Prologue - Part 2
{Fond Memories}
I was sentenced to a maximum of four years in juvie because of that night.
Four long years in the High Desert Juvenile Detention and Assessment Center. And it was all because of that no good son of a bitch Brian O'Conner.
He had been there as well, but we were on separate blocks and only got to see each other out in the recreation yard a handful of times. Each of these meetings ended with the two of us coming to blows and spending days on end in the hole; the worst part of what they called "rehabilitation". I hated it; the loneliness and being left with only my thoughts for company. It was enough to drive anybody over the edge.
I was hardly any different from the rest of them when it came to that, but I stuck to my guns and walked the straight and narrow the best I could.
Biding my time until I would see Brian out in the open world again…
That punk had only gotten sentenced to two years thanks to the plea deal that he had made with Voorhees and the feds. It wasn't too much longer though that I myself got out. By the end of two and a half years in that hellhole, I had been let out on good behavior. I was seventeen going on eighteen by the time I was able to breath fresh air again, and my mother decided that it would be best for the two of us to move away from Barstow.
'Thank god!' I thought to myself when she told me this, not giving a damn about where in the world we would end up.
Any place was better than this endless, sprawling desert.
It wouldn't be until a month later that this plan of her's would come to fruition, and within a few weeks we were driving down I-40 with my middle finger flying through the open passenger window of her '92 Corolla.
Our destination; Echo Park, Los Angeles.
It wouldn't be my first time in Echo Park. My mom originally lived there with her parents and my two uncles until she met my father in '79. The two eloped and ended up in Barstow, where my father abandoned the two of us after he knocked up her and another white puta up in Bakersfield. Other than that, I didn't know too much about my father, but that didn't matter. The only people that mattered to me at the time were my mother, my uncles, and my abuela.
Speaking of my abuela, that was who we were going to be staying with until my mother could get back on her feet. It had been about three years since the last time I had been there, and while it was rather small and cramped, it was right down the street from perhaps the most awesome people I had ever met in my life; the Torettos'. I had spent many prior visits hanging around the Toretto house with the other neighborhood children, and we loved nothing more than watching the oldest boy, Dominic, work on his race cars.
Dominic didn't mind letting us watch him work on his cars either, and I'd have to say it is because of him and his friends that I fell in love with cars in the first place, long before I ever met that narc Brian and his friend Roman Pearce.
To be perfectly honest, I viewed Dominic as the brother that I never had, and I believe that he looked at me in the same light.
"Remember, J.P…" He would always say as I watched him work on his favorite 93' RX-7 FD. "Blood doesn't always run thicker than water. You may never know what a person is thinking… their reasoning behind what they do… but you will always have a place here in mi familia. Remember that."
I did remember.
I held those words as close to my heart as I possibly could.
And as soon as my mother and I had unloaded the car upon us arriving at my abuela's house, I would make a point of going to see him.
