The first thing Smurf notices about you is that you don’t flinch when she grabs your chin.

Most kids do.

But you just stare back at her with hollow, exhausted eyes while police lights flash across the diner windows behind you. Cheap sneakers soaked from running through alley puddles and a handgun clenched so tightly in your trembling hands your knuckles have gone white.

Too skinny. Too sharp around the edges. Like something half-starved that learned how to bite before it learned how to trust.

Smurf recognizes it instantly because she used to look the same.

You grew up in motel rooms that smelled like mildew and cigarettes, raised by a mother who kept choosing survival over dignity because survival paid quicker. Men drifted through your childhood in waves—drunk, angry, greedy. You learned early how to disappear into corners. How to stay quiet.

Your mother always swore she’d never become that kind of woman.

Until one night she did.

The memory still makes your stomach twist: the stranger sitting on the edge of the bed counting bills while your mother cried in the bathroom pretending not to hear you scream for her. You remember grabbing the lamp before the man could touch you. The sound it made against his skull. Running barefoot down the highway—your mother never once coming after you.

After that, Oceanside swallowed you whole.

You stole food when you had to. Slept wherever you could. Learned quickly that pity was worthless and fear worked better. By the time Smurf finds you trying to rob a diner with an unloaded gun, you already look at people like you’re waiting for them to betray you.

Smurf plays along perfectly.

When the cops arrive, she’s sitting beside you in the booth sipping coffee while you shake silently over untouched pie.

“She’s just upset,” Smurf tells the officers smoothly, one manicured hand rubbing your shoulder like she’s known you forever. “Family problems.”

And somehow, impossibly, they believe her.

Outside in the parking lot, you finally mutter a quiet, suspicious, “Why’d you help me?”

Smurf smiles around her cigarette.

“Because,” she says, “you could learn a thing or two from me.”

So she takes you home.

The Cody house overwhelms you immediately. It’s loud in a way poverty never is. Music playing at all hours. Pool water shimmering under backyard lights at midnight. Smurf slides into your life so naturally it terrifies you. She teaches you how to read people, how to manipulate without seeming manipulative, how to spot weakness the second someone walks into a room.

Because beneath all the pretty clothes and beach-house luxury, the Codys survive the same way you always have. They just do it better.

You warm up to most of her boys eventually.

Craig’s easy to figure out. Deran keeps you at arm’s length but stops glaring after a few months. Baz charms everyone so naturally it almost feels rehearsed.

But Pope—

Pope is different.

He lingers at the edges of rooms like he’s separate from everybody else entirely. There’s something deeply unsettling about the stillness he carries, like violence packed tightly beneath skin. He cleans obsessively after jobs. Watches people when they aren’t looking.

For weeks, maybe months, the two of you barely exchange more than a few words. Just lingering eye contact across rooms. Silent acknowledgments in hallways. Mutual wariness stretched thin with curiosity underneath.

Then one night the house is loud with music downstairs, Smurf throwing some party that spilled into the backyard hours ago. You’d tried to ignore it, tried to stay composed, but something cracked open anyway.

Maybe it’s exhaustion. Maybe it’s memory.

You lock yourself in the upstairs bathroom and cry as quietly as possible, knees pulled to your chest on the cold tile floor.

You don’t hear the door open at first.

Pope.

He doesn’t say anything immediately. Just sits down beside you slowly, arms resting on his knees.

“Smurf cried a lot too,” he began.

“…she doesn’t seem like the type.”

“No.” Pope glances toward the hallway. “She just did it when she thought no one was watching.”