Chapter 1 Jake Wright exhaled as he strapped 30 kilos inside the modified blow hole. He had been doing this job far too long; it finally caught up to him. As he looked down the snout of J-Qui, his top drug Orca, he reflected on a life dominated by drug and animal abuse. Jake removed the cocaine from J-Qui, and turned abruptly to face down the barren pier. “No more for now,” Jake mumbled to his trusted Killer Whale. Jake took another moment to gaze out into the Pacific Ocean, the newly established cash cow of the drug game. “No more for now,” Jake said again quietly. “No more for now.” Jacob James Wright was born in Fremont, Nebraska on a rainy day in the middle of April, 2010. His parents worked hard but couldn’t support a child, so from his moment of birth, the only parental figure Jake had was his adoptive father, Ray. Ray loved Jake from the moment he set eyes on him. Ray had been a military man until he retired early to settle down with his wife, Amber. The move from Austin to Omaha didn’t suit Amber. She didn’t understand why Ray chose to retire in a place that seemed so removed and cold, and so she left. She didn’t take anything; she left in the middle of the night, leaving behind a sleeping companion in Room 135 in some rundown motel in Omaha, Nebraska. Ray pretended to forget but couldn’t bring himself to forgive. He had given his everything to Amber and she vanished from his life as quickly as she had come into it. Ray found his outlet in Jake, he had eyes that looked exactly like the eyes he had spent the better part of his life loving. In Jake, Ray saw Amber, an Amber that wouldn’t hurt him. His adopted son didn’t have anyone else in the world and neither did Ray. They loved each other out of necessity, forming a bond stronger than that of most Father-Son relationships. Ray gave Jake a constant guardian and friend and Jake became an outlet for Ray’s love he thought he had lost on Amber. I met Jake in Mrs. Engstrom’s first grade class at Linden Elementary. Jake strolled into Mrs. Engstrom’s second floor room 15 minutes after the morning announcements. He slyly handed the fat blob of a teacher a note as he took his seat in the only open seat, which happened to be next to me. That bastard, I had been saving that seat for my longtime crush, Tessa Nesworth. Tessa was my type of girl, even in the first grade. She had that sexy sort of voice that made it seem like she could at any point become disinterested in you. The sort of voice that made you more interested knowing that at any point she could become interested in someone else. Well, that and the fact that she was packing half of an A-cup by the end of her Kindergarten year which was more than anyone else had to offer. I turned back from my day dream to face my enemy, the one who was standing between me and the big-breasted toddler I was sure to make mine by the end of the year. Jake and I’s eyes met. Not in a gay way, in the sense that we were sizing each other up. Noticing that we both stood at approximately 4 feet tall, we quickly moved our death stare towards a common enemy, Mrs. Engstrom. Each of us had been hoping that the other would be puny in comparison, but because this failed to be the case, we didn’t press the issue anymore for the day. The next day, Jake didn’t come to class. The day after that, Jake still hadn’t come back. This in turn reinstated my hopes for Tessa to be moved from her seat in the back closer to mine. I became so enthralled with my sexually charged fantasies about Tessa as my dirty lemonade stand receptionist, that I soon stopped counting the days that Jake had been gone. It wasn’t until I attended my first grade graduation that I even remembered Jake Wright. At 11 o’clock on May 25th, I along with 36 other children were given a diploma in the musty basement of our three story school. Mrs. Engstrom read our names individually with as much vigor as her fat ass could muster, in order to get a response from the handful of parents who had taken the day off of work to watch their kid celebrate a very forgettable milestone. We were called to the front of the room one by one to receive a piece of paper, acknowledging that we could indeed share with others and spell our names correctly. “Eric Follarin!” I heard the old hag yell with the same amount of gusto I assume she used when she realized double fudge brownies were on sale. I quickly rose from my seat trying to avoid the flash I anticipated would come from my mother’s Canon Rebel. She was always documenting every step in my life, no matter how small. As I rushed forward, shading my eyes from the aftermarket flash that stuck out of the camera. I then noticed a boy had snuck into the open seat beside me that was reserved for Jacob Freeman, who was likely playing hookey. I nearly ran to the podium to collect my “award”. I wanted to get back to see who had taken the spot that I had been saving for Lindsay Kuntis, my rebound after Tessa had continually refused my requests to spoon with me during nap time. After somehow managing to shake the sausage fingers of Mrs. Engstrom, I turned to give the death stare to whoever had taken Lindsay’s seat. My gaze was met with the cold stare of Jake Wright.
