There was a pause as Standish absorbed this. ‘I don’t really give those bitches any of my shit, man,’ he said, laughing nervously, like we were all tight. ‘I just tell ’em I’m gonna, then go ahead and f**k ’em. What are they gonna do? Cry rape? They’re addicts and whores.’ He looked between us, swallowing. ‘I – uh, I traded most of the shit for a carburettor.’

‘I really wish you hadn’t said that,’ I said, my voice low.

‘Standish, dude … First, tradin’ a substantial amount of shit for car parts? That’s dealing, dickwad. In Thompson’s territory.’ Boyce glanced at me. ‘And as for that other thing? You just f**ked yourself, man. My friend Maxfield, here – he’s got issues with the r-word.’

I watched Standish think hard to remember what r-word he’d said. ‘B-but, you can’t rape a junkie whore –’

He didn’t finish his sentence. I didn’t really mean to knock a tooth out – that was a bonus. I meant to motivate him to get creative with getting Thompson his two hundred dollars, and I meant to make it so he couldn’t speak or eat normally for a month. Done and done.

He paid up the next day. Boyce heard he pawned his dad’s Rolex, and he lost twenty pounds he was already too scrawny to lose with the forced-liquid diet he was on for six weeks.

The hitch came from the fact that we were on school property when Standish acquired his motivation. Though we preferred to keep these confrontations off campus, he’d made himself scarce for days. But school was compulsory, and it’s not hard to find someone when the whole student body is less than two hundred bodies. We figured out his schedule and set up an ambush – Boyce slinging an arm round his shoulders, laughing and smiling like they were bros, while steering him into the out-of-the-way bathroom.

Standish’s unfortunate accident put us back on Ingram’s radar. We were called to her office out of shop. Boyce guessed the lowerclassman snitched, because he was pretty sure Standish would shit himself before he’d rat us out as the guys who messed him up.

‘Except for that Jekyll and Hyde act of his – maybe he is dumb enough,’ I said.

‘Who and hide what?’ Boyce frowned. ‘That’s a book, right? Never mind. Just deny.’

‘Agreed.’

We were installed in the same chairs we’d occupied two years ago, after the infamous hallway brawl no one ever admitted witnessing. Ingram narrowed unblinking eyes. ‘I find it interesting that you two were seen with Edward Standish just before he left this school with his front tooth in his hand, a bloody mouth, and years of expensive orthodontia destroyed.’

Boyce staged an impromptu coughing fit to hide laughter. If there was one thing Boyce Wynn couldn’t do well – aside from reading for comprehension – it was pretending he wasn’t laughing when he was laughing. I concentrated on maintaining a blank expression. She couldn’t expel us for beating the shit out of a guy who swore we had nothing to do with it, and strangely, her eyewitness also retracted his story. I was sure Boyce was behind that, but I didn’t ask.

We’d been out on the water for two hours before the girl in the red-and-white-striped bikini deigned to speak to me. She made me think of a hot little peppermint stick. Snobby, but hot. I wasn’t particular about attitude, though, because a cute girl on the boat was rare. It made for a better view for the day than miles of water, coastline and fish, if nothing else.

‘Guys who are, like, emo or goth or whatever at my school are a lot … paler than you. And less muscled up. I thought that anaemic look was part of the lifestyle. Or whatever.’

I squinted one eye to peer at her. She’d sidled up next to me as I prepared to bait the rod on the starboard side. We were trolling deep today.

‘Lifestyle?’ I chuckled. ‘I don’t really have time to establish a philosophy,’ sweetheart, I would have added, if she wasn’t a client’s daughter. ‘I just am what I am.’

‘And what’s that?’ She had a wicked gleam in her eye I hadn’t noticed in the first two hours of this trip. Then again, she’d spent that time working on a tan behind the dark sunglasses now perched on her head while trying to ignore her parents, who were trading veiled and not-so-veiled insults at the back of the boat.

A smile hitched my mouth on one side. ‘What do you want me to be?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘That line work on the girls around here?’

I ran the tip of my tongue over my lip ring and squatted down to snap open a bait bucket, a movement that exhibited those muscles she’d noted. ‘Yep.’

She arched a brow. ‘What else works on them?’

I looked over my shoulder, where my dad was at the wheel and wasn’t, at the moment, giving me the evil eye. ‘Why don’t I teach you how to bait this hook and hold this rod while we talk about that further?’ I looked over the top of my sunglasses at her. ‘If you really want the answer to that question, it might take a little while to itemize the data.’

As I stood, she moved in front of me, bracing her feet apart to ride the gulf’s undulations on deck. It was choppy out today and would have been better to go into the bay, but her dad wanted to fish in open water.

‘I know all about bad boys and lures and baitin’ hooks …’ She put both hands together on the railing, staring out at the water. But from my position over her shoulder, she’d just pressed a perfect swell of cle**age together, almost up and out of her tiny bikini top. Lures indeed. ‘… and holdin’ rods – what was your name again?’