King Shaun, the invincible. Evie stepped back and walked away.
The dark closed in pretty quick just outside the firelight. The smell of newly thawed earth filled her nose, sharp, cold and alive. She lifted her fingers to her lip and felt where Shaun’s teeth had crashed into it, hot with blood under the skin. He got like that when he was drunk. Careless. Reckless. Other bruises whispered under her clothes. He never really meant them, but he’d never tried to stop them either.
The sandy, twiggy earth under her feet slid and cracked as she found her footing in the dark. When she blinked, she could still see yellow flames printed inside her eyes. She made her way back toward the cars, Shaun’s and Ré’s, trying to pick them out against the trees. She came upon them faster than expected.
To her left, several feet into the darkness, Evie heard a small sound. It was hardly anything. The boys’ shouts from the fire were bouncing all over the beach and scattering in the sand, louder than anything else even at a distance. She sucked her lip, running her tongue over the angry part, trying to soothe it, trying to keep her eyes from filling with tears.
And she heard it again. A whispered ahh and a soft laugh. A purr. Evie stopped and looked toward it, still sucking her lip. Her tears were flowing now. It wasn’t just the sting of her lip. It was that Shaun was indestructible. Always falling into her like a freight train, like whatever was in his way couldn’t hold him, couldn’t stop him. She couldn’t even try.
She heard Sunny’s voice. A low murmur, not her voice, and then Sunny’s again, dismissive, laughing: “He’s fucking drunk.”
Evie could picture Sunny tipping her dark hair back, her long white throat releasing the sharp notes into the air. Evie walked toward the sounds.
Sunny and Réal were strangely tangled against the trunk of the Buick. Evie blinked at the picture—were they…? She blinked again, but the picture had changed. Ré was walking away, toward the fire. Sunny looked over her shoulder at Evie, eyes gleaming in the black, the smile on her lips like a switchblade.
Pictures from that night shuffled back to her now, like cards in a bad hand. The boys gone all Lord of the Flies—well, just Shaun and Alex. Ré had barely said a word that night. But of all of them, Ré was most like a stone, an anchor in the water. He was always quiet, so she hadn’t thought anything of it. Hadn’t even noticed. Her smashed lip and her irritation had got all her attention that night.
But now? As she eyed Sunny across the tan leather seats, she could see the hint of that soft ahh on her lips. Her and Ré pressed to the back of the Buick, dark clothes and dark hair camouflaging the real shape they had made in the shadows.
Sunny’s Valkyrie swung low over Evie’s shoulder, switchblade in her hand. How could she have been so blind? She tried to think of other moments, other clues. Ré’s low voice telling Sunny to stop it that day they’d taken his car. Sunny so stressed about what had happened at the lake without her. Was he flirty? It ate a hole through Evie’s gut right down to the leather seats.
“Sunny,” she said, feeling sick. “Let me out here. I’m going to walk.”
The moon was high and thin and lifeless, barely lighting her path. If she followed the highway, it would take an hour to get home from where Sunny had dropped her, so Evie aimed for the cemetery, the remains of that night at the lake playing on as she cut through the quiet streets.
Shaun had been wasted. Not as bad as Alex, but bad enough. They had settled down as the fire began to die, Alex staring blankly into the embers, not noticing his ass getting wet in the sand. The last of the bottle hung in his hand, catching firelight between his knees.
Shaun had come to find her again, to wrap himself around her. His low laugh into her hair, rough chin across her cheek.
“You’re too drunk to drive,” Evie had said, still mad about her lip.
But he’d only laughed and pushed her away. “I’m fine. Stop being such a suck.”
She’d known it was stupid, that it might have killed her, but she’d let Shaun drive her home that night anyway. And he’d been careful, he’d gone slow. They all knew the roads so well, every curve, every turn—God, even the potholes were familiar. She’d always known just when to brace herself.
In the car, he’d reached over and taken her hand, pressing it flat against his thigh, laying his own down over top to keep her there. She could hear the grin in his voice without even looking at him.
“Hey, if we crash, at least we’ll die together, right, babe?”
She’d only laughed at him. “So, live fast, die young. Is that your big plan?”
And he’d turned to her, grin hanging ear to ear like a string of Christmas lights, just one finger on the wheel. Letting the road go on below them without even looking at it. “Beats havin’ to grow up, I guess.”
15
R
Black Chuck was Ré’s mother’s family. Great-uncle to his mother’s grandmother or something. He was young in the only photo Ré’d ever seen of him, wearing a funny, old suit made for a different man, a taller one, so that the high, old-fashioned collar rubbed the underside of his chin, and the cuffs fell nearly to his knuckles in the dim, gray light of a grainy old black-and-white.
His hair was parted above his left brow and combed to the side, though it looked too
