Page 2 of The Bully's Dare

He gives me a cocky half-grin and shrugs a single shoulder as if to say, Whoops.

I feel the heat rise up my neck. Jerk.

Healing Touch glugs as it leaves the slip and every teenager on board hoots and hollers as they go further out to sea. I hope a kraken swallows them whole, honestly.

I leave my Walkman and book behind and leap from the edge of the sailboat to the wooden dock. The sun-charred slabs are stingingly hot underneath my bare feet, but I ignore the pain and crouch down to the edge to extend my hand.

“Need a hand?” I ask as the dock boy swims to the edge of the dock.

“I’ve got it,” he grumbles, but as he scrabbles at the edge to get his footing, it’s clear he doesn’t have it. He takes my arm and together we pull him up. His uniform—a white polo shirt with a small lighthouse stitched into the chest pocket and khaki pants—is soaked through. I pick a piece of seaweed from his shoulder and he grimaces about it.

“Those guys are a bag of dicks,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“Can I get you anything? A towel?”

“I’ll live. The clothes aren’t the problem.” He’s got these soft chestnut irises and they meet my gaze for the first time. “You want to know the real tragedy?”

“Always.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a neatly rolled joint, now soaked and limp.

“R.I.P.,” he says.

I hold up a finger. “Hold on.”

Why, yes. I have tricks up my sleeve. I reach into my bikini, where I’ve stashed away my one vice from Four and Pearl: a rolled joint and a lighter. For the moments I really need to escape.

For the first time, Dock Boy smiles. “Hello, new best friend.”

“You can call me Kenzi.”

Dock Boy’s real name is Donovan. His real age is nineteen. I haven’t discovered his real hair color yet, but I know it’s not black because he keeps having to towel off his neck when the dark hair dye drips down around his ears.

Harborstone Marina is a self-contained ecosystem, complete with its own restaurant (the Blue Heron, accessible by the public) and a slew of private facilities: a general store, a private pool, a communal shower/restroom/locker room, and a laundry room.

There are only two sets of washers and dryers in the laundry room. Donovan sits on one of the washers, I sit on the fold-out table, and we pass my joint back and forth as his clothes tumble dry.

He’s wearing only his boxers, but they look enough like a bathing suit that it’s somehow not obscene. Doesn’t keep me from admiring his body, though. He’s lean, not quite stacked like the jocks, but I like the softness of him. He’s kept on this thick leather-woven bracelet and a simple chain necklace with a ring on it.

“Promise ring?” I ask and point to it.

He frowns at that. “My mom’s wedding ring.”

“Divorced?”

“Deceased.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugs, and that’s the end of that conversation.

I get it. I have things that were my dad’s, sort of. Pearl kept his record player and a few tattered albums. I play them sometimes, but only because I like music, not because I liked him. He died when I was just a kid, and the memories I have aren’t great ones, so we never had the kind of connection that inspired me to carry around any of his trinkets.

My head is a little hazy and I swish my legs under the table. I feel small, but not in a bad way. The comfort of careless innocence. “So why do they hate you?”

Donovan thins his lips. He taps ash off onto the quarter slot. “I’m a loser. I’m gay. I don’t have a yacht or a summer house. Take your pick.”

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