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up to our slip at the wharf, still smiling. Me more than him, but it was one of those things. The thrill of getting away with something
together.
He hopped off the deck first and held his hand out for mine.
    It never crossed my mind that Coyne might be out on the water too. He must have cut his engine the same time we did, so we didn’t hear him approach.
    “Hey, Dixon,” he shouted.
    We both turned, just in time for Coyne to appear in the mist. Just in time to see the gun, but not fast enough to do anything about it.
    He fired twice.
    It sounded like a wire snapping, hollow and high-pitched. It echoed forever, ebbing into the distance. I understood what happened, but I didn’t
know
it. Not until Levi stumbled back onto the boat and fell into me.
    Black blood spread on the front of Levi’s shirt. And then it started spitting. His air poured out through his chest instead of his throat. My body moved on its own because I wasn’t thinking.
    Silence swallowed me. I snapped the tab on our EPIRB, our emergency beacon. The radio inside it crackled to life, sending a mayday to the Coast Guard. And because we were supposed to use it out at sea, a strobe burst to life on top of it.
    Blinded, I sank to the deck and clapped a hand over the hole in Levi’s chest. Heat spilled from it. Dark foam bubbled between my fingers. In my shock, I thought I saw his soul slipping out, a grey ghost that lingered near his chest.
    But it was cold that night. It was just frost forming on the heat of his blood, the same way my breath hung in the air. Above us, the rescue beacon pulsed, lightning that bounced off the fog in eerie patterns.
    “Coast Guard’s coming,” I told Levi.
    The last thing Levi ever said was, “’Kay.”
    I kept thinking,
Too bad Dad doesn’t smoke anymore,
because every time he watched
Platoon,
he’d tell us that the plastic wrap on a pack of cigs could close up a bullet hole. Slap it on, good as new. It was stupid trivia. Who even knew if it was true?
    But that’s what I was thinking while I tried to hold in my brother’s last breath
.
     
    It wasn’t until Ms. Park left that Dad finally came in. While I boiled mud and memories from my skin in the upstairs shower, I listened to him talk to my mother in the kitchen.
    Not his words—I couldn’t really pick them out. Just his voice, rising and falling. Slipping beneath my mother’s voice, strange and dark. Maybe it was about me. I didn’t know; I couldn’t tell. But it felt like an accusation.
    It was always obvious to my parents what happened that night. Pretty much the whole village knew and understood. Our waters were our waters. If Coyne hadn’t dropped gear on top of ours, he’d have been dropping it on someone else’s.
    Broken Tooth didn’t have much. We were all starving a little bit, shrinking every year. Bailey wouldn’t come back. A degree in political science wouldn’t do her any good around here. The bright ones like her, they went off to the world. To New York Cities and LAs and Londons. None of the Baileys came back.
    Instead, tourists moved in, all romantic about living Down East. Untouched wilderness, rustic everything. Then they paved it and blocked off our beaches. They pitched a fit about how much noise we made in the harbor when we went out to fish. They held condo meetings about the stink of salted herring that lingered when we sailed out.
    But our harbor was what we had. Our families and our town. The burying ground was full of slate gravestones, our names all the way back to the 1600s. Washburns, Dyers, Dixons. Archambaults and Ouelettes, on and on, over and over.
    What I did, my neighbors woulda done too. The Coynes and the out-of-towners carried poison with them. No one in Broken Tooth would have blamed me.
    Ducking my head under the water, I let heat flow through my hair and run the trail of my lips. Fresh wateralways smelled like blood, especially when it was turned up hot. The steam robbed me of deep breaths. I stared as sand