West Shore

Chapter 4: The Compact

The Compact

The kid on the diving board still hadn't jumped when the shouting started.

It came from the far side of the deck, loud enough to carry over the water and the speakers both. Not a word. Nothing anybody could have repeated back. Just a man's voice let go all at once, and every head on the deck turned toward it.

Amanda came off the lounger sideways, went down on one hand, and got Jason between herself and the sound.

Will Thorne came through the crowd, and the crowd opened for him without being asked. He'd gotten bigger since the last time anybody on that deck had seen him. He crossed the deck with his jaw locked and his hands already reaching.

He didn't slow down when he reached her. He caught her by the wrist and hauled her up, and she stumbled, twisting back toward the lounger.

"Jason—"

Jason sat up. He put his feet down on the deck, and he frowned.

"b***h," Will said, and hit her.

His hand caught her across the face and took her off her feet. She hit the low table beside the loungers and it went over with her — drinks, ice, glass, all of it down on the deck — and Will stood over the wreck of it, breathing through his nose.

Past the pool the music was still coming out of the speakers. A server in a white shirt had stopped at the end of the deck with a tray in both hands and stayed there. Two girls by the steps had their hands over their mouths. Fifty-odd kids who could have walked off that deck any time they wanted to, and not one of them did.

Lance got up off his lounger, and it took him two tries. He left his glass on the cushion behind him.

"Hey. Hey — Will." He took two steps and stopped. "What the hell are you doing? You came all the way out here to somebody else's house to wreck it — so who are you mad at?"

Will answered him without turning his head. He pointed down at Amanda, sitting on the deck with the heel of her hand pressed to her face, crying.

"She's mine! So what the hell was going on with her and Jay?"

Around him, kids looked at each other and then somewhere else.

Everybody at that party had come from somewhere, but two families outranked the rest of them, and every kid on the deck knew which two. The Vances had the soldiers. The Thornes had the votes.

Jay Vance and Will Thorne had been at each other since they were four years old, and it was never about the thing in front of them — a yogurt cup in a cubby, a seat at the end of a bench, a girl at somebody's ninth birthday. Whatever was in the middle of the room that week, the two of them went at it from opposite sides, and every kid on that deck had grown up watching it.

The one everybody still told was the spring of eighth grade: a crew on each side, a fight behind the athletic fields that ran until dark, and the equipment shed past the track burning by the end of it. Both houses went to work that same week — lawyers, a gift to the school with nobody's name on it, a file that afterward nobody could find — and what came out of it was the Compact. One house doesn't put its hands on another house's people. What was owed went through the fathers, and it stayed quiet. After that spring, the rule had two names on it.

The laugh came out of Lance all at once — loud, wet, wrong — and it broke the room open anyway. He got both hands up.

"Okay. That's on me." He turned with it, taking in the faces as he went. "I didn't know she was with you, Will. Nobody tells me anything."

"Jay's been in a mood since he got up this morning. Ask anybody here. So we had a bet going — who could make him laugh first — and it was Amanda's turn." He held both palms out and left them there. "She was tickling him. That's all you walked in on."

For a second nobody took it. Then a kid in the middle of the crowd said, "Yeah. It was a bet."

Another kid behind him said, "That's what it was."

"Right?" Lance said, offering it around — to the crowd, to Will, to the lounger where Jay lay. "Right, Jay?"

Jason didn't answer him. Neither did Will.