on top of her hat the only part of her visible in the moonlight. “Come on.”
It took them a long time to scale the side of the tower. The ancient iron ladder creaked dangerously, the wind stinging Colby’s cheeks as rust on the rungs coated the palms of his hands with a rough orange dust. “Mike,” Colby muttered, glancing down and immediately getting dizzy, his fingers beginning to numb. All at once the magnitude of his own stupidity reared up at him—his dad would have skinned him alive for a stunt like this, had his dad still been around to have opinions on things like what Colby did or didn’t do. “Shit, dude, this is really high.”
“Don’t look,” Joanna warned from underneath him, her voice surprisingly calm. “If you look it makes it worse.”
“I’m not looking,” Colby promised, turning his face skyward. If he started thinking about his dad—that day in the garage in the rainstorm, how in May he’d have been gone a full year—he was going to lose the plot for sure, so instead he gritted his teeth and forced himself to think of nothing, hand over cold, clumsy hand on the ladder until finally he swung one leg over the guardrail. He pulled Joanna up after him, the two of them grinning at each other in dumb relief as Micah and Jordan fist-bumped beside them, all of them giggling like a bunch of stoners.
That was when the cops showed up.
Two hours later, Colby sat in a brightly lit holding room, a can of ginger ale going warm on the scarred wooden bench beside him. He had no idea why he’d asked for ginger ale, honestly, like he was flying on a fucking airplane and not sitting here waiting to find out if he was going to jail or not.
He’d never actually been on an airplane, come to think of it. Maybe this was the closest he was going to get.
Colby sighed, leaning his head back against the painted cinder-block wall behind him. They’d split all of them up into separate rooms; he’d craned his neck for a last worried look at Joanna as a lady guard led her down the pee-smelling hallway and Micah yammered on about his civil rights. Colby’s wrists were a little red from the handcuffs, which seemed like overkill. It wasn’t exactly like the four of them were a quartet of criminal masterminds here.
This wasn’t Colby’s first encounter with the Ross County Sheriff’s Department, though he’d never been carted down to the station in the back of a squad car until now. He hadn’t actually been in this building at all since his second-grade class trip. His dad had been one of the chaperones, Colby remembered suddenly; they’d all gotten plastic sheriff’s stars from a gallon-sized Ziploc bag at the reception desk up front.
He should try to stop thinking about his dad.
“Colby,” Keith said now, coming into the holding room and shutting the windowed door behind him. He was wearing his mustard-colored deputy uniform with Olsen stitched across the pocket, his hair cut short on the sides and slicked back with pomade or gel or something at the top. It was, Colby thought, an extremely try-hard kind of haircut. “How’s it going in here?”
“Fine,” Colby said, sitting up a little straighter in spite of himself, as if Keith were an actual authority figure and not the same boner he’d been since everyone used to make fun of him for eating his own boogers back in elementary school. “Is Jo okay?”
Keith raised his eyebrows, like he wanted to make it clear that he’d noticed Colby’s interest and was filing it away for later consideration. “She’s fine, too,” he said with a nod. “Her stepdad came and got her.”
Colby blew a breath out. Jo wasn’t his girlfriend—they’d never even kissed, though Micah never missed a chance to tell him how nutless he was for not having, in Micah’s words, hit that by now—but that didn’t mean he wanted her spending the night at the sheriff’s department just because the rest of them were a bag of smashed assholes. “Okay,” he said, relaxing a little. “Good.”
“He left Jordan here to sweat it out a couple more hours, though,” Keith continued, sitting down on the opposite bench and resting his slightly girlish-looking hands on his knees. “Can’t say I blame him. The hat alone should be a capital crime.”
Colby didn’t smile. “Should you be telling me that?” he asked instead, crossing his arms and frowning. Now that