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Who, right on cue, gavebut was never quite able to deflect

The look that said, There’s the freak who killed her own boyfriend

She rong, of course I hadn’t actually killed Jason I was just the reason he was dead

CHAPTER TWO

I was already stripping off ot to the secret cove that is my little sanctuary I ay too pissed off to bother with the wetsuit

Fuck Linda, I thought, as I tore off my shirt and bra

Fuck Rockabill helped propel me out of my jeans and panties

And fuck me accompanied my shoes and socks, and then it was a short sprint into the ocean, whose waves reared up and enveloped irl In fact, swi was all I had left of my mother, really Her real face, the face inbehind only details I’d et our clandestine nightly swiether when I was a child

And which, I suspected, had driven my family apart

My ht before an awful storfew hours, helping people board up the s of the shops and houses that lined our small main street and central square Then, out of nowhere, his buddy Trevor had let out a lohistle of surprise at the same time that Louis said, "Holy shit," in the awestruck voice he used when they went to the big Fourth of July celebration in Bangor to see a real fireworks display My father, along with just about everybody else who lived in Rockabill at the ti wo down the street as if she had an invitation that specifically requested "stark naked, only, please" No onebrave father, who took off his coat and went and put it around the young woman’s shoulders She smiled up at him, and that’s the moment he says that he knew he loved her and couldn’t live without her

For propriety’s sake, he’d taken her to the Grays’, Rockabill’s only bed and breakfast at the tiically so close to our house was never mentioned in the official story Nick and Nan were still alive and in charge, not Stuart’s nasty parents, Sheila and Herbert Nick and Nan gave her a bed for the night but weren’t all that surprised when they woke up to find it eirl andbreakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes I came around about a year later into an ideal family My parents adored one another; Nick and Nan served as the perfect surrogate grandparents (my father’s parents had passed away before I was born), and soon Jason joined his grandparents, Nick and Nan, to take his place as my best friend and soul mate For six years I lived as happily as a child could live Until the night another big storht , one as suddenly and inexplicably as she had appeared

Then I learned the truth about our farowing up was a sham Rockabill, except for Nick, Nan, and Jason, had never accepted erously different and were happy to have their worst suspicions confirhter That a young girl whose mother had deserted her deserved any sympathy was trumped by the fact that I looked almost exactly like her: the sarew older, the saious community, but our Puritan ancestors enerations Like her irl has a bod for sin The whispers had stuck, growing into shouts as the years went by and other worse things happened