RUN
HOLLY HOOD
Booktrope Editions
Seattle, WA 2015
COPYRIGHT 2015 HOLLY HOOD
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Cover Design by Yosbe Design
Previously self-published as Run, 2015
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
PRINT ISBN 978-1-5137-0489-0
EPUB ISBN 978-1-5137-0539-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015918342
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
ALSO BY HOLLY HOOD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DEDICATION
BIRTH
JUNE 7TH
JUNE 8TH
JUNE 16TH
JUNE 17TH
JUNE 18TH
JUNE 20TH
JUNE 21ST
JUNE 23RD
JUNE 25TH
JUNE 27TH
JUNE 28TH
JULY 2ND
JULY 4TH
JULY 5TH
JULY 7TH
JULY 8TH
JULY 9TH
JULY 10TH
JULY 12TH
JULY 15TH
JULY 19TH
JULY 21ST
JULY 22ND
JULY 23RD
JULY 25TH
JULY 26TH
JULY 27TH
JULY 28TH
ONE YEAR LATER
AUTHOR’S NOTE
MORE GREAT READS FROM BOOKTROPE
ALSO BY HOLLY HOOD
Ink (Ink Series Volume 1-5)
Wicked Little Sins (Sin Series)
Get To me (8th Sin Series)
Visit Holly Hood’s website at simplyhollyhood.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I think we all have that one person in our lives that means so much, who is selfless, who thinks of everyone else before themselves. Cheers to all the Masons in the world.
Thank you to everyone who enjoys my books. I hope you enjoy this one as well. Last, but certainly not least, thank you to my family for putting up with my writing obsession. I know I do it a lot.
For my sister
You have always been beautifully flawed.
I wish one day you see your inner beauty!
One day I hope your struggles aren’t so much!
But most of all, I love you, even on the days I don’t like you very much!
BIRTH
YOU’D THINK MY PARENTS would be proud the day I was born—they weren’t. My mother didn’t get the cute little baby shower where ladies gather for gift giving in joyous anticipation of the new arrival. My father wasn’t smoking “It’s a Girl” cigar with his friends to celebrate my arrival. That wasn’t my life.
I was born in the county jail—a whole six pounds of bouncing baby girl with a head full of chestnut brown hair. My mom, Joy-Ann, was just seventeen when I came into her life.
She was the opposite of her name in every way.
When you’re born behind bars it’s a sad introduction to the world. Nobody cares about you. You’re just another pathetic statistic.
My mother had been serving time for shoplifting. Instead of doing meaningful things with her life, she got knocked up by my father and did all of his dirty work, including helping him sell drugs to the local teens.
Leon Talbert Halstead III--he’s my father. Only minutes after my birth he was on top of a roof trying to escape the police.
I’ve read the newspaper article many times. It’s as if I were right there. A chopper circled overhead while the entire town was glued to their television sets as my father made the worst mistake of his life.
He was twenty and not very smart. He wasn’t skilled in any type of legitimate work, so he lived a life of crime and abusing drugs; and, of course, getting my teenage mother pregnant.
The newspaper said my father shouted he was never going back to jail. The police told him that he had a baby girl and needed to change his ways. I imagine the helicopter whipping his hair as he raised both of his middle fingers to the cops and shouted, “I never wanted that baby anyway—not ever!” This is the part that has seared my mind forever. My father, Leon Talbot Halstead III, stood there staring down at the officials, then proceeded to take a flying leap off the back of the building…Yeah, just like you’ve seen happen so many times in the movies. Maybe it served him right to fall and break almost every bone in his body and get nearly mauled to death by the police dogs below.
My father was famous for being a loser--a loser who wanted nothing to do with me since the day I was born.
JUNE 7
TH
“YOU CAN’T TRUST ANYONE but yourself. That’s the best advice I can give you,” Aunt Wanda said, waving her hand around for effect and slicing through the air with her cigarette. “Especially men…men only want to hurt you. Be kept by no one and make your own rules. If you want to be rich, rob a bank. If you want to be successful, take it all on your own; don’t wait for it to come to you.” She took another drag from her cigarette, letting out a puff of smoke. “Live under the thumb of no man. Don’t let anybody decide what you’re going to do with your life. It will never get you anywhere, okay?” She downed the can of beer that’d been wedged between us in the front seat and took another puff of her cigarette.
She wasn’t a very smart woman, but she always offered a lot of good advice.
Her name was Wanda. And she hated her name as much as the parents who gave it to her.
She hated my mother Joy-Ann, too, so I guess you could say that’s where the trip down “Hatredville” began.
She said my mother had gotten a better name, as well as the good looks. She really thought she deserved everything she got. I couldn’t deny that it seemed Aunt Wanda got the short end of the stick a lot in her life, but sometimes that’s all you could expect when you were raised by trash.
We weren’t good people. We never wanted to be. And even if we knew how, it just wasn’t instilled in our bloodline.
We came from a long line of degenerates, from people that knew how to scrape by and hit the road when life got tough. We didn’t wait around and try to fix things. We ran. If you were different, you could last; if you weren’t, then well, the hell with you.