My fingers curled against the denim near my groin, and her eyes skittered to the kitchen table, and then to the box in that damned chair—the label of which was clear as day: HUMAN REMAINS.

“Is that… your father?” she asked, pointing.

Goddamn. Even dead, he was fucking up my life.

I glanced over at the box as though I had to check to be sure what she was talking about. “Yep. I expected to get more satisfaction out of having him incinerated, even if that’s what he wanted. I suspect he knew he would be a pain in my ass a little longer that way. If I’da buried him, it would be done and done. Instead, I’ve got to figure out what to do with a creepy-ass dad-in-the-box.”

She choked a laugh, eyes dancing. “God, Boyce.” For some reason, she’d always found me funny. In high school, I would catch her smirking at some idiotic remark I’d made, trying to hide it while her best friend bitched and fumed and called me all sorts of names as though I gave a fat crap. Both of their reactions just egged me on, of course.

“I keep thinking he’s gonna pop up outta there like one of those damn windup clowns.”

She shook her head, smiling. “Maybe you could scatter him from the pier?”

I frowned. “Not gonna happen. I told him I wouldn’t be totin’ his dusty ass to the water or performing some pointless farewell ceremony. He’s gone, and I’m glad.”

She angled her head, sobering. “I know you are, and I don’t blame you one bit. But maybe dumping his ashes in the gulf would bring you some closure.”

“Ain’t no closure for me and him, Pearl.”

“I understand,” she said, and I hoped she didn’t.

“Besides,” I added, sliding back into the comfort of disrespectful humor, “I’m pretty sure he’d amount to pure-D marine pollution.”

She chewed her lip. “What about our sandbar? We could dig a hole, dump him in, and put a big, flat rock on top of him.”

Our sandbar. The one not quite the length of a football field from her backyard—if a football field was submerged under eight or nine feet of water. A couple of marshy, sea-grass-covered islands and a dozen or so sandbars—an extension of the nature preserve that ranged as wide as the town—stood between the wide-open bay and her neighborhood.

When I was in tenth grade, a guy offered to trade me a shitty aluminum boat with a sporadically working outboard motor after I found a working vintage Holley carburetor for his ’69 Boss 429 at a scrapyard in Corpus. I took the deal because that ugly-ass boat could maneuver the pass from the backside of town around to the channel between that bunch of tidal marshlands and sandbars—across from which the Frank house occupied a corner lot on a dead-end street.

I don’t know what I thought I was going to do from there—spy on her? Then I heard Dover talking her into having a party there the coming weekend when her parents would be out, and I knew trading a scavenged Mustang part for that leaky relic had been a stroke of luck. Or genius.

“I don’t know, Mel… if anyone reports it—”

“As long as we don’t invite too many people and don’t build a big fire, no one will see. It’ll be so cool. It’s my birthday. C’mon, Pearl—pleeeeease? Clark can get his dad’s boat that night and we’ll ferry everyone there and back.”

She blinked her lashes at Pearl like she always did at my best friend—who was a sucker for every damn cocktease move she made. If he’d just wanted a hookup, I wouldn’t have cared—anything that screwed over Clark Richards was good, including his girlfriend getting some on the side from my boy. But he was all in, and she knew it. She twisted him into knots every time he saw her and then left him that way to bounce back to that rich asshole.

Pearl sighed and agreed to the party. The last thing Maxfield needed was to witness Dover and her dickhole boyfriend making out, so when he slid onto his stool at our lab table a couple of minutes later, I didn’t tell him about it.

Come Friday night, I motored down the channel near Pearl’s place, alone, beaching the boat as soon as I saw the glowing fire pit and heard the music. There were about a dozen of them—all rich kids, no townie losers—drinking and dancing around the low flames. I pulled the boat up behind a clump of marsh grass and watched, feeling like some kind of lurker sociopath. Pearl was dancing with a guy who couldn’t keep his hands off her—a junior named Adam Yates. His parents were both dentists; when we were in second grade, they’d come to school to talk about teeth and pass out toothbrushes and business cards.

My jaw steeled, but I had no rights where she was concerned. She wasn’t mine. She’d never be mine. I wanted to leave, but for some reason I just sat right there like a masochistic jackass.

When the birthday girl passed out cold just before one a.m. from too many shots, Clark trundled her and several others into his boat, leaving behind the dick who’d been feeling Pearl up all night. Richards and Yates didn’t bother to disguise the thumbs-up signal between them, but no one was sober enough to witness it but me. The rest of the partiers left with PK Miller when he said he had to make curfew with his dad’s boat or his mom would chew his ass the rest of the weekend.

Pearl stumbled around, dousing the fire with sand and chucking cups and bottles into a trash bag, because of course she was preventing fire and picking up trash, even hammered. Yates trailed along behind her, trying to take the bag or get her to stop. I was too far away to hear them. My fists tightened when he slid his arms around her and kissed her neck, but I did no more than stand up from the rock I’d been parked on for two hours because she seemed willing enough. Until he turned her around and did something she didn’t like—too much tongue?—goddammit—and she gagged and shoved at his chest.