CHAPTER FOUR.
PIPER DOCKED THE boat at the dock stretching out from the marina that was strictly for the Abernathys'. The coast guard tent was part of the marina which the Abernathys, well, owned. Piper didn't really care whether she would get in trouble or not, but if what Edith said held any truth at all, Harry and Inez wouldn't care. JJ may wish his sister didn't have to work so much, but not fighting for a spot to dock at the marina the day after a hurricane was nothing short of miraculous.
Twisting the keys, Piper pulled them out of the ignition and spun them around her finger into her palm. She picked up JJ's dry tank top off the deck of the HMS and pulled it over her head as John B and JJ tied the ropes around the four-by-fours of the dock. There was another boat—the Abernathys' fishing boat—docked on the other side, which Piper regarded with a spare glance and a shrug when Kie looked at it questioningly.
The plan was simple enough: hit up the coast guard tent, get a finder's fee, and get back to do whatever the Hell they wanted. Day after a hurricane also means no work—even for Piper. Piper wasn't exactly sure when or how she was supposed to find out when to clock back in with no service, but she would cross that bridge when she got to it.
"Piper!" Willa called from a vendor's tent as the five of them walked up the dock and across the jetty toward the coast guard.
Piper squinted into the sun until she found Willa's silhouette underneath the tent next to Edith who was pointedly not looking at Piper and her friends as they joined the sisters. "Yo."
"It's a madhouse in there," Willa jutted out her chin to point to the coast guard's tent. There was, in fact, a line stretching up the pier. Willa looked around Piper, counting heads and blushing when she realized Pope was looking at her, "Only a few of you'll be able to get in."
"We got this," John B said, slinging an arm around JJ's shoulders and pulling him toward the line. Kie smiled tightly at Edith and Willa, but then turned her entire body to lean against a wooden beam with her hip, hiding behind Pope's figure. Kie didn't hate Edith and Willa the way she hated Sarah Cameron, but, from what little she's said about it, her Kook year was all around unsatisfying.
"Hi," Willa chirped happily to Pope who was standing just behind Piper. Thinking better of it, Willa started massaging the centers of her palms to keep herself busy, but she had gotten both Piper's and Pope's attention, so Willa cleared her throat—a small, kittenish thing, "Um, Pope. Hi."
"Hello, Willa," Pope replied and glanced at Piper for help in navigating the conversation, but Piper was biting her lips to hold in laughter and determinedly looked at Edith. The one thing Piper and Edith joked about was just how bent Willa was for Pope, but Edith was steadfastly ignoring Piper. Arguing was something they did, yes, but they didn't usually ignore each other. That would be like ignoring an elephant stomping across a room made of glass.
"What's up with you, princess?" Piper asked.
Willa looked at Piper, seemingly glad to get out of replying to Pope—on the pretense of dignity, of course—, then she elbowed Edith, "She's pissed at you."
"I can see that," Piper nodded. "Why?"
"She was worried about you. She woke up yesterday and you were gone."
Edith elbowed Willa in the ribcage, but kept herself looking straight ahead to the coast guard tent, "I wasn't worried. I was glad you were gone."
"Yikes," Piper said, her mouth slightly agape in awe of Edith's ferocity. She found it kind of funny, too, though. Like, yes, Edith was insulting Piper's very existence—once Edith got annoyed because she could hear Piper breathing—but working Edith up was something that brought Piper great, unfiltered joy.
Then, John B and JJ rejoined the group.
"That went well," John B said sarcastically, pulling Pope, Kie, and Piper away from Willa and Edith to talk secretly and conspiratorially. Piper didn't know for sure, but she thought one of the reasons Edith probably hated her so much was because she would drop everything just to cater to her brother and her friends. Even at the expense of others. Piper had certainly dropped things at the expense of Edith.
JJ draped his elbow over Piper's shoulder, and Piper shoved him off. JJ looked her in the eyes, mock-hurt across his face, "What if I had canine diabetes, Pipe? Would you let me lean on you then?"
"No," Piper deadpanned, then she scrunched her nose in curiosity. "Can dogs even get diabetes?"
"Shut up, Maybanks, for, like, two seconds," Kie said benignly.
"What's the plan?" Pope asked and JJ set his elbow back on Piper's shoulder.
"I know how we're gonna find the guy who owns that boat," John B said, twirling the motel key between his fingers.
Pope pointed at the key as JJ took it from John B to inspect it, "We don't know whose room that is. It could belong to anyone."
"I'm in," JJ said resolutely, tossing the key over Pope's head to Kie.
"Come on," Kie said, egging on Pope with a smile. "I'll be lookout."
John B put his hand on Pope's shoulder as he passed and whispered, "Finder's fee. Just sayin'."
"I'll be the getaway driver, Pope," Piper grinned, dangling the keys to the HMS Pogue in front of her nose.
John B turned to look at Pope and said, "See? At least you'll only be an accomplice."
"Come on..." Piper groaned, pulling at Pope's chambray.
"Oh, wait, Piper," Willa said as Piper let go of Pope's shirt and nudged him forward, so she could pick up the back of the line. Edith groaned with distaste and acute annoyance. "Dad gave us your paycheck. It's on the boat, I can grab it. Unless you're in a rush?"
Piper turned back, but looked over her shoulder at her friends for direction. John B nodded, so Piper told Willa that, "Yeah, we're in a bit of a hurry..."
"S'fine," Willa shook her head. "We'll be here all day, just swing by later if you can."
"'Course," Piper grinned and winked at Edith who had turned happily now that Piper was leaving. "See ya' later, princess."
━━━━━━━
ANY AND ALL side conversations had stilled with the waves as Piper rounded the marshland to dock at the bank behind the motel. Piper sucked in a breath and JJ whistled, "I thought The Chȃteau looked bad."
"This place is a shitshow," John B said and Piper nodded. Piper stood on her toes to see over JJ's head as he bent down to grab the anchor.
"Motel or meth lab?" Kie asked
"You be the judge," Pope said. They were speaking in flippant jokes, but the motel with its water-damaged panelling, panels of shingles missing, and broken windows with even more torn-up shades made the atmosphere eerie. Piper couldn't even see it in a kaleidoscope, finding-beauty-in-destruction type way.
"Doesn't look like a place somebody with a Grady White would stay," John B said.
"No," Pope swallowed his thought, but it came back up anyway. "It looks like a place someone with a Grady White would get killed."
"Here we go," Piper muttered as she turned the stern toward the bank. "Brace for impact..."
"This is your captain speaking," JJ said into his shoulder, morphing his voice to sound like it was tinny and shuttering through an intercom. "HMS Pogue comin' in for landing."
JJ whooped as he jumped off the boat and onto the bank, dropping the anchor on the grass.
"We good?" John B asked. JJ echoed him, and Piper turned the keys, the engine and propeller stuttering to a halt. "All right. Here goes nothin'."
"Hey," Pope called out. John B turned around to look at Pope, Piper, and Kie from the stern. Pope pointed at JJ haphazardly, not taking his eyes of John B, "Don't let him do anything stupid."
"Oh, we will," JJ said, nodding at John B.
"I'm not making promises," John B shook his head.
"Piper, wanna come babysit?" JJ asked, a devious smile on his lips.
Piper scrunched up her face, "No fuckin' way. You two wanna get asbestos exposure? You're on your own."
"Be careful," Kie handed John B the key. He looked up at her, waiting for her to crack the punchline. But she didn't have one. "I mean it."
John B chuckled and hopped off the stern.
Pope and Kie settled onto the floor of the boat. Leftover breeze from the hurricane pushed Kie's and Piper's hair around their faces, but Kie had more patience than Piper ever would, so she pulled the top half of her hair into a bun, but she was staring at Kie smugly the whole time.
"What?" Kie asked finally.
Piper shrugged, "Nothin'."
"Shut up. What is it?"
"Be careful?" Piper mimicked, "I mean it?"
Kie rolled her eyes, but everyone knew what Piper was suggesting. Everyone had seen it.
Pope snorted, "What about you, Piper?"
Piper's face fell into one of confusion. "What about me?"
"When are you gonna admit you're completely in love with Edith Abernathy?" Kie asked, raising her eyebrows, and Pope nodded.
"I'm not attracted to every girl I see, y'know?" Piper crossed her arms over her chest, walked around the small, unguarded cockpit, and sat against the metal guarding the steering wheel.
"Oh, we know," Pope said. "That's not what we were implying."
"Yeah, no," Kie interjected. "It's just Edith Abernathy in particular."
"Why do you two think I'm in love with her?" Piper asked skeptically, and a bit on the defensive. Pope and Kie shared a glance. Piper was on the defensive.
"Well," Pope started diplomatically. Pope always spoke like that—slow and didactically when he was going to explain something, as though he was explaining how to divide fractions to a third grader. "Besides the fact that you like to antagonize the people you love to show affection—"
"I don't do that."
"You splashed JJ after he was catapulted off the boat," Kie pointed out. "Then got into a dunking fight with him."
"He's JJ, though. I'm his sister, it's like my job to be a prick."
"May I continue?" Pope asked, and Piper waved her hand in accordance. "Besides that, and the fact that you enjoy working, not for money, but to spend time with Edith, she's your type."
"Okay, Einstein," Piper scoffed, deftly ignoring the accusation that she liked to spend time with Edith for any reason besides annoying her. "What exactly is my type, then?"
"Mm, let's see," Pope looked at Kie as though they were mock brainstorming together. "Approximately, 5'4", curly brown hair, brown eyes, generationally wealthy, LaCroix-drinking girls named Edith Abernathy. And Gillian Anderson."
"Okay," Piper smiled wryly. "Ha ha, but it's not my fault that Gillian Anderson is really hot."
"Are we just gonna skip over—"
"I was planning on it—"
"Hey, hey, shut up," Kie said abruptly, nervously. "Cops."
Piper and Pope ducked down, and Kie crawled onto the stern. There was, in fact, a blue and white Kildare Sheriff's Department Chevy Silverado parking in the motel's parking lot. Piper's heartbeat was in her ears.
"Call them," Pope told Kie.
"Can't," Kie hissed back. "Towers are down."
Kie, Pope, and Piper stepped off the stern and onto the bank, crouched and knees bent to make themselves as small as possible.
"If I lose my merit scholarship, I'm gonna kill someone," Pope whispered. The three of them hid behind an uprooted and off-kilter motel sign. Kie stuck her head out from around the edge of the blue and orange sign. Two sheriffs—Shoupe and Plumb, Piper had spent a lot of time at the department with JJ—were speaking with some man, probably the motel's owner, pointing at a room. "Maybe they're looking for a room?"
"Look, look, he's pointing!" Kie said, her voice shrill. The room, Piper is ninety-eight percent sure, JJ and John B are snooping around in. "They're going up there."
"If JJ gets in trouble with the police again..." Piper trailed off. "Pope, I would volunteer to be the person you kill."
"They're going," Kie said and ran across the open grass to the side of the motel, Pope and Piper in tow. "Okay, do something. Do something."
Pope picked up a rock from the ground and waved his arms at Kie and Piper, "Stand back."
Kie and Piper complied, but when Pope threw it, the rock blew right, missed the window, and hit the wooden fence that was, somehow, still standing. The rock thudded pathetically. If Piper wasn't entirely committed to be the optimistic one, she would've cried.
"Didn't you ever play baseball?" Kie asked, then bent down to find her own rock.
"I was on the math team."
"That, actually, makes perfect sense," Piper muttered, and picked up a rock that fit in the center of her palm. She rolled out her shoulders, "I got this. I slept with someone on the baseball team freshman year."
Kie stood up and looked at Piper incredulously.
"I did!"
"Just throw the rock," Pope said, grabbing Kie's shoulder and pulling her behind Piper. So, Piper chucked the rock up. It felt like it was moving in slow motion, then it clattered against the windowpane, and Piper exhaled audibly. Kie took the rock in her hand and threw it up, too. It tapped the glass. They waited.
The blinds split open, and John B's face peeked through. Piper, Pope, and Kie pointed feverishly to the left and mouthing 'cops.' John B pushed the blinds out of the way, looked at the direction they were pointing, then disappeared. Piper, Pope, and Kie looked at each other, terrified, and ran back to the HMS Pogue. Kie and Pope spun around and knelt on the stern, their stomachs against the warm metal, and Piper crouched behind the steering wheel. She spun the keys, and the engine spluttered to life.
"Should we peel?" Kie asked.
Pope turned to look at Kie, "We never leave a Pogue behind."
They waited.
They watched JJ and John B crawl onto the outside windowsill. They weren't jumping down.
"No, seriously, should we peel?" Kie asked with more strength.
Pope tilted his head to the side slightly, contemplating, "Maybe."
"I absolutely cannot believe they're that fucking stupid," Piper breathed when John B and JJ turned their head against the white brick wall to look at them. They hung onto the draining pipes connecting to the gutter.
"What are you doing?" Pope called out to them.
"Oh, my God," Kie said.
Piper pointed to her eyes with her index and middle fingers, then spun her hand around and pointed at JJ, and mouthed, "I'm gonna kill you."
JJ grinned and put his finger over his lips. It was silent for a moment, John B and JJ had leaned toward the window slightly to see what the deputies were doing. JJ and John B started whispering furiously at each other and JJ dropped something black and heavy out of his pocket. It clattered loudly against the dumpster pressed against the wall of the motel. Piper knew a lot of things. She was familiar with a lot of things. And she knew, without a doubt, that a fucking gun fell from JJ's pocket. She was going to kill him.
The blinds shot open, JJ and John B inched as far away from the window as they could, and Deputy Shoupe's face started surveying the area. Pope and Kie spun around and Piper cleared her face, pretending to laugh at something Pope had said. Piper could feel bile climbing up and stinging her throat.
The deputies left and JJ and John B climbed down the drainage pipes like spiders. The boys scrambled onto the boat and Piper peeled, taking them back the way they came.
"Well, that was fun," JJ laughed, cockily and a little hysterically. "So, Pipe, where we headin'?"
"The marina," Piper cranked the wheel to steer around a dock and metal panels floating in the water. "So, I can get my paycheck and pay for your funeral."
"Relax," JJ said dismissively. "You could have warned us a little sooner."
"We would have," Kie said, stretching her legs out across the deck of the boat, "except Pope was on the math team."
"You were on the math team?" John B asked.
Pope ignored him. "The cops took everything like it was a crime scene. Did you guys find anything?"
"Did we find anything? No, I don't think so," JJ echoed theatrically, sticking his hands in his pockets and wiggling in his spot. He pulled his hands out of his pockets, a wad of cash in one hand and the gun in the other. "Oh, yeah, we did."
"What the Hell?!" Pope asked, Kie echoed. Piper was grinding her teeth from tensing her jaw so tightly. She was going to murder her little brother. "Why would you take that from a crime scene?"
"It's better than the cops having it," JJ shot back indignantly, pulling his hands away when Pope went to grab the gun, but even Pope thought better of it and pulled his hand back, too.
"I'm gonna lose my merit scholarship," Pope said, looking at Piper.
"Hey, hey, hey. Sh, sh, sh, sh," JJ threw one arm over Pope's shoulders, and with his other hand, brought the gun up to Pope's lips. "At least you have us, right?"
"I'm living the nightmare."
Piper looked at JJ, "I love you, dude, but I need you to put those away, and sit on your hands before I capsize this thing—" she gestured vaguely to the boat— "on purpose."
━━━━━━━
WHEN PIPER AND the Pogues reached the marina again, it was a swarm. It wasn't a swarm of fidgeting lines, though. No, it was a mob. Willa and Edith hadn't moved, they were still perched by the same vendor, but other teenagers had crowded around them too, watching EMT pull a body off a fishing charter on a stretcher.
"Who's that?" John B asked Willa, nodding at the stretcher. Edith ended up standing next to Piper, so, naturally, she wasn't in the talking mood. Piper was pissed—a JJ for stealing a gun—but she was also self-conscious of the fact that people think she's in love with Edith Abernathy. What did in love even mean? Is it a place? Can she leave?
"It's Scooter Grubbs," Willa said. "He was out during the storm."
Pope was in between Willa and Piper, so he leaned forward slightly to see, and Willa blushed, stiffened, and held her phone out to him, "Check out this photo."
Piper leaned over Pope's shoulder who was leaning over Willa's. It was a photo of the dead body. Piper shuttered and turned away. Edith glanced at Piper through her peripherals. "Yeah, it's gross."
"What kind of boat did he have?" JJ asked.
"Somehow, that marina rat managed a brand new Grady White," Willa said.
"Shut up, Wills," Edith said, reaching across Piper and Pope to smack Willa's arm. Piper bristled involuntarily. "Don't call people that."
But then Willa's words sunk in, and Piper almost cracked her neck to look at John B. Brand new Grady White. Willa shrugged her sister off, "Everyone's out lookin' for it. Sucks we have to stay here."
"We, uh," Piper started, sticking her tongue in her cheek. "We should check out."
Pope, JJ, John B, and Kie all nodded, standing up and stretching out. Edith dug through her bag on the ledge of the vendor's stand and pulled something out. She held it out to Piper; it gently tapped her stomach, getting her attention. "Your money."
"Uh, thanks."
✧.*ೃ༄ [ 𝘅. author note ]
wrote this instead of a doing the
DBQ i have due today