#6 CAUTION BRO! PLEASE SLOWDOWN... 🚧⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️🚧

Ahanu "Nu" Kind-Heart had just returned home from visiting his best friend Squire "Ski" Reynolds in rehab. He could not believe his ears; his best friend Ski had just banned him from his life indefinitely.

Ski had been abusing steroids for approximately eleven months, and his erratic behavior eventually landed him in the Pine Coast Drug Rehabilitation Center for Adolescents.

Ski was unhappy with his somewhat scrawny physique and was too busy with school, volunteering, and track to OD on working out, so he did the next best thing in his mind and purchased a supply of oral steroids from a local middleweight boxing champion, a charismatic thirty-three-year-old named Scrape Norwood that taught boxing at the local Boys & Girls Club.

In the beginning Ski had only planned to use the performance-enhancing drugs for a short amount of time so that he could have some good headshots for his future modeling gigs, but he quickly got hooked on them and couldn't fight off the compulsion to take them. In exchange for the steroid supplements, Ski agreed to do Scrape's fifteen-year-old son Toby's geometry homework each week.

Ski saw how many beautiful older women/aunties flocked to Scrape because of his brawny build. Ski admired Scrape's charisma, ripped physique, and strong influence with women in the community, so he began to hang out with Scrape and some of his friends on the weekend, hoping that some of Scrape's influence would rub off on him and give him more admiration from girls his age. Most of Scrape's friends were in their mid-to-late twenties. At nineteen years young, Ski was the only teen in Scrape's crew.

Scrape drove a flashy red Hellcat and had "juice" in the community as well as a firm hold on the limelight; therefore, Ski wanted a metaphoric sip of each.

During their weekend excursions, Scrape and his boys continually capped on Ski for being a well-mannered school boi; Ski didn't want to feel like a mismatched sock, so he began to drink (something he had originally been dead set against because his parents had been hit head-on and killed by a drunk driver and he despised the taste of alcohol). Eventually Ski also began to skip track practice & to abandon his volunteer work in favor of participating in special, roid-fueled marathon workouts with Scrape and his friends.

Ski had even begun to contemplate dealing roids to his peer group to prove his allegiance to Scrape & his crew, but something that his pastor grandfather, Paw Paw Reynolds, once said kept flashing in his mind like a caution-inducing yellow traffic light.

Paw Paw said:

We are only here on earth for a limited time, son. Make sure you make the right impact....

Paw Paw's words lingered in Ski's spirit like the robust aftertaste of a chemically sweetened diet soda on the taste palette.

One recent day out of the blue, to Ski's surprise, Scrape told Ski that Ahanu gave him "goody-goody-narc vibes" and to cut him off because he was a potential liability, so Ski quickly began to distance himself from his former best friend, Ahanu.

And like a bad omen, Ski's growing steroid habit brought nothing but trouble to his doorstep. A certain brand of trouble that even caused him to get into a physical scuffle with his childhood hero and beloved grandfather, Paw Paw Reynolds, on the front porch one day.

The week prior, Ski's grandfather caught him drinking from a bottle of wine while popping several pills from an unmarked prescription bottle. Paw Paw tried to grab the bottle from Ski's hand and to pray for him, and that is when the infamous scuffle ensued.

By way of the scuffle, Paw Paw Reynolds acquired a scratched cornea that nearly resulted in him having permanent blindness in his right eye. It was at that point that Ski & his grandfather realized that it was time for Ski to enter rehab.

Paw Paw Reynolds knew that he was seen as out of touch in his grandson's eyes as a pastor in his late sixties; therefore, he enlisted the help of Ski's best friend, Ahanu, to try to encourage Ski to make a sharp U-turn back in the right direction.

Unfortunately, Nu's visit had not gone well. In fact, it had abruptly ended with Ski throwing a glass vase against his hospital room door, the vase narrowly missing Ahanu's right shoulder in the process.

Of all things, Ski's erratic tantrum came about because a volunteer candy stripper from the local high school, Bailey D., according to her name tag, had just run out of cashew snacks to hand out to patients on Ski's floor.

Nu was shocked to see Ski behave that way. He was also surprised to see Ski in the condition that he was in. Ski's once youthful-looking pecan-colored skin was now an ashen, yellowish-gray, and the whites of his eyes were now the color of yellow caution tape. His once neat, regal cornrows were now fuzzy and overgrown. Truthfully, Ski's braids looked like they hadn't been done in 100 years, and the angry sneer that he had just had plastered on his face made him resemble one of those popular, slightly sinister-looking Labubu dolls.

Although Ski was certainly beginning to get the beefcake physique that he wanted, he also looked like he needed to head to Victoria's Secret to purchase something from their brassiere section because his pecs were starting to develop into C cups. Also, Ski usually had flawless skin, but his forehead was starting to look like the ultra-bumpy surface of a Nestlé Crunch candy bar. Ski definitely looked like he had been christened by the acne fairy that day.

Ahanu rewound and replayed Ski's words again and again on the cassette tape of his mind. His ears still stung; he couldn't believe that Ski had just flat out told him that they could no longer be friends because Ahanu was just too good.

Ahanu tried to warn Ski to leave Scrape alone because he didn't have a good feeling about him, but instead of protecting himself and listening, Ski had shown Ahanu the door.

How could someone be too good? Make it make sense, Heavenly Father! With wars, homelessness, world hunger, racism, discrimination, bigotry, and poverty running rampant throughout the land, goodness is definitely something that the world sorely needed more of, not less of. Ahanu thought to himself reflectively.

Before Ahanu exited his car to head inside his campus apartment, he said a short prayer for Ski to see the light and soon. Ahanu couldn't wait to talk to Krista tonight. She always had a calming effect on him.