On the basketball court
How naive, thought Kip. How perfectly simple to think that living here was all it took to belong here, and yet how untrue in practice. Kip had only been a marginal member of this community, at best, before he'd killed his father. Now it felt like everyone was just waiting for him to leave so they could exorcize themselves of their demons and move on. If he was truly one of their own, Kip had always believed that someone would have stepped in on his behalf. He honestly felt that if just one stuck-up, self-satisfied, rich bitch type person had reported his parents, or punched his dad in the face, or called the whole family out on its bullshit perfect life, he wouldn't have had to pull the trigger that day. He wouldn't have had the gun in his hand, or the knife heading for his gut.
But Kip liked that Jackie held her opinion anyway, that at least one person believed he still had rights.
"Aaron's first Christmas," he said, without hesitation. He'd read it over several times because he wanted to see if he could guess how his mom would have looked when she saw the picture of the baby inside of it. "There was a photo." He didn't quite make eye contact with Jackie as he spoke of it, not wanting to make himself uncomfortable. He wanted to have this conversation because, with the holidays fast approaching, and Kip's own history with Christmas Day, he really just wanted to feel close to his mom as she had been.
"She doesn't get that he's dead," Kip said after a few seconds. "My dad, I mean. I tell her when I go see her, but...she doesn't even really know who I am most of the time."