Ricochet (TGC book 2) (DISCONTINUED)

Chapter 3

Ricochet will be continued as a separate second book.

~!@#$%^&*()_+

In all my seventeen years of life, I only celebrated my birthday once last year. It was possible that the first couple of birthdays were also acknowledged, but there was no way I’d remember them. All the other years, it passed without notice, and I was the only one who ever remembered it.

For my sixteenth birthday, Sandy and Tom, my foster parents at the time, took me and their two sons Keegan and Kyle out to my place of choice. Though they were usually tight with money, they gave me permission to pick whatever I wanted to do and told me not to worry about it. I never liked over-the-top things, so I asked if it was okay that we just take a hike, the five of us together, and just have a picnic someplace remote. Until now, it had been the best day of my life.

This year, for my seventeenth birthday, everything was different. It wasn’t just my birthday we were celebrating this time; Leo was also born on the exact same day. I was all for going to see a movie, but he thought it was a big deal, that it was the first of many years that we would wish each other happy birthday, and he insisted on doing something special.

We got help, of course, to figure out something that worked for both of us. It was Nettie that came up with the idea to have a day that revolved around the number seventeen, which would be our age that day. Then she went on to expand it into a really cool theme; the total number of people would be seventeen and we had decided on everyone going on just seventeen rides at the amusement park; each person picks one for everyone to go onto.

Everyone would go back to my and Katherine’s place for the rest of the day. Everything there was sorted out in groups of seventeen; the number of different appetizers, how many colors there were on the ribbons used as decoration, and the number of presents Leo and I would get combined (which meant one of us would get one present more than the other, but that was about 8 presents more than I ever got in my life, so I didn’t care).

To say I was excited was an understatement. Out of the other fifteen people, the ones I knew were my closest friends Carter and Nettie, Katherine and Nick, as well as some from the Guard that I had met before; Brandon, his older sister Emily, Daisy, Reese and Ryan. The other six, I met on the spot.

Kat had brought two of her friends to introduce me to, Trina and Gail. There was also a guy who was a teacher at the Erin Jean High School, where gifted people went, called Pasha. Two other men looking to be Nick’s age introduced themselves as Dennis and Hyatt. The last person was a girl younger than me who seemed to be friends with Ryan and Reese; her name was Jessa. I figured she must have been one of the guys’ girlfriend or something.

“Which ride are you going on first?” Nettie addressed me the second we walked through the park’s gates.

I had to admit, on top of being excited, I was pretty nervous about this. I’d never been to an amusement park before, and I was having first time jitters. Luckily, I had a pretense not to let that nervousness show because there were six strangers coming along with us.

“Not sure,” I replied.

In all honesty, I didn’t even know the names of the rides. I was basically just going with whatever they looked like at first glance; snake ride, pirate ship, obvious haunted house, mirrors whatever, etc. There was one that looked like a T, only the horizontal part kept moving up and down. That one should have scared me the most, but I found myself imagining how exhilarating it must feel like to scream during a drop like that. I could almost imagine myself bungee jumping, which was something I’d always wanted to do.

I showed it to the others. “What about this one?”

That raised a few eyebrows. Carter spoke up. “It’s your first time at a place like this, and you go straight for one of the most feared rides?”