CHAPTER ONE
blow a kiss to your girl

BRIAR THORNTON doesn't believe in the idea of looking up when she was made to be revered if not feared. All her life she spent on top of things—cheer, sex, secrets, power. It's a silly notion, but she can't stand it when she isn't at the pinnacle looking down at the people beneath her like some kind of Olympian god.

That's why she's standing on the roof with John B. Or, John Bitch, as she likes to call him, while the others are one or two levels below, drinking lukewarm beers and touching things they aren't supposed to touch. They're all gutter rats, the Pogues. That's what her mother calls them, at least. Briar was never one of them, but because of Kiara, she supposes she can make this one sacrifice. Run with the plebeians, but make sure they know you're not one of them. Her mother's words.

Eyes closed, Briar tilts her head to the saffron-robed sky, letting the sea breeze caress her skin, invisible fingers snuck through her hair, tugging at the limp spaghetti straps of her white tank top. Somewhere above, a seagull squalls like it's trying to wake something under the sea. Her heartbeat roars to the static pulse of the waves, every little hitch in its rhythm pulling her back into the present, the ocean sprawling before her like the dragging train of her evening gown. The world is your oyster, her mother used to say, until Briar grew up and altered that tired platitude to better suit her own tastes: The world is my kingdom. It revolves around me, and me only. Nobody can take what's mine.

"The key is your centre of balance," John B says, like he of all people should be lecturing her on balance while he's wobbling on one foot on the precipice of the rooftop, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker. He takes a sip from his can. Briar gets the urge to give him a little push. It's what she used to do to the JV bottom-feeders of the cheer squad. Push and push and push until they're sent off crying, realising all they are and all they ever will be are sheep in a world full of wolves.

"At least close your eyes." Briar comes up behind him, walking along the beam of the gabled rooftop with ease. "Make it a little less boring."

"It's harder than you think," John B deadpans.

Unimpressed, Briar scoffs.

Slanting her an aloof look, a challenge flickering in his eyes, he turns, planting a calloused hand on her shoulder for stability. "Let's see you try, then, top girl."

"Scoot, John Bitch," Briar sneers, and now she's standing on the edge, looking out at the sea, her audience.

"Do a flip!" Pope yells from the deck directly below her.

Sucking in a steadying breath, Briar lifts her leg, a thousand things reeling through her mind at once. Posture: shoulders back, spine straight, chin pointed up, head tipped to the sky. Core: like a drawstring pulling tight, tight, tighter as her arms V-split over her head. In her head she counts to ten, holding perfectly still. It's almost mechanical instinct now, this one simple motion and all its thousand tiny working parts. It's perfect. She's done it from the top of a human pyramid before, been flung twenty, twenty-five feet above the ground by human hands. Her body can spin, flip, fly, execute all these phenomenal, gravity-defying feats most people can only dream of. This rooftop is nothing. It's a joke. It's hardly a throne.

"That's top girl shit!" From the scaffolding off to the side, JJ cheers and claps loudly. Bless him. JJ knows jack about cheerleading, but he's got one thing right. Briar Thornton is top girl material. She's worked every hour she could spare and then some on carving her body into the perfect machine.

She pivots, sending John B a smug look, even though she doesn't need his validation.

He only hums, feigning dissatisfaction. "Mediocre at best."

"Your go," Briar says, as they shuffle to reverse their positions, John B's arms looped over her shoulders, Briar's fingers staking into the flesh of his elbow until he's teetering on the edge again. Again, she has the urge to give him a push, just to see what he'd do. "Don't kill yourself. Or do. I don't care."

"That's, like, what? A three story fall to the deck?" Pope says, squinting up at John B, "I give you about a one in three chance of survival. At least Briar doesn't look like she's about to buckle like a little bitch."

John B hums sardonically. He sticks his finger in his mouth and puts it up, like he's judging the direction of the wind. "Should I do it?"

"If I push you, would you be mad?" Briar muses.

John B twists round, lips pulled into a saccharine grin. "I'll take you down with me, Thorny."

Briar slants him a cool smile and flips him off. Against all deterrent efforts to kill the nickname, the boys persisted, growing bolder and bolder each day. She could easily leave, she reminds herself. She could easily walk away from them, but where would that leave her? Staring at the house across the street, watching her father live out this suburban fantasy he'd carved out for himself behind his picket fence. No thanks. Besides, Kie likes these guys. The jury's still out for Briar.

"Oh, no. That is a door you do not want to open, John B," JJ scoffs. Perched on the scaffolding, he traces the rip of his beer can with a finger. The wind ruffles the little lick of blonde hair jutting out from under his cap. "Even I wouldn't try it, and I make it my personal responsibility to open every single door available to me."

As the boys banter, Briar's phone gives a little buzz, and she fishes it out of her pocket. Four incoming messages from Allison, one of the girls she'd met at cheer camp a couple years back. Three of the messages are pictures. Nudes, actually. For a second too long Briar's gaze lingers on the peachy flesh tucked into too-small lingerie before she reads the last text asking her to rate which one would get her boyfriend harder. Desire is a low ache in her core, but she stuffs it down, knowing that going for straight girls is an invitation to a world of inconvenience as her thumbs tip-tap over the keyboard: make him sweat a little longer before you open your knees again u slut.

Besides, her and Allison aren't like that. They don't even live in the same state anymore. They wouldn't see each other again until next summer, if cheer camp doesn't get cancelled again.

"They're gonna have Japanese toilets with towel warmers," Kiara says, sounding almost scandalised as she emerges from the inside of the half-finished house, hands trailing the beams holding up the incomplete construction work.

"Of course they are, why wouldn't they?"

"This used to be a turtle habitat, but who cares, I guess?" Kiara drawls.

"I can't have cold towels."

"Can you guys please not kill yourself?" Kiara gives John B an exasperated look, her doe eyes flickering between him and Briar.

Briar peers down at Kiara. If it weren't for Kiara, Briar would never have lowered herself into the Cut. If it weren't for Kiara, Briar might've been smoking in the parking lot of some long-lost seven-eleven chewing and spitting a stale chocolate chip cookie pilfered from the shelves, bored out of her mind like she always is these days, just so she wouldn't have to stare into her father's front lawn and picket fence across the street a moment longer. She supposes she owes it to Kiara to at least be civil with her scummy, trouble-seeking friends on the other side of the Outer Banks. In truth, she might even prefer this ragtag group of lost boys to hanging with the arid crowd from school who talked a blue streak about uninteresting things like detox teas and the latest diets and which boys they were planning to sink their acrylic claws into at the next house party.

These days the boredom is smothering. What do people do outside of cheer besides hook up and shop and get drunk? Briar almost pities the nobodies. Almost. And then she met the scumbags Kiara called her boys, the Pogues. The boys are from a different world entirely from Kiara and Briar's suburban paradise on Figure Eight. They go to public school in the more rural side of Kildare Island, while Kiara and Briar attend an uppity sort of private academy that neither can stand because everyone is the same. They may look different, but inside they're all the same. JJ tells Briar that Kiara's a Kook—that meant rich kid, apparently, but Briar thinks the OBX vernacular is colossally stupid, like something a first-grader would use in their play-pretend fantasy world—but she's cool enough to bother with them. Nobody knows why, really, but Briar has a vague idea even if Kiara didn't exactly try to justify her taste in friends. Briar saw, though, that Kiara's dullness instantly fell away when she was with the Pogues.

"Don't spill that beer," JJ warns. "I'm not giving you another one."

Briar snatches the can out of John B's hands and takes a long sip. Then John B wrestles it out of her hands and drops it onto the deck, where the remainder of its contents splash across Pope's legs and stain the deck a darker shade. Briar wipes her palms over her cut-off denim shorts.

"Oh, shit," John B swears, his expression deadpan, not very apologetic at all.

"Of course you did," Kiara sighs, looking about a hundred percent done with John B's antics.

They take turns jabbing at John B until Pope leans over the railing at the same time Briar spots the shiny shell of a police car.

"Uh-oh. You call the cops on us, Kiara?" Briar muses, and when a pained expression crosses Kiara's face for a moment so brief Briar thought she might've imagined it, she knows her words had struck home. They both knew what it meant.

"Security's here!" Pope calls, clapping his hands together, chop-chop, ever the big-brother. "Let's wrap it up!"

"Boys are early today," John B remarks.

JJ whoops, levering himself off the scaffolding. "Humpty Dumpty, let's roll!"

"Move it, top girl," John B grunts, right behind Briar as she slides down the side of the roof.

"Come on, Bay Area, we don't got all day!" JJ laughs, extending a hand as she scoots all the way on her ass.

Briar gives him a withering look.

JJ's dubbed Briar Bay Area ever since she'd told them where she was from before her mother made the crackpot decision to uproot their entire lives just so Briar's father could be reminded of their presence, as if by moving into the house across the street from Paul Thornton and his classy new family would keep him from running away from his responsibilities. Really though, she's from Hayes Valley but nobody knows where that is, and JJ says Bay Area's close enough. Sometimes Briar misses the landlocked Western Addition, where the cheerleaders are more successful than their high school's football players, but she misses being able to breathe easy even more.

"Gary is that you?!"

Gary yells something back that Briar doesn't hear because the next thing she knows, she has Kiara's wrist in her hand and they're laughing as they bound through the empty house, leaping over idle tools and construction sheets. In this moment, something comes alive under Briar's skin, a thrill that beats through her body like an impulse. JJ hoots and Briar catches Kiara's impish grin as they thunder down the stairs, narrowly missing Gary's reach.

"Might wanna start a summer diet, Gary!" Briar crows, throwing her head back and cackling.

More security guards try to ambush them, but years of cheerleading has made her nimble and Briar easily evades their hands, always reaching, always grasping thin air. Maybe they're too slow. Maybe Briar and Kiara are faster. Maybe it's because they have their youth gripped between their adrenaline-sharpened teeth. But it feels like nothing can catch them. Nothing can touch them. Kiara boosts Briar over the fence and Briar grips Kiara's elbows to lever her over, and this is when Briar thinks that this is the most alive she has been all summer while they're running from security, jumping into the back of their shitty getaway van. The moment they're in, John B jerks the van to life. Briar collapses on top of Kiara and she is grinning, equal parts menace and mirth, eyes blazing, heart pounding, a laugh tearing from her chest and Kiara's gaze is glimmering as she lets Briar grab her face between her hands and plant a kiss on her cheek.

JJ and Pope vault over the fence just in time for John B to pull the van around, honking with urgency.

"Bus is leaving!" JJ yells, and Kiara pushes the door wider. Both boys leap in, JJ tumbling over Briar's legs without ceremony, and John B floors the gas.

"Look at Gary gunning for a raise!" JJ laughs. Briar looks out the window, and sure enough, there is the rotund security guard pounding the pavement, just barely keeping up with the van. John B slows down a little, not out of pity, but just so they can laugh and jeer because they are young and there is nothing more cruel than teenagers who would burn down the world just because they could.

"Hey, you little pricks!"

"You're gonna give him a heart attack."

"Fatso needs to lay off the donuts," Briar sneers, pressing her face against the window.

JJ sticks his head out the window. "You're so close! You can do it! Come on!" To add insult to injury, he tosses his empty beer can at Gary. "There you go! They don't pay you enough, bro."

"JJ, stop, stop," Kiara says, just barely stifling a laugh. She has a hand knotted in the back of JJ's shirt, reeling him back in.

"Oh, come on, that sort of initiative is just begging to be punished," JJ exclaims. He jabs a thumb at Briar, who looks a little unimpressed. "Bay Area agrees. Hey, Thorny, flash him your tits."

Baring her teeth, Briar jams her foot against his surprisingly taut bottom. "I think he'd be more interested in yours."

Kiara slides the door shut.

As the van pulls further and further away from Gary, who's grown exhausted and is hunched over with his hands on his knees, as they pass the baby blue WELCOME TO THE OUTER BANKS / PARADISE ON EARTH sign, Briar tears her gaze away from the window and settles back in her seat. Outside, the sea beckons, San Francisco gold rush glittering in the sunlight.

Beneath her thighs, the cracked red vinyl pinches at her skin like a jilted lover, but Briar barely feels it. She shares a surreptitious smile with Kiara, who leans her head against Briar's shoulder like it's the only place to be. And because it really is, Briar rests her head against the crown of Kiara's head. Their fingers twine together, and Briar feels the hummingbird beat of Kiara's pulse against her wrist. Maybe it's the light slanting in through the dusty window gilds JJ's sun-bronzed skin in rosy-gold, or the way John B's soul-deep eyes flash like a setting sun in the rearview mirror, or the way Pope's dark skin seems to be glowing with his toothy smile, but Briar is starting to understand why Kiara's always been a little bit in love with them in a way.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
🥰🥰 look!!!!! they're adorable. also, briar is definitely not the most likeable person i guess but yknow.

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SUNDRESS ── jj maybank / kiara carrera
Chapter One, BLOW A KISS TO YOUR GIRL.
⚓️ S1.01: PILOT