“Don’t tell no one,” Bubba said, pressing a finger to his lips. “You’ll ruin my repatation.”

*   *   *

Since she didn’t have anywhere else better to go or anything else better to do, Chastity figured she might as well hang with the redneck outlaws for a while. The last thing she wanted was to head back to Fayetteville and fetch coffee for her daddy’s pervert salesmen at the Chevy dealership. The ones who made sly little comments about her figure and gave her dirty little winks while sending her across the road to Applebee’s for fried chicken salads and jalapeño poppers while they closed that big deal on a brand-new Tahoe.

She hadn’t been home but two months from rehab when her daddy and Sharon sent her back to a new place, this one south of Little Rock, a rustic campground that ran about a thousand dollars a day where you could walk hiking trails and sit around campfires with the other addicts, admitting to all your greatest adventures when you’d been flying high on pills and booze. Chastity was there a whole three days before talking a groundskeeper into driving her back to Fayetteville, where she got her silver G-Wagen and hightailed it down to the lake house. Her daddy and Sharon never telling her they’d lost the damn thing in bankruptcy on that stupid outlet mall in Branson.

Chastity figured she could stay here until Daddy came for her, getting all emotional and tearful, explaining once again how her addiction came from her mother’s side as Uncle Jeff was a goddamn fuckup himself, despite her daddy trying to help him be a success in life.

“You okay?” TJ Byrd asked.

Chastity was working on a little mascara in the master bedroom mirror, big white light bulbs giving her an up-close microscopic view of her pores.

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“I’m cool,” TJ said. “Don’t worry about it. It was no big thing.”

“It’s just makeup and clothes,” Chastity said. “That big girl ran from the room like a scared rabbit.”

“She’s not used to seeing me like this,” TJ said. “Just startled her a bit.”

“You in a dress?”

“Without jeans,” she said. “And shit-kicking boots and old flannel shirts.”

“Weird,” Chastity said, rolling the stick around her lips and making a pouty kiss in the mirror. “Very weird.”

“Have you seen Ladarius and my little brother?”

“I gave them the keys to the boat,” she said. “Showed them where my daddy keeps the gas cans.”

“It’s freezing rain out there,” TJ said. “I don’t want my little brother on a boat.”