"WELL, THAT WENT WELL," POPE MUTTERED WHEN JJ AND JOHN B CAME BACK FROM THE HELP DESK. They were at the Marina, planning to tell them about the boat, but it seemed that they had bigger problems.

Leaning his elbow on his best friend's shoulder, JJ questioned, "So, what's the plan?"

"I think I know how we're gonna find the guy that owns that boat," John B informed them, holding up the motel key that they found in the sunken boat.

"We don't know whose room that is, okay?" the Heyward boy pointed out, shaking his head in disagreement. "It could belong to anyone."

JJ grabbed the keys from his best friend and threw them to Kie who was standing behind Pope. "I'm in."

"Come on," the Carrera girl urged, smiling at the boy in front her. When she noticed that Bree was also hesitant about the plan, she bumped the girl's shoulder. "I'll be lookout. Bree and Pope can hang in the boat with me."

"Okay, fine," the brunette muttered, walking with Kie down the dock as JJ followed after them.

"Finder's fee. Just saying," the Routledge boy told Pope with a shrug before racing after his friends. "And hey, at least you'll only be an accomplice." The Heyward sighed loudly but came along nonetheless.

As they pulled up to the motel whose name was on the key, JJ whistled. "I thought the Chateau looked bad." The Chateau, as Bree had figured out through context clues, was what they had named John B's house.

"This place is a shit show," the brunette boy mumbled while his blonde best friend got the tether ready for when they got close enough to the land.

Kie nodded, "Motel or meth lab?"

"Who says it can't be both?" questioned the Callaway girl. She hadn't even known that that place existed, but it seemed like it looked better after the hurricane hit.

John B furrowed his eyebrows. "Doesn't look like the type of place somebody with a Grady-White would stay."

"No," Pope agreed, surveying the building as they pulled in next to another boat that looked absolutely nothing like a Grady-White. "It looks like a place where someone with a Grady-White would get killed."

"Or where they'd hide their drugs," Bree added.

The blonde boy that was standing up turned to her with a questioning expression as he asked, "Where does someone with a Grady-White get drugs?"

"A drug dealer," she replied simply, and he rolled his eyes at her before looking back at the motel.

"All right. Here we go," JJ said as they got closer and closer to land before making his voice sound like a pilot on an intercom. "This is your captain speaking. HMS Pogue comin' in for landing. Whoo!" He cheered, jumping onto the grass.

Bree couldn't help but smile as he tied the boat to the land so that they didn't float away, and John B quizzed, "We good?"

"Yeah, we good," the blonde replied, standing back up.

"All right," the Routledge boy nodded, turning off the engine as he got ready to step off the boat. "Here goes nothing."

Pope leaned forward. "Hey."

"Yeah?" John B stopped so that he could listen to what his friend had to say.

Pointing to the Maybank boy that was ready to go, the Heyward said with a pleading voice, "Don't let him to anything stupid."

"Oh, we will," JJ assured him with a smirk, making eye contact with his best friend before allowing his eyes to shift to the brunette girl next to him for just a moment. She didn't notice, however, because she was too busy staring at the motel.

Turning back to Pope, John B shook his head, knowing that there was no way that he could keep JJ from doing anything stupid. "I'm not making promises."

"Yeah, I know," the other boy sighed.

"Uh, be careful," Kie told the brown-haired boy as she handed him the room key, and Bree raised her eyes at her friend. "I mean it."

John B breathed out with a smile, "Yeah. Let's go." He and JJ began making their way up to the room, and the three teenagers in the boat stared after them.

"What was that?" the Callaway girl questioned once she was sure that the boys were out of earshot.

The Carrera girl furrowed her eyebrows in confusion. "What was what?"

"'Be careful, John B," Bree mimicked in a voice much higher than Kie's. "'Oh, I just don't know how I would live if you got hurt."

"I did not sound like that," the raven-haired girl scoffed, rolling her eyes, but Bree could see that her cheeks were slowly turning pink the more they talked about it.

Pope chuckled. "You kind of did, Kie."

"Okay, whose side are you on?" Kie quizzed with raised eyebrows as she whipped her head toward the Heyward boy.

He raised his hands in defense. "The side of the truth, and you truthfully sounded like that."

"Whatever," the Carrera girl said, running a hand through her hair and looking down in embarrassment. "Let's talk about something else."

"Okay, Bree, what's your biggest pet peeve?" Pope asked, turning to the brunette girl in between him and Kie. 

"Um," she trailed off, thrown off by the sudden topic change as she contemplated what it was. "Oh, when people suck up their snot, and it makes that, like, weird snorting noise."

Kie groaned, "Oh, that's disgusting."

"That's really gross," Pope agreed, scrunching his face up in disgust. "What about you, Kiara?"

"Biggest pet peeve?" she questioned with raised eyebrows, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.

The Heyward boy confirmed, "Yeah."

"Easy," she replied, pointing at him as what she was going to say came to her mind. "Giving one percent to the environment."

"What's wrong with that?" he asked.

"We only have one Earth, Pope," she explained, and Bree nodded along, seeing where she was coming from. She also hated it when someone just did the easiest thing to protect the environment. "We should be giving it a hundred percent, bare minimum."

He nodded slowly. "Right. That's not fiscally sound."

"Neither is destroying the planet we live on."

"Now you're making me sound like an asshole for saying sucking up snot," the Callaway girl told Kie with a playful glare.

Pope froze, staring at a spot behind Kie with panicked eyes. He tapped the side of the boat to get their attention. "Hey, hey, cops."

"Shit," the brunette girl muttered as they all stood up, and a deputy vehicle pulled into the parking lot of the motel. They could see it through the gate that separated land and water.

The Heyward boy muttered urgently, "Call them." Bree wasn't sure which one of them he was speaking to, but it was most likely the Pogue.

"I can't. Towers are down," Kie reminded him.

"If I lose my merit scholarship, I'm gonna kill someone," Pope informed them as they climbed out of the boat and creeped behind a sign so that they could get a better look. "Maybe they're not going up. Maybe they're just — Maybe they're just looking for a room."

The Callaway girl, not one to look on the bright side, mumbled, "They're going up there."

"Okay, do something. Do something," Kie whispered as they raced to the side of the building where they could see the window of the room that JJ and John B were in.

Pope panted before reaching down and grabbing a rock from the ground and taking a few steps back so that he could get a better angle. "Stand back."

"Okay. You got it." The two girls nodded, backing up. Pope leaned back and chucked the stone as far as he could toward the second floor window, but it landed pathetically on the ground a few feet away. "Didn't you ever play baseball? Dude!"

"I was on the math team," Pope defended as Bree picked up another rock.

Kie raised her eyebrows at him in disbelief and slight amusement. She probably would've laughed if it weren't for the situation. "A mathlete?"

"You know what?" the Heyward muttered, so done with her as they could hear the police officers getting closer.

Both of their eyes widened when the brunette girl threw the rock and it hit the glass of the window hard, making a loud cracking noise. Waiting a few seconds, they were relieved when they saw John B's head poke out from under the blinds.

They jumped up and down, pointing at the balcony and mouthing 'Cops'. The Routledge boy's head disappeared for a few moments, and the next thing they knew, him and JJ were climbing out of the window.

The three teenagers on the ground ran back to the boat, but when they realized that the other two weren't following them, Pope turned around to see them pressed up against the wall. They were standing on a tiny ledge on the second floor. He rolled his eyes and whispered, "What are you guys doing?"

"Oh, my God," Kie groaned. John B put a finger to his mouth, telling them to be quiet while JJ just laughed and made weird motions with his hands.

The best friends were mouthing something to each other when something black and metal fell out of the blonde boy's pocket, hitting the metal roof below them before clattering to the ground.

Bree flinched at every sound the object made as it fell to the floor, and Shoupe's face appeared in the window as the two boys pressed even tighter against the wall. After a moment, the officer's left the room, and the brunette let out a breath she didn't know she was holding.

"Well, that was fun," JJ commented once they were all back on the boat and heading home. "Could have warned us a little sooner."

"We would have, except Pope was on the math team," Kie informed him with a look in the Heyward's direction.

JJ raised his eyebrows. "You were on the math team?"

"The cops took everything like it was a crime scene," the other boy pointed out, ignoring the question all together. "Did you guys find anything?"

"Did we find anything? No, I don't think so. Oh, yeah, we did," the Maybank told them, pulling a gun and a wad of cash out of his pocket. Bree realized that the gun must've been what fell.

The three others that hadn't been in the room with them widened their eyes in shock as Pope exclaimed, "What the hell?"

"Dude, what?"

"Dude, chill. Come on." JJ stood up, walking over to Pope was to show him his treasure excitedly.

The Heyward boy was not having it, though. He stared at his blonde friend in astonishment. "Why would you take that from a crime scene?"

"What the fuck?" Bree muttered, moving over to where they were standing so that she could examine the things further, and sure enough there was a real gun and a stack of various bills.

JJ shrugged. "Better than the cops having it."

"You serious?" Kie questioned John B, which for some unknown reason, made the smile on his mouth drop.

Pope took a deep breath, looking away from the blonde boy that might've just ruined his life. "I'm gonna lose my merit scholarship."

"Hey, hey, hey. Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh," JJ muttered, pulling the Heyward boy in closer and patting him on the back of the neck whilst staring in his eyes. "At least you have us, right?"

"I'm living the nightmare," Pope groaned in response, stepping away from JJ and having a seat back behind the wheel of the HMS Pogue.

"Is this what all of y'all's outings are like?"

《✵》

BREE WAS EXHAUSTED, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS ONLY FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON. After the fiasco at the motel, the Pogues had dropped her off so that she could keep her promise to the Carreras and help out. After a couple of hours, she went home, ready to take a nap to recharge.

Her plans were interrupted, however, when she opened the door and saw none other than Sarah Cameron sitting on her bed, playing with the magic eight ball that usually sat on her nightstand. "What are you doing here?"

"Your mom let me in," the blonde explained, which didn't really answer the question. "Where have you been all day?"

"Work. What have you been doing?" Bree shrugged before flopping onto the bed next to her best friend. She lied because she knew that if she told Sarah where she had really been, she would be bombarded with questions, and she just didn't have the energy to deal with that at that moment.

The Cameron girl sighed, placing the black ball back on the bedside table and turning to the Callaway girl. "The birds were trying to eat the mice that got flushed out of their burrows, so I spent the day hitting them with a tennis racket."

"Naturally. I'm sorry I wasn't here to help," the brunette apologized.

"It's fine." Sarah waved her off before looking around the girl's room for a moment. "How did your house get, like, no damage at all? I mean, when I was walking in, there weren't even any leaves in the driveway. Like, what the hell?"

Propping herself up on her elbows, Bree chuckled softly. "I'm so sorry. If it makes you feel any better, next time there's a hurricane, I'll make sure we get swept off to Oz."

"Thank you," the blonde replied with a smile. Then, her eyes widened as if she had just remembered something. "Oh, I heard there was going to be a party at the beach tonight. You wanna go?"

"I don't know. I know he's your brother and all, but I really don't think I have the energy to deal with Rafe right now," Bree hesitated after contemplating it for a moment.

The Cameron girl rolled her eyes. "First of all, he's on my brother by blood, and I honestly don't understand how you put up with him all the time. Second of all, he's not even gonna be there."

"Really?"

"Yeah. He and my dad have some 'business' to discuss, whatever that means," Sarah informed her friend before giving her a questioning look. "So, are you in?"

She thought about it for a couple more seconds, but when the blonde have her a pleading look, she nodded. "Sure. I'm in, but only if I can get at least an hour of sleep in first."

"Great." Her best friend beamed excitedly, standing up from her seat on the bed. "Oh, and wear something nice. I wanna have the hottest date there."

"Well, I'm not gonna be able to stay awake if you don't let me take my fucking nap."

"Okay, okay. I'm going."