Concrete Underground, Moxie Mezcal [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

color ad for Abrasax, again with a photograph of their CEO Dylan Maxwell. With his shaggy, jet-black hair, slim build, and loose, brazen way of carrying himself, people tended to think of him as more rock star than tech executive. I stared at the photograph, meditating on the way he seemed to gaze out from the page with those intense blue eyes. My brain flashed to an image of that same steely gaze projected larger than life on a movie screen. I felt a chill course through my body and make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, then imagined for a second that I could hear the sound of an old, clanky film projector.

4. Strangers on a Bathroom Floor

There were a good many things I'd rather do on a Friday night than try to gain entry to the St. Augustine, an exclusive west-side hotel that catered to two types of clients - the rich and the powerful. And yet there I was, trying to weasel my way past some overgrown Aryan doorman blocking me from the grand ballroom.

"No, you don't understand. I'm a journalist, man. I have credentials."

I flashed him the first thing I found in my jacket pocket, which happened to be my press pass from a tech trade show two months past. It didn't seem to help my case. It probably also did not help that I showed up to a wedding in a five-star hotel wearing jeans and chanclas. Or that I reeked of whiskey. In my defense, however, I had to rush straight from work to make it here, so there was no way I could have stopped both at home to change and at the bar to get suitably blitzed. Something had to give.

I persisted in arguing with the doorman until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a very short, very angry young Mexican woman in a wedding dress charging towards us from across the ballroom.

"Now you've done it, Adolf. Get ready to see what happens when you infringe upon the rights of the Fourth Estate."

The young woman reached past the doorman and grabbed me by the arm.

"It's okay," she said. "He's my brother."

Jenny and I were twins, and we were always close growing up despite our very different personalities. Besides a birthday and a couple dead parents, there wasn't much else we shared in common. She was an over-achiever and a bit of a kiss-ass, always trying to make mom and dad proud, which she seemed to pull off with ease. She was the girl in high school who played every sport, joined every club, ran the student council, and somehow still managed to pull A's without breaking a sweat. Intense doesn't even begin to describe her. I could never compete with that, so instead I decided to build an identity for myself as the rebel. Unfortunately, I somehow equated rebelling with turning into a giant asshole.

We grew up in a middle-class suburban family. Our father was a teacher and our mother an architect. They were the kind of couple that kept a date night to go dancing every Friday for the 31 years they were married. They died when Jenny and I were twenty-two. We sold the house where we grew up and split the cash; neither of us wanted to set foot in it again.

Jenny used the money to pay for her Master's. After school she went to work for James McPherson, one of the most powerful and richest men in the city. Aside from owning the St. Augustine, McPherson had interests in real estate, land development, venture capital, and other things I really should've known more about. The McPherson family was old money here going back to when this valley was nothing but orchards. If I said that at one time or another the McPherson family had owned every single square foot of land in our city, I'd probably be exaggerating - but not much.

Jenny ran the McPhersons' charitable foundation, which basically meant that not only did they have so much money that they had to start giving it away, but they even had to hire someone else just to get rid of it for them.

Jenny grabbed two glasses of scotch from the bartender and handed one to me.

"From the look of you - not to mention the smell - I know I really shouldn't be giving you this, but.." she trailed off and shrugged.

"Here's to your big day," I said as I clinked my glass to hers.

"So big that you showed up an hour late and missed the ceremony completely," she added, flashing me an expression of disapproval that made her look like our mother. I opened my mouth to protest, but mercifully she pressed her finger to my lips to silence me. "I'm just happy you made it."

"I am, too," I replied.

We managed to sneak away from the reception through the hotel kitchen and out a service door that opened onto a loading dock at the back of the hotel. We sat on the dock and caught up over scotch and cigarettes.

"I haven't smoked in ages," Jenny said after exhaling a series of perfect rings. "If Brad saw me, he'd flip."

"What are you going to do when he smells it on you?"

"Blame it on you, of course."

I chuckled and stubbed out my cigarette butt. "Do you remember when we were in high school and we used to sneak out onto the roof over the garage to smoke?"

Jenny smiled. "Yeah, and I remember the time junior year when I came out to find you frying, babbling about spy satellites, government radio signals, and Philip K. Dick."

"Yeah, and you blackmailed me for fifty bucks to keep from telling mom and dad," I said with a grimace.

"Like they couldn't figure it out anyways when you spent the next morning bug-eyed and twitchy during Sunday brunch with grandma." Jenny laughed so hard she snorted.

"We used to be so close," I said, letting a hint of genuine emotion escape my lips for the first time in as long as I could remember. "What happened?"

"I guess we grew up," Jenny shrugged.

I scoffed. "Speak for yourself."

The service door swung open and a large, square-jawed man stuck his head out onto the dock. "Jenny, I've been looking for you for half an hour."

"Hi, Brad," I said while chewing on the rocks from my scotch. "Nice party."

He ignored me while Jenny stood up and walked over to him. "Why do you smell like smoke?" he asked.

"Sorry, honey. D was smoking, and the wind kept blowing it right into my face."

"Let's get back inside," he replied coolly. "Our guests are waiting for us." He held the door open as Jenny stepped inside.

"Hey Brad, I was meaning to ask you," I called out as they left, "did you get a chance to read my article? I sent you a copy at your office."

The door slammed shut.

Jenny met Brad through her work. Brad McPherson was James McPherson's nephew and protégé. He managed a number of McPherson's business holdings, including the venerable St. Augustine. Presumably that got him a discount for the reception. He also engineered a deal with the Mayor's office for millions in city redevelopment money to help revitalize parts of downtown. Coincidentally, Brad's uncle owned just over half of the land in the area slated for redevelopment.

It was hard to explain why I hated Brad so much. He was successful, charming as all hell, and from all accounts very committed to my sister. Granted, he had that moral blind spot that the rich and successful develop out of necessity, but he wasn't at heart a bad person. Sure, I had always pictured Jenny ending up with a smarter man, someone who could match her intellectually, who was a little more like our dad - but on the other hand, I could see that Brad had the kind of all-American good looks and charisma that middle-class brown girls go crazy for. To her, he represented the last step of integration and acceptance, like her ticket into honorary WASP-dom.

So maybe it wasn't that hard to explain why I hated him after all.

I made my way back through the reception, trying to count the faces I recognized out of Jenny's guests. The sad thing was that she had almost no family there, so I knew more people from photos or TV than from real life. There was the Mayor, two sitting congressmen, one senator, a handful of local politicians, the publisher of the Morning-Star, a smattering of billionaire venture capitalists, the CEOs of the city's dozen or so largest tech companies, and me.

One of these things is not like the others.

All of the city's best and brightest were here with one glaring exception - Dylan Maxwell.

I decided to find my assigned table, figuring it was a good place to kill time while I waited to see if Maxwell showed. When I got there, I realized Jenny had sat me next to my old high school friend Brian Lopez. She probably thought she was doing me a favor by giving me someone to talk to.

"Well if it isn't old Double-Dip himself," I said as I walked up to the table, slapping Brian on the back. "Good to see you, Bri-Bri."

Brian stood up, trying to force his grimacing lips into a smile. "D, good to see you."

He extended a pudgy hand to me. He had always been what they politely referred to as "husky" when we were kids, and time and age had not improved things. He shook my hand, gripping it tightly, and then introduced me to the other three people at our table - two of his co-workers from City Hall and his fiancée, Sandra.

"Nice to meet you," I said to Sandra, ignoring the other two. She was a few years older than him and it showed. Her facial features were harsh and uneven, but she compensated for it with an amazing body that she was showing off in a tight tan cocktail dress so low cut it threatened to spill out her ample cleavage.

"Very nice, congratulations," I said as lewdly as possible to Brian. He couldn't help but smile smugly; he was the nerd from high school whose newfound power and influence had nabbed him the kind of girl that used to laugh in his face.

"No really, she's hot. I definitely like what's going on up here," I continued, waving my hand in front of her chest. "Brian has always been a breast man."

"D, please..." Brian stammered.

I opened my mouth to say something else, but got distracted when I noticed a woman walking through the reception hall in a multi-colored checkered ball gown and a black veil. That was weird. I considered asking the others at the table if they had seen her too, but then realized that their backs were to her.

I continued, "No seriously, you should have seen this guy in high school. Sometimes I think the only reason you used to hang out with me was to come over to my house and stare at my sister's tits." Brian's face turned beet red. "It used to creep her