Elephant Shoe

If his sixteen years' experience has taught Mikey Alston only one thing, it's this:Life is too damn cruel to face alone...The ice took our car off the road.The tree wrecked it.Tate and I didn't make it out unscathed.My parents didn't make it out alive...I was eleven, and that's the day my whole world was ripped away from me.My brother, David, was twenty-one. All the family I had left, I needed him. He didn't need me.David sent me away. Packed me off far across the country from my home town in Devon - from Tate and everything I'd ever known, to live with grandparents I'd never known. Six years is a long time. But now I'm back.(Not through choice. Not mine, anyway).And Tate's still here.Only... he's not the boy I left behind.He won't speak to me. Won't speak to anyone.The one upshot of my return to a life I no longer fit and he's letting me down spectacularly.Well, Tate, here's the thing:I'm not giving up on you. I'm not everybody else. You can't shut me out. You need me - we need each other. And we will be friends again. Best friends.I'm decided.It's decided.