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( CHAPTER ONE ) "Are y'all sure you don't want to come with us to Aunt Cris's?" I ask for the sixth time today. "Like, if you and John B are with me, she'll let us take the ferry back in the morning."
JJ drives one last nail into the board that I'm holding up over one of the windows of the Chateau — that's what we call the Routledge's fish shack of a house — and with that, we finish the last of our Hurricane Agatha prep.
"Thea, you'll only be on the mainland for like two days tops. You'll be fine," he says finally. "I'll even send you with some of my good smoke if it'll make you feel better."
"No amount of weed in the world could make me want to be alone with my Aunt Cristal and Alex for that long," I huff and then deadpan. "I'll drown myself first."
"Whoa now, what's your aunt done to you to make you hate her so much?" John B, who had apparently been listening in, says as he steps out onto the porch with three dark bottles in his hands.
He hands me one that's already open, and I take a sip. It's definitely stale beer, but it's ice cold, and in the summer heat, it tastes like liquid gold.
"I mean it's not Cris that's the problem. It's Alex," I say, flopping down on a fraying couch. "We've been arguing nonstop, and it's gonna be even worse if we have to sit through Aggie together."
Alex is my older sister. I love her because she's my sister, but she's also the bossiest person on the Outer Banks. What's worse is that she's made it her life's mission these last few years to follow in our late parents' footsteps and go full-fledged Kook.
That being said, she and I don't exactly get along.
"And you think having us there would help?" JJ laughs as he sits down next to me. "Dude, Alex hates us."
To be fair, Alex doesn't like most people from the Cut — never mind the fact that she and I live there too — but there's a special place in her cold dead heart to hate JJ Maybank and John B Routledge.
The two of them are my best friends in the whole world, but from the day I brought them home from school back in the third grade, Alex said that they were trouble. In eight years, her opinion hasn't changed a bit.
"Remember that time she tried to call the cops on us for bringing Thea home late?" John B says.
"Or the time she threatened to sink the HMS Pogue if we ever tried to take Thea out to the sound again?" JJ shivers a little and crinkles his nose at the memory.
"Or the time-"
"Fine, I get it," I sigh and lean back until I'm staring up at the paneled porch ceiling. "Y'all win. You're right"
