“Hearing is my job. I take my job seriously. This way I know everything.”

Anton is kidding, but I panic all the same. I feel a sudden chill spread along my arms and down to my fingers, which start to tingle. Saliva soaks my mouth. A metal taste permeates my tongue and teeth. “I doubt you know everything.”

“Knowledge is power, Miss Cassandra,” he says, but his voice comes from a remove. He chuckles in slow motion, like a tape played at half-speed.

I hear myself panting and force out words to muffle the sound. “Depends on what you do with that information, Anton.” Even as my pulse click, click, clicks. Even as heat spreads across my scalp, I feel myself disappear.

A few years ago, in high school, I went through a difficult period. My best friend, Avery Walker, and I had a fight, a big one. In the aftermath, I was lonely, self-destructive, and hungry for affection. I did what lots of girls do: smoked too much weed, blew off my classes, and started seeing Marcus Silver, a guy who was wrong for me in all the worst ways. Our love story, simultaneously epic and ordinary, started as a slow burn then escalated at warp speed. Marcus was intoxicating. He taught me about insatiable cravings, and how it feels to want more—more fun, more sex, more everything. Soon, I was desperately in love, and after that, just desperate. No one knew he existed. Only Anton, who caught us once in a compromising position. At least I think he did. But he never mentioned it, nor did he tell a soul. In my world, this makes him more trustworthy than family. Still, his words, however innocently he means them, raise all kinds of fears.

“Get in the car, Cassie!” Lawrence shouts. “I don’t want to miss this guy.”

“Why are you yelling? Nate isn’t even here yet—”

As I say this, my brother grabs me from behind. “Princess Pickle,” he says, lifting me off my feet in an iron grip. “So kind of you to honor us with your presence.”

Nate is a brawny bear with Lawrence’s wavy black hair and his own perpetual five o’clock shadow. He’s our family’s Lost Boy, funny and cynical, but in no hurry to grow up. At the same time, he’s surprisingly self-aware for a twenty-five-year-old man whose only true ambition is to surf the world’s biggest wave.

“Any news about Billy?” he asks me. “I hope he survived the night. Pretty boys don’t fare well in prison.”

“Don’t say prison. Or jail. According to Lawrence, it’s a detention center. Soon, he’ll have us calling it a spa.”