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  “I…I don’t know what to do, Mom,” I said to her, confused.

  “Just…just walk with me a little while. That’s all I need, baby. I just need you to walk with me.” She straightened up, took my hand, and we started walking down the stone sidewalk. It had been years since she’d held my hand and I couldn’t help but smile. It didn’t make me feel like a little girl, just…needed, which is pretty rare when your parents are both strong, independent people who’ve never needed anything.

  “You must hate us now, huh? Dragging you from one end of the world to the other, only to end up on this rock and watch me turn into a bowl of Jello in only an hour.”

  “No,” I argued, looking straight ahead, not wanting her to see the semi-lie.

  “Fallon Timmons, you know better than to lie to me,” Mom chastised between sniffles, obviously not needing to see me to know the truth. “You didn’t speak to us for days when we told you about the move, and you not speaking to us is about as dramatic as you get.”

  We stopped in front of a store that sold handmade pottery, the plates on display all in the shape of fishes. “I thought we’d be staying in California, that’s all. Josh was stationed there, and we had the house and the garage and-”

  “And you were tired of moving around,” Mom finished for me.

  “Yeah.”

  She patted my arm and sighed long and hard, a mother’s sigh. “You know we didn’t like disappointing you, but California wasn’t our home. None of the places we were stationed at was home, not to Dad and me. We spent thirty years running away from this place. It was time for us to come back. It was time to bring you here.”

  We began walking again, and as we crossed a small alley, I caught sight of a group of girls across the street surrounding another who was in a wheelchair. They were laughing, but not with her. I knew just from the way their laughs sounded that they were teasing her. I pulled away from Mom’s hand and crossed the street with purpose, ignoring her calls to me to let it go.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” one of the girls asked mockingly.

  “How do you screw someone with wheels attached to their ass? What does he do first? Buckle you in or grease your wheels?” laughed another.

  “I’ll bet you five bucks that her ass looks like one big callus split down the middle,” cackled the third.

  I could see right away that the girl in the wheelchair was crying. She couldn’t leave while they surrounded her, and she appeared too afraid to say anything or cry out for help. She was a mouse trapped by three hungry, taunting cats.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “You want to pick on someone? Pick on me.”

  I wedged myself between the girl in the wheelchair and her attackers, taking a good look at the three who had chosen her weakness as their target. “Come on. Let’s see what you got. Here, let me start it off for you.” I looked at the one who’d asked about having a boyfriend. “How many boyfriends do you have? Oh, I’m sorry. You probably don’t have boyfriends; you probably have customers.”

  I turned to the second one. “And you. How do you screw anyone with that big ego in the way?”

  Finally, my eyes landed on the third girl. “You know, I could get nasty like you. I could get mean, but I’m not. I’m just going to stand here and stare at you as if you’ve got something wrong with your face.”

  “Who do you think you are?” she sneered. “Are you her lover or something?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Wanna watch?”

  The looks on their faces made the girl in the wheelchair start to laugh, and they knew that they’d lost whatever power they had. They left, muttering under their breath. I turned around to face the girl in the wheelchair, kneeling so she wouldn’t have to look up at me.

  “Are you okay? When I saw those girls and heard what they were saying, I couldn’t just stand around and do nothing, you know?”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” she said with a sniff, her eyes following the three girls as they made their way angrily down the walkway. “I can usually handle myself but today’s been kind of a crappy day.”

  “Hey, no problem,” I told her. “We all have days like that, right? Especially with people like them.”

  She held her hand out. “I’m Audrey, by the way. And yeah, I was always told to just walk away from people like them, you know? Well…I guess in my case, it’s not walk away so much as roll away.” She started laughing, tears slipping out of her eyes for a different reason now and so I laughed with her.

  “I’m Fallon.” I took her hand and shook it, her strong grip surprising me. Audrey was probably the most beautiful person I’d ever seen in my life. She had thick, red hair that was pulled in a strange braid running down side of her head. The shade of red would have looked unnatural on most people, but on her it looked like the color had come straight from the deep red of her lips, which hid pretty teeth and a soft voice.

  Her eyes were amber colored, her tears making them glitter like topaz. They were almond-shaped, with dark red lashes that made them look like they were framed by fire. Her skin wasn’t pale, but kissed with the color of a lifetime of sun and sea, which only deepened the intensity of her fiery hair.

  “Get away from my sister!” a rough voice shouted, cutting through our laughter.

  I looked up at the sound of that voice and felt myself being shoved onto the ground by rough hands. I looked up into a pair of angry hazel eyes perched in the face of a boy who held nothing but resentment for me. “What?” I said, stammering as I took in the full effect of him. His hair was black like mine, his dark brows drawn together over disapproving eyes. His nose was crooked between those eyes, but what caused my words to catch in my throat was his mouth.

  His lips were curled back over his teeth, but one side pulled tighter than the other and as his snarl grew I saw why: a thick, raised scar ran from the middle of his left cheek to the corner of his mouth. The scar was pink with red, angry edges. With his nostrils flaring, his lips pulled back, and his teeth bared, he looked like a wild animal.

  “Get away from my sister. Stay away from her, you hear me you damn trog?”

  He grabbed the handles of Audrey’s wheelchair and pushed, her protests falling on deaf ears. The sidewalk cleared a path for the two of them as they made their way toward an alley and disappeared. I stood up. I wanted to run after him and tell him he was being as much of a bully as those other girls had been, but I couldn’t. Instead, I just stared.

  “I see you’ve met my grandchildren,” a voice said behind me. I turned around to see Mom, Dad, and Mrs. Simon.

  “Your grandchildren?” I said, stunned.

  “My daughter Lyssa’s kids, Audrey and Liam,” she replied. “They’re close.”

  “Yeah, well, if he’d been a little closer maybe he could have stopped those girls instead of having some stranger do it,” I mumbled before heading back to the truck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LIAM

  I couldn’t push the wheelchair fast enough. I wanted to run. I wanted to pick her up, chair and all, and just take off. The arrival of these damn trogs made the island feel even smaller than it already was. There was no place to get away from them, not even at home now.

  “Would you stop? Stop pushing, Liam!”

  I looked down at Audrey’s face. Her eyes were still red and puffy from crying. “You’re not supposed to be out there by yourself,” I reminded her. “You’re supposed to always have someone with you. You know that.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter, Liam. God! I’m sixteen-years-old!”

  “Fifteen!”

  “I’ll be sixteen in a month!”

  “You’re still fifteen. And yes, you do need a babysitter. That girl wouldn’t have upset you if you’d been with Grans or Jameson. Dad would be pissed if you’d had one of your episodes right there in front of Grans’ place with all those tourists around. And he would have had my ass for it, too.”

  Audrey grabbed the wheels of her chair, forcing it to stop and causing me to almost flip completely over it.
“You’re an idiot, you know that?”

  “Jeez, what the hell?” I hissed at her after tripping over my own feet and falling on my knees.

  “Fallon didn’t make me cry. She made me laugh. She was helping me. Maybe you would have seen it if you weren’t busy plugging Brenda’s holes instead of the ones on Dad’s boat.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I scolded.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!”

  My sister was beautiful when she was angry. She was beautiful when she was sad, too. But when she was being stubborn, she looked like an angel. “Aud-”

  “No! Look, I’m not some broken doll, okay? It’s summer! I don’t want to stop doing anything just because there are tourists around and you and Dad are paranoid.”

  “We’re not paranoid,” I grumbled. “Those trogs don’t care about what their crap does to us. Aud. They don’t care about your feelings-”

  “I don’t care about their feelings either,” she snorted. “And you know you feel the same way. You don’t care about what they say or what they do; it only makes things easier for you.”

  My sister had a way of knowing and speaking the truth that always got on my nerves. “Them simply existing makes things easier,” I grunted before dusting off my knees.

  “Yeah, well, I like Fallon. She’s not like them.”

  “I don’t care what her name is. She’s exactly like them. Just because she decided to play the hero once doesn’t make her different,” I reminded her. “Look, I’ve gotta get back to the dock. I’m gonna take you to find Brenda, and this time I want you to stay with her.”

  “Why?”

  I sighed, hearing the disappointment in her voice and hating it, hating the fact that I was the reason why it was there. “Because I need you to be safe. If anything happened to you, it’d kill Dad. You know that.” It’d kill me, too.

  She huffed, and her shoulders fell even lower than they’d been when I found her across the street from Grans, but I wasn’t going to react to it. “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  ***

  Every crate of fish that I carried on deck must have weighed over a hundred pounds. I was tired, and sore, and the sun was barely overhead.

  “Quit daydreaming and hurry up.” I heard my dad shout from the deck of his boat, the Lyssa.

  I looked up and saw him standing there with another stack of crates in his arms. He carried them six at a time down the ramp, slamming them onto the pier so roughly I half expected them to keep on going straight through the old wood and back into the sea. The sardines were long since dead, but the things that lived in the water wouldn’t give a damn.

  “Did you hear me, boy? I said hurry up. I’ve gotta get these crates to your grandma’s place before the noon lunch rush.”

  I climbed the ramp back onto the boat and grabbed the last six crates. The sound of seagulls squawking overhead was like an alarm to move; no one liked being crapped on by birds, and no one wanted to eat fish that had been crapped on, either. I walked down the ramp and put the crates of fish down just in time to see my dad’s truck approach in reverse. As soon as the only working brake light lit up, I began to transfer the crates to the back of the truck, three crates at a time to keep them from tipping over.

  “Did you find your sister?” Dad asked as he handed me the truck’s keys.

  “Yeah. She was being harassed by some trog.”

  “And?”

  I climbed into the truck and started the engine up. “I handled it.”

  Dad sighed and grabbed the back of his head. “She’s gotta be more careful. With her condition growing worse and all these damn tourists, things can get hairy.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” I reassured him as I took the foot brake off. “I’ll keep her safe.”

  “You’d better or I’ll have your tail!” he shouted after me as I pulled away.

  I could see the ferry creeping in, every single inch of its rail surrounded by trogs. They had their cameras hanging around their necks, the white flashes of pictures being taken making the whole damn scene look like Christmas. Some were coming to stay at their vacation homes closer to the cliffs. Others were going to stay at the inns that lined the beach on the other side of town. The rest were just coming for the day. They waved at me, at the truck and the crates of stinking fish in the back. It was the same thing every summer and this year wasn’t any different. Dad would have honked, but I just drove.

  I stopped at the beginning of town while a row of trucks heading to pick up supplies crossed the road to get to the ferry before it docked. The truck’s passenger door opened suddenly. I turned to look and smirked when I saw Jameson Paul climb in. Like everyone else on the island, we’d grown up together, but he was the only one who enjoyed hunting the way I did. Even Brenda would rather wait for her food to be brought to her than get it herself.

  “Yo,” Jameson grunted as he slammed the door.

  “Yo.”

  “Last catch?”

  I nodded. “Grans had better be able to feed these trogs for a week with this one because I’m not going back on the boat for at least that long.”

  “Hunting season?”

  “Hunting season.”

  The road cleared and I pressed my foot on the gas. We roared through the street and passed by the shops and restaurants closest to the wharf. The sidewalks were already crowded with twice as many people as there’d been when I left with Audrey. I snarled.

  “It’s like sitting in one of those crates and not being able to do anything,” I said out loud.

  “Give it time, man,” Jameson laughed as he waved at some of the trogs he noticed smiling at him. “Summer only just started.”

  “And they’re already acting like stuck-up pieces of meat,” I growled, thinking of the girl who’d made Audrey cry.

  “What happened now? Ask a girl out to dinner and got turned down?” Jameson laughed.

  “I wish. Some trog was harassing Audrey.”

  Jameson stiffened and grew serious. “What? Do you remember what she looks like?”

  Of course I remember. It’s hard to forget a face like hers. She looked a lot like Audrey, except for her hair. It was black, like mine, only straight and smooth like the ocean at night when it was calm.

  “Ugh.” What the hell was I doing?

  “What? Was she a dog?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But it doesn’t matter what she looks like, does it?”

  “D’ya wanna go and find her? Sniff her out before we make a move? Scare her a little?” Jameson’s grin ran from ear to ear.

  The idea made me smile. “Nah. Like you said, summer just started. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Yeah, man. Our first summer hunting alone; I’m stoked.”

  Jameson put his bare feet up on the dashboard and leaned back into the bench seat. I could hear the springs giving up to him and glared mockingly. “Dude, until my dad pays me for the work I’ve done, try not to break anything that I can’t fix, okay? There aren’t that many useable bench seats left in the junkyard which means if you break this one, you’ll have to ride in back with the bait.”

  “Are you calling me…fat?” Jameson asked, his mouth dropping wide open.

  “Yeah, you fricken’ cow.”

  A moment of seriousness passed between us before we both busted out laughing.

  “Moo, ya bastid,” Jameson said, punching me in the arm.

  I turned down an alley and parked behind my grandma’s place, the screen door in the back already swarming with flies. There were empty crates stacked ten high, and the smell of rotting fish forcing its way through the truck’s windows burned my eyes.

  “Come on,” I grunted. “Let’s get this done so we can get moving.”

  We climbed out of the truck. I honked the horn twice and then headed to the back where Jameson had already lowered the tailgate and was pulling out the crates. Three by three we pulled them out and stacked them beside the truck bed until all twenty-four crates were on the ground. The ice
that kept the sardines cold was melting fast as the sun began to rise, cooking the stink into our skin.

  I heard the screen door slam, and I watched my grandmother walk toward us with her eyes counting the fish, doing the math in her head to see how much we’d brought and how long it would last before we needed to set the boat out again. “Is this it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” I told her.

  “You think that’s gonna last me a week, don’t’cha, boy?”

  “Summer just started, Grans. The ferries aren’t even two-thirds full yet. This is more than enough to last you through the week,” I pointed out.

  “You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? How many restaurants do you run, boy? Huh? Don’t think that just because you’re turning eighteen soon that you’re smarter than me. All that schooling and all that playing you boys have been doing don’t mean nothing here. Only one thing matters here and that’s feeding your family. If you can’t do that, you’re worthless.”

  Without another word, she bent down and stacked three crates on top of each other and then took the six inside, opening the door with one hand, the crates balanced in the other.

  Jameson whistled. “She’s stronger than my dad!”

  “She’s stronger than both of our dads,” I agreed as I bent down to repeat her moves. I struggled and nearly dropped them as I opened the screen door. The kitchen was small, with most of the floor covered with boxes and crates. It always surprised me that Grans hadn’t killed herself yet by tripping over them.

  “Just put them over there by the fryer,” she barked as she passed me, moving to get the rest of the crates.

  I could hear people talking in the restaurant, their forks clinking against their plates as they ate the food my grandmother made for them. They laughed at the decorations, at the mix-matched plates and silverware. I could hear them snickering, so confident that no one was listening to them criticizing everything.

  “You gonna just stand there drooling, or you gonna get the last one?”