Free Beautiful Disaster by Kylie Adams Page B

Vanity’s worthless dad.
    Max noticed that Pippa had positioned her chair slightly away from the group. She just sat there with a vacant expression on her face, not interacting with the others unless spoken to. Of course, it was a miracle that she had even shown up at all. Max counted his blessings for that, though her behavior continued to mystify him.
    Before spring break, she had been generally unavailable, but still the same saucy girl he had fallen three-quarters in love with. Now she was nothing more than an emotionally empty vessel growing increasingly distant from her friends.
    But the real puzzle was the disappearance of Christina. Without explanation, she had just vanished. Cellphone calls, texts, and emails went unanswered. When Max called her mother, the political barracuda had been vague on the girl’s whereabouts, only offering that she was visiting family out of state and would be unreachable for the next few weeks.
    Shit! Had a time machine taken her back to the frontier era? Who could be “unreachable” in the year 2006? None of it made any sense. Her absence was a true disappointment, too. He really wanted Jap here to support him tonight.
    “Do your thing, man. Just go out there and do your thing,” Tyrese said.
    Max gave him a cool nod. He sucked in a deep breath, then glanced around to see Spasm staring daggers at him and Vicky destroying a platter of chicken tenders, fish fingers, and mozzarella sticks.
    Lucien was already on the stage, halfway into Max’s introduction. “So I’ve been working with this young comic, and he’s not the worst punk I’ve ever dealt with. I spent a few days giving him pointers and never once felt like carving him up with a meat cleaver.”
    A low rumble of laughter erupted from the crowd.
    “And from an old-timer to a young buck, that’s the closest thing to love you’ll find in this business,” Lucien went on. “Keep in mind—tonight is this guy’s first time out. He’s a stand-up virgin. So don’t scare off the little prick. Put your hands together for Max B !”
    There was a moment—coinciding with the welcoming applause from the crowd—when Max thought about racing out of the building, jumping into his car, and never coming back. But instead he stepped into the spotlight, determined to see this through, not only to make Lucien proud, but to prove something to himself, too.
    If nothing else, he knew that he looked good in his AG jeans and Morphine Generation hoodie. The look was hot without trying too hard. The idea to drop the radioactive last name for the simple initial B had been his. Winning over a crowd was hard enough without frontloading a performance with the surname Biaggi and all the preconceived notions that came along with it.
    He approached the mic, greeted the audience, and launched into his first routine about drunken late-night food binges. It was bombing. But Max kept his cool. Stage survival rule number one: When a joke doesn’t work, never take it out on the crowd.
    “Okay, that sucked. I’m a big freaking loser !”
    He got some mild laughs this time. Self-abuse always pulled them to your side.
    “You know, I haven’t gotten laid in a few months. I used to get sex all the time. My parents never trusted me to be at home alone with a girl, but once my grandmother moved in with us, everything was cool, because she would chaperone. There was one hard-and-fast rule—no private time in my bedroom with a girl. We had to stay in the living room with Grandma. This worked out real good on account of the fact that this woman was so out of it. I mean, she never knew what the hell was going on! I got my first blow job and lost my virginity with Grandma in the same room. And all she ever told my parents was, ‘Max is a good boy.’ ” He delivered the last line in the voice of an old woman. “Damn right I was good! Kim Foster came home from school with me every day for a month!”
    Serious chuckles erupted.
    Max felt the energy. They