Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
EVEN THOUGH IT'S THE LAST PLACE she wants to be, ever, Briar demands that John B drops her off in front of her house first. Supposedly the gang is going to bum around on John B's boat until dinner time and maybe try their hand at catching something for dinner, but Briar truly doesn't understand the appeal of fishing. She doesn't even like fish. Although, hanging out in John B's boat does sound better than going home. One advantage of living in the Outer Banks is that she can get in a real tan before the summer ends so she doesn't have to be like the other girls who constantly reek of too-orange spray tans. But first she has to make sure her mother hasn't died of alcohol poisoning while she was off gallivanting with her new summer crew.
"I'm home! It's me!" Briar hollers, her voice echoing against the marble floor tiles as she throws the front door shut— "Your darling daughter? Light of your loins—" and kicks her shoes off. That's when she sees it.
In the past year, Briar has come to think of her new house as more of a cavity than a home. It's a classic two-story with an attic cluttered with little boxes of bits and bobs that either didn't quite fit anywhere, or her mother just couldn't be bothered enough to sober up and unpack. Its pearl-white walls are bare except for the gilded mirror mounted on the wall at the end of the hallway that Briar catches herself preening in every morning before she leaves the house.
Sometimes she pretends she is the evil queen in Snow White—she knows she's grown way past the time little girls still believed in Prince Charmings and white horses and happy-ever-afters, but some part of her can't help but latch onto the darker edges the way she stakes her fingers into gummy JV flesh to keep them from stepping out of line. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the hottest bitch of all? And she's standing there, in her tight tank top and the miniskirt that's pushing it, all wolf-wicked blue eyes and sun-kissed skin stretched over toned legs that garnered too much attention.
They never go into the kitchen, and Briar's mother never cooks, so after a whole year and a half, all the boxes are still sitting on the island counter. On the lacquered coffee table in front of the leather sofa, there are stray things like keys and dirty wine glasses and a ceramic ashtray her mother bought from their trip to Bali a few summers ago soiled now by cigarette ash and lipstick-ringed cigarette butts. Proof of existence. Sometimes there are flowers in glass vases—or what her mother calls minimal effort to spruce up the place, make it look less bone-dry—but they're usually dead by the end of the week. Even though she knows she's stuck here for as long as her mother wishes—or at least until college—Briar can't help but feel like they're just passing through because there's nothing in this place that makes it feel like a home.
Nothing much changes within this hollow cavity, so everything is noticeable at first glance. They're not minimalist by choice.
So when she notices a pair of expensive white boat shoes next to her ratty Converse, she smells a fucking rat in the house.
