Page 1 of Boundaries

Prologue

The Past

"Mason, what the hell? Have you got the ball or what?" Seth McKenna’s annoying, whiny voice grated in my ears. I snorted from my hiding place. At the end of the day, out of all the McKenna boys, he was the least of my problems.

To be honest, I had them all figured out. Simply put, Seth was the irritating one, Boyd was the laziest and stupidest, Nixon was the scariest, and Mason was the meanest.

I had been hiding under their house for the last thirty minutes, watching them attempt to play football and eavesdropping. And now it appeared I was busted.

“Dude, you’re taking forever.”

“Shush, I’m listening," the latter McKenna replied gruffly. My daddy said Mason was at that in-between stage when a boy’s voice started to crack into a man’s. I thought he sounded stupid.

I shuffled further back into the darkness of my hiding place. This was the spot I came to when I was in spy mode. I was on a mission and determined to earn wages to buy sweets. My brother Mattie would give me money for any dirt I could dig up on the McKenna boys. He also liked me to take pictures of them when they were up to no good.

I’d brought my camera a couple of times, but the photographs were always too dark and using the flash would have been stupid. I may as well have told them I was there.

My orders now were to listen to their boring as heck conversations and report anything interesting back to my brother.

The McKenna’s land bordered my parent’s farm, and our families hated each other.

That was the way it had always been. For years, the Taylor-Joys and the McKenna family had been at each other’s throats, and all due to one dull as dishwater argument about boundaries: confusion as to where our land ended and theirs began.

The section of land that could not be officially claimed, as Daddy put it, was a stretch of meadow that had a river running part way through it. The bend in the river opened into a pool area, which was perfect for wild swimming. The bank was also sloped to allow easy access to the water. Which is the main reason everyone fought over it. Although I still didn’t understand why, it was bloody freezing in there most of the year. My sister Jenna liked it there, though; she found it calming. I did join her sometimes, but mainly to sneak off and watch the lambs being bottle fed; they were so cute during lambing season. The McKenna farm had animals—loads of them. We grew crops for the supermarkets. Not as much fun.

I found all the bickering about the land really boring; it wasn’t as if there was gold buried there. Yes, it had a pool, but who cared? If you wanted to swim, there was the Lakeside Swimming Pool in Swaffham, a large, uninfected pool where you could be free from the worry of something swimming up your suit. And as for the meadow, both our families owned loads of acres already, but Daddy had a bee in his bonnet. He said that Mr and Mrs McKenna were greedy and that it was all about principle, whatever that meant.

In my opinion, we were like the Montagues and the Capulets, two families I was reading about in a book we were studying at school.

That second pair of feet appeared next to those belonging to Mason.

“Listening for what?” Seth blasted back, lowering his voice to a whisper.

“We have a rodent problem.”

The snort left my mouth before I could stop it. Did Mason McKenna just call me a rat?

“Really?”

"Yes, dipshit, really," Mason said, losing patience. It didn’t take long for him to snap; Mason McKenna had a smoking-hot temper. I had witnessed it last year when Mattie stole Mason’s girlfriend, Mia. Talk about a boy tantrum. I thought his head was going to explode.

"As in a rat?"

It seemed to take Seth a while for his brother’s words to sink in. I squinted, my eyes scanning his body. It was, in fact, Boyd McKenna who stood there, the dumb one, not Seth. Oops. Silly me.

"Well?" Boyd prompted his brother.

"Almost, more like a B-rat. If you can call it that."

I was nine, but I wasn’t stupid; I knew he was talking about me. How I wanted to kick him in the shin, but let’s face it. From my position in the nook under their house, there was little chance of that!

"Who is it?"

Mason cleared his throat. "One of the Taylor-Joy kids."

Drat! After three weeks of special ops surveillance, my hidey-hole was toast.

“Come out now; we know you’re in there,” the ‘too-big-for-his-own-boots’ McKenna snarled. Yeah, like I was coming out anytime soon, I’d rather stick a fork in my eye.

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