he noticed her. She ducked back down and let out a small giggle as she understood that she had been caught spying again.

Brandon
would never alert the others to her secret position behind the window. He was far more mature for being only ten, and he never hid the fact that he believed her to be the best thing in the world. Brandon was her favorite.

“Dylan, stop picking that scab on your knee,” her mother, Linda, called out from her place by the sink. “It’s never going to heal, baby.”

Dylan ran her small dirty hand over the layer of rough, open wound. “Charlie said it’s going to scar and then I can always tell people I fell from my skateboard.”

“You can tell them that without the scar,” Linda reminded
her.

Deciding that it was safe to look out the window again, Dylan turned and continued to spy.

She chomped on her gum loudly and gracelessly. She tried to blow a bubble, a trick she had not mastered quite yet. Her gum flew out of her mouth and hit the window. Dylan carelessly picked up the sticky wad and placed it back in her mouth. 

Normally there were only four boys in her yard playing. She knew them all well, for they were her brothers. Usually she would be out there with them. It wasn’t that they would always embrace her, of course. They could never bring themselves to leave her behind, though. They would tease her relentlessly some days and others they would carry her around as if she was the most precious thing on the planet. It depended on their mood, she supposed. Dylan never minded, though. Any awareness of her presence, good or bad, was attention nonetheless.
             

Today all but
Brandon seemed to disregard her. She was invisible. A stranger, a fifth boy, had taken her brothers’ attention.

She wasn’t angry or jealous. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a name for the way she felt about that boy at her tender age of four. If someone were to ask her when she was older, if she would dare answer honestly, the feeling she would tell them would be
wonder
.

“Mom, who is that boy?” Dylan finally asked.

Linda set down her towel and stood just behind Dylan. “Ah, I see now,” she whispered. “That boy is Ben McKenna. He’s your age, and he just moved here.”

She watched him as he leapt in to the air and sprayed Hugh with a powerful blast from his Super Soaker. He did this all without any concern for where he landed. He could run fast, she noticed. She also noted, for her own small pride, that she was much, much faster.

Linda handed her a plate of juice boxes and cookies. “Stop spying and go share these with the boys,” she urged.

Dylan wobbled to the back door and opened it without dropping anything. She stepped out onto the deck and nervously waited for the boys to notice her.

“Cookies!” Dylan’s twin brother, Jonah, screeched.

At once, a stampede of dirty boys barreled towards her and snatched everything from the plate in her hand until it was clean. Sadly, that was the attention she had been craving all afternoon. For a brief moment, they knew she was there.  

“Who are you?” Ben McKenna asked with a mouth full of cookies.

“That’s our sister, Weed,” Hugh teased.

Fuming with humiliation, her face a deep shade of red, Dylan stomped her foot on the wood of the deck. “Stop calling me that!”

The boys began to laugh. Today would be a day of teasing, it would seem.
             

“What are you playing?” Dylan asked quietly. She shuffled her bare foot on top of the other and looked down. “Can I play, too?”

“I’m not playing with a girl,” Ben said adamantly before anyone else could respond.

Dylan looked up and stared at the boy, who had now become an intruder instead of a new playmate. “Why? I can do boy things.”

“Because I don’t like you!” Ben yelled, and threw the football at her, causing her to drop the plate in her hands.

Dylan picked up the ball and drummed her tiny fingers against the stitching. This was a dare that she would happily accept.

Her brothers remained silent, knowing exactly what her next move would be. They had trained her well in all categories of life thus far.

Dylan smiled mischievously and drew the ball back. She sent it sailing through the air like a torpedo, and grinned when it hit Ben between the eyes. Direct hit.

Ben’s eyes popped open in astonishment. He said nothing while he rubbed the new red spot between his eyebrows, and stared at the enemy he had just made.

“Yeah, Ben,”
Brandon began with a smile, “we should have warned you. She can throw a ball.”

The Mathews boys lost all interest in the altercation almost immediately, and went back to tackling each other. Ben stayed where he was, too stunned to move.

Dylan headed for the door and snuck one last look at Ben McKenna. The shock had disappeared from his face and, in a moment that was meant for her eyes only, he was smiling at her.

Ben McKenna’s body sank deeper into the leather chair it had rested in for more than six hours. He watched the red numbers on the large informational screen above him move and switch from hopeful to disappointing too many times to keep track. He seriously wondered if this was a divine indication that he should not be getting on to that plane.

Selfishly, he hoped his flight would be canceled. He wanted nothing more than to go back to his apartment, eat a steak, drink a beer, and get back to work. It seemed as though now, like the childhood that shadowed him, he was only weighed down by the irritations that went along with his life back home. He found himself full of aggravation, as usual.

“
Damn,” he muttered in a tone that was practically a growl.

As the phone rang from inside his pocket, he was reminded of the source of his frustration. Without looking, the caller was obvious to him. No one else would call three times in a row.

“Hello, Mother,” he answered grudgingly.

“Benjamin? Where are you?” she asked fearfully. This wasn’t a motherly fret, of course. It was simply the panic that came from the knowledge of her son’s obvious reluctance to come home. “You’re still coming, right?”

“I’m patiently waiting and surviving at the mercy of a digital screen that is hanging over my head.”

“It’s still delayed?”

“It snows here in Massachusetts, Ruth.”

“You know I hate that.”

“Sorry,
Mom
.” He sighed deeply and closed his eyes. “I’ll call you when my plane lands.”

Ben slid his phone back into his pocket and leaned his head against the uncomfortable chair. He despised the holidays, but most of all, he hated going home to his past life. He would never do this by his own motivation. Only a mother’s guilt could pull the unwilling in.

He cringed when he thought of the endless pile of work waiting for him back at school. It was almost too much for him to bear. Each time he tried to think of something else, he remembered that there was nothing but school and work in his life to think about.

Technically it was his holiday break, but he knew better than most that only the truly successful men of the world never take breaks. That was what he was raised to believe, anyhow. He never even wondered if he had been misled.

This waste of a trip was a meaningless way to appease his unhappy mother and, even more so, anger his disapproving father, a Supreme Court judge. Even now, he could hear his father’s voice rambling on in his ear about the importance of representation and the behavior of a truly driven man. The voice was a bit dominating, even if it was only imaginary.

He was, indeed, focused. His life was planned down to the very last detail, flying through his first year at Harvard Law School, facing a promising career in the legal world. He had always been expected to succeed, only because he had never failed. He worked harder than anyone in his class, even earning an internship at one of the country’s most successful law firms beginning in the spring. He would forever put his father’s influence on that achievement in the back of his mind, holding it there and dwelling on it in secret.

“Flight two-sixty to
Phoenix, Arizona, is now boarding,” a woman called through a phone that echoed out over an intercom.

Ben stood to his tingly feet and grabbed his carry-on bag. He boarded the plane at last and sat beside a window.