Carefree || JJ Maybank

Chapter Eighty-Three

Our mother left when I was three. For the whole time growing up... it was just me, my sister, and my pops. In some ways, he was the best father you could imagine. Taught us how to work and what to do after work. More of a friend than a father. He wasn't overprotective at all. Like any family, we had our moments. One day, he tried selling mine and Everleigh's beloved Twinkie. Then we told him he was the worst dad ever. That was the last time we saw him. It's one thing to lose a father. It's another thing to never get to say goodbye.
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"So this is what we're doing, huh?" JJ asks Sarah. The rest of the group had found a spot to sit but JJ couldn't calm himself enough. "We're just sailing out. We're just gonna forget about John B?" He paused for a second and when he got no response, he started to talk again. "We should've never left him. We're turning right back around."

"No! We're not all gonna get caught. What type of plan is that?" Cleo yells at him, making Everleigh's head shoot up. Cleo did spend the entire six weeks on the island with them, helping them survive. She also helped them off the boat. But Everleigh still thought she was a little too new around the group to be yelling at JJ like she was.

"It's a plan to stick together, Cleo." He defends himself. "I lost her once already and now we've lost John B. This is why we stick together."

"Then we are dead together." Cleo finishes her argument, walking away from JJ.

Kiara jumps in when it finally gets quiet. "She's right. We had to leave or we'd all be ziptied in the back of a pickup." She pauses and looks around. "We did the right thing."

It's quiet for a second until everyone is startled by a phone ringing. With how far out on the water they were, no one expected signal. JJ turns and looks at Kiara, "Who's that?"

Kiara furrowed her brows and looked back at him. "It's Portis."

"Portis? That's John B. That's definitely John B." He says confidently, rushing over to Kiara and taking the phone from her hands, scrambling to answer it. "Yo, yo. Dude, is this you?"

"Speaker... speaker." Kiara tells him, and he scrambles again to turn it on.

"Do you need us to turn around?" JJ asks, looking at Sarah as the whole group listened.

Everleigh finally heard John B's voice and a sigh of relief leaves her chest. The grip on her wrist was finally removed as she moved closer to hear a static voice. "No, don't worry about me. Look, it's way too hot here. You guys gotta get out of here."

"Let me talk to him." Sarah tells JJ, taking the phone from his hands. "Are you okay?"

"Yes. I'm fine. Everything's good. Listen." John B's voice began to break up more and more the longer they spoke.

"He's fine. Thank God. What happened?" She asks him, but his response was too broken up to hear what he was saying. "Wait, what'd you say? John B."
Then the line cuts. "Guys, I don't know what he said but he was talking about him going somewhere."

Everyone tried to think of where they could meet him so that he wouldn't get caught.

"No. No, no, no." Everleigh says, making the whole group look at her with shared confusion. "He wasn't talking about where he was going, no. He was telling us where to go."

"Okay, look, that's great, Ev. But with no context, it's kind of hard to go where he wants." Pope replies with a smartass tone.