It was clear to him now that he’d been testing them, daring them to kick him out. Toss him back. Go ahead, he’d thought. You can’t handle me.

But they did. They had not only handled him, they had made him.

I wonder, Phillip, his father had said, why you want to waste a good mind and a good body. Why you want to let the bastards win.

Phillip, who was suffering from the raw gut and bursting head of a drug and alcohol hangover, didn’t give a good damn.

Ray took him out on the boat, telling him that a good sail would clear his head. Sick as a dog, Phillip leaned over the rail, throwing up the remnants of the poisons he’d pumped into his system the night before.

He’d just turned fourteen.

Ray anchored the boat in a narrow gut. He held Phillip’s head, wiped his face, then offered him a cold can of ginger ale.

“Sit down.”

He didn’t so much sit as collapse. His hands shook, his stomach shuddered at the first sip from the can. Ray sat across from him, his big hands on his knees, his silvering hair flowing in the light breeze. And those eyes, those brilliant blue eyes, level and considering.

“You’ve had a couple of months now to get your bearings around here. Stella says you’ve come around physically. You’re strong, and healthy enough—though you aren’t going to stay that way if you keep this up.”

He pursed his lips, said nothing for a long moment. There was a heron in the tall grass, still as a painting. The air was bright and chill with late fall, the trees bare of leaves so that the hard blue sky spread overhead. Wind ruffled the grass and skimmed fingers over the water.

The man sat, apparently content with the silence and the scene. The boy slouched, pale of face and hard of eye.

“We can play this a lot of ways, Phil,” Ray said at length. “We can be hard-asses. We can put you on a short leash, watch you every minute and bust your balls every time you screw up. Which is most of the time.”

Considering, Ray picked up a fishing rod, absently baited it with a marshmallow. “Or we could all just say that this little experiment’s a bust and you can go back into the system.”

Phillip’s stomach churned, making him swallow to hold down what he didn’t quite recognize as fear. “I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody.”

“Yeah, you do.” Ray said it mildly as he dropped the line into the water. Ripples spread, endlessly. “You go back into the system, you’ll stay there. Couple of years down the road, it won’t be juvie anymore. You’ll end up in a cell with the bad guys, the kind of guys who are going to take a real liking to that pretty face of yours. Some seven-foot con with hands like smoked hams is going to grab you in the showers one fine day and make you his bride.”