“I think she looks like Rae,” Kimmy said. She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “There’s a few kids at my school who call me Bugsy, like because of my teeth?”

Alex said, “I wouldn’t worry about them. I think you’re really pretty.”

Kimmy sighed. “Thanks.”

“You want to play another game?” Alex said.

Kimmy nodded, and she stared at Maria for a little longer before flipping all of the faces on her board upward for the next game.

In his bedroom, Ryan was doing some quick math on the back of a National Geographic magazine. The deal had been so easy. He was still tingly at the thought of that fat wad of cash stuck under the plunger in his bathroom. Now that the deal was done, he couldn’t help himself from dreaming up next steps. A bigger operation. He considered how much more product he could grow in the limited space he had available, how much more quickly he could grow it, and how much more money they could charge for it. After all, those people had said that it was the best weed they ever smoked.

Ryan had spent the past six months perfecting the hydro-ponic setup in his bedroom closet. It was a large closet, conveniently constructed in such a way that a single jacket on a hanger would conceal the whole operation unless someone was looking. And no one came looking. Ryan was tidy enough that Poppy barely set foot in his room except to give it a quick glance now and then. John wasn’t one to pry. Alex had never been a snoop.

A classmate who went by Ham had introduced Ryan to marijuana while working together on a group project for science class at the beginning of their senior year. The two of them would smoke shitty joints out of the bed of Ham’s pickup truck after they had finished their work. Ham had come up with the idea of growing and selling their own weed once he saw how proficient Ryan was with the simple hydroponic setup required for their class project.

It ended up making the most sense for Ryan to grow and Ham to distribute. Ryan would harvest and package the weed in the privacy of his bedroom and deliver it to Ham, who lived a twenty-minute bike ride away, in the evenings or on weekends so that he would never have to run the risk of bringing product to school. Ham took care of the money side.

Ham wisely decided to sell to kids at the university rather than their high school, and had an easy connection with an older sister and two cousins who were students at WVU. It was a neat and profitable little venture. Six months in and they hadn’t had so much as a close call with parents or law enforcement.

The Fripp Island deal came about when Ryan had mentioned to Ham that he would be gone for a long weekend on a family vacation there. Ham said, “In South Carolina? You’re shittin’ me, dude.” He made a quick phone call to confirm, and sure enough, Ham’s older brother, Keller, was on Fripp Island for the summer, working as the caddy for some professional golfer who had tournaments and workshops lined up on the island. Keller had been complaining to Ham at every opportunity that he had no access to weed for the entire summer, since he was stranded in a place where you had to have a pass just to cross the bridge, which pretty much kept all the yuppies in and the dealers out. Ham had arranged the drop: Ryan would meet Keller up the beach around midnight on the first night of vacation to swap a couple ounces of weed for twelve hundred in cash. The deal seemed like a piece of cake and worth the extra stress on Ryan to be the in-person hookup, because Ham rarely sold broke college kids more than thirty bucks of weed at a time. To sell that much in one night, all in cash, to someone they knew and trusted—it was a no-brainer.