“Is Francie your stepmom?” I ask, with a glance toward the redhead grinning at us from the refrigerator.

“I guess? Sort of? It’s hard to be a stepmom when you deny any relation.”

At Trey’s and my confused looks, Tanq adds, “That’s my bio dad.” She points to the guy in the polo shirt. “It was a drunken one-night thing with my mom. They never expected to see each other again. A few years later mom ran into him at the post office, told him he had a kid. It was nice at first. We hung out. I came over here a lot. He took me up to Buckeye Lake a few times. Taught me how to fish, how to jet ski. Then he got married.”

Trey reaches into the fridge, retrieves collector Cokes for all of us. While we sip, Tanq continues, like vandalizing those cars has caused a dam to break, and suddenly she can’t stop talking. “Francie didn’t want anything to do with me or my mom. I think it was because my mom, uh, didn’t have the best reputation? I dunno, there’s a bunch of details my mom never told me. Anyway, we never asked for child support or anything, but after Francie moved in, that woman convinced my dad I wasn’t really his. I mean, we’d never done a paternity test or anything. So he . . . cut me off. Just like that. I tried to see him a couple of times, called him. He ignored me. When my mom went back to meth and started hitting me, he refused to help. Said I wasn’t his problem, that he had a real family now.”

Her face is stoic and perfect as she talks, like that of a porcelain doll, but there’s something a little looser about her too. She’s not curled in on herself; her arms drop naturally from her shoulders.

“You look just like him,” Trey points out. “I mean, just like him.”

“I know, right?” she says. “There was never any doubt. Francie just wanted me out of her life, and my dad didn’t have the balls to stand up to her. To be fair, I may have gone too far. I came over after school one day and . . .” She changes her mind about what she was going to say. “Anyway, Francie took out a restraining order on me.”

“Dang, girl,” I say, flashing back to the way she screamed while attacking her dad’s car with a tire iron. “Couldn’t your mom sue for a paternity test?” I asked.

Tanq snort-laughs. “Spoken like a rich bitch. With what money? My mom wasn’t even sober enough to walk into a law office most of the time. We lived in a cramped apartment with another family; I shared a room with three other kids. What the hell were we supposed to do?”