I didn’t know how to tell her that his bluster reminded me of my father, who’d terrorized everyone who could have cared about him because he’d known that he was a gutless coward, too scared to quit the bottle. His bullying hid his weakness. Her boyfriend was the opposite of my dad on the surface, but he was hiding something. Whatever it was, that motherfucker had concealed it well enough to fool her.

“So you don’t like him because he’s smart?”

Hell, she was clueless sometimes. “Yeah, that’s it. Good thing Maxfield isn’t a fucking brain, or I’d have had to hate his ass. Oh, wait.”

She rolled her big brown eyes. “He’s different.”

If I hated people for being smart, I’d have been screwed day one. Pearl was the smartest person I’d ever known, and my best buddy from high school was right behind her—graduating from the same giant university, about to head north to some sort of bioengineering job in Ohio. “Yeah. Maxfield is different. He’s not an asshole.”

“Well, y’all have been friends forever—”

I laughed. “Not forever. We beat the shit out of each other in ninth grade.” Right after the worst summer of my life, when we got the news that Brent had been killed in Iraq two months before he was eligible to get out. I’d expected to escape my father but instead found myself the sole target of his untempered rages. For some reason, Maxfield was the guy I took it all out on. Maybe because he was the only one brave (or idiotic) enough to call me on my shit.

I’d been on an unswerving path to become my father, and I hadn’t even seen it.

“Melody told me about that fight, but I thought she was exaggerating.”

“No exaggeration. I got this from it.” I pointed to the small scar near my right eye and grinned. “No worries. He’s got one too. We were opposite ends of a fuckup stick for a while there.”

A smile touched her mouth and she shook her head, turning to stare out into the dark, arranging her thoughts before she spoke, as she always had. I stared at her, waiting for it. The moon was only a sliver over the water, softening the contours of her face, and starlight flickered in her eyes. The collapse and retreat of waves on the sand echoed the familiar soundtrack of our lives.

“I don’t expect you to be friends with Mitchell,” she said. “That would be awkward.”

Yeah. That would be awkward. I’d wanted her for too many years. She was the bad habit I’d never broken, because I didn’t fucking want to.

“I may be jealous, but jealousy isn’t why I don’t trust him,” I said, and she turned her face to mine. I wanted to fall into the deep wells of her eyes. “I protect you, Pearl. It’s just what I do.”

• • • • • • • • • •

Brent protected me until the day he left town. Our whole lives, he insisted that Dad was full of shit and I should pay no mind to his opinion of me or anything else. He blocked my punishments, deserved or undeserved—sometimes physically, but usually by negotiation. My brother was a born peacemaker, the kind of kid who’d stepped in to referee neighborhood disputes before fists could fly, which made his decision to join the Corps at eighteen all the more incredible to me. At ten, I thought all Marines were guys who liked to fight and shoot people.

He planned to serve four years, then go reserve and come get me. “If I believed they’d let me take you from him now, I would—but nobody lets little kids choose their guardians. And I’m barely an adult.” He paced the airless room we shared at the ass-end of the trailer. He’d just graduated from high school and would leave for boot camp in California in August, when I began fifth grade. “When I get out, I’ll be older. You’ll be older—in high school. I’ll get a decent job. We’ll move to Corpus, and he’ll never lay a hand on either of us again.”

My brother was also a dreamer, but I figured that’s how heroes were—it’s how they changed the world—by dreaming how it should be, superimposed over how it was. I wanted to believe what he told me. I wanted to believe that when Brent came back Dad would be so glad to get rid of my sorry ass that he’d let me go.

Brent went to San Diego, and then Quantico, and a year later, after 9/11, to Afghanistan. After earning distinction for marksmanship in boot camp, he made lance corporal and then became a scout sniper. When I was fourteen, he was sent to Iraq. Dad hung a US flag in the window of the garage and accepted praise from everyone who stopped by to yack about how proud he must be to have a son serving our country—as if he’d had any fucking thing to do with it. As if he weren’t the dead reverse of everything Brent stood for.

I hadn’t been born with my brother’s ability to defuse anger; I’d inherited my mother’s knack for throwing fuel on it without even trying. It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say—I was the only one left to trigger his drunken rages. I was the motherfucking dipshit, the worthless dumbass, the pansy-assed son of a bitch, the useless shit-for-brains moron. I swallowed every word, except where Pearl was concerned. I’d done my one good deed when I saved her life, and I knew it.

When she came up to the middle school, she was still tiny and so quiet. She seemed more defenseless than ever. I didn’t notice when she sat down at the end of the table Rick and I had commandeered for lunch the year before. The outcast table, we called it—but that didn’t mean just any weirdo could plant his ass at it.