Phinn held his pint glass up for a toast, and everyone followed suit.
“Splash!” he declared.
“Splash!” everyone echoed loudly. The Daltons smiled politely and wordlessly clinked their glasses.
“You say ‘cheers’ on the mainland. Splash is the term we use around these parts,” Phinn translated.
“Oh, got it. Splash, everyone!” Wylie replied, awkwardly lifting her glass again.
For a few minutes, no one spoke as they devoured their dinner. Wylie doused her shrimp with the green dip and took a bite. The sauce tasted like lime and avocado, and the shrimp was so fresh, she could barely stop herself from moaning in delight. She washed it down with a sip of coconut milk that tasted sweeter than the canned kind she cooked with back home.
“Wylie,” Phinn said, “How old are you?”
Wylie, mouth full, swallowed her food quickly and nearly choked on it. “I turned seventeen yesterday, actually,” she answered.
“And Joshua, what about you?”
“Sixteen,” Joshua answered. Phinn gestured to Micah to answer.
“Fifteen,” he said, and then with a glance to Tinka, “but people think I’m a lot older.”
Phinn replied, “The people in this room tonight are members of what I like to call my inner circle. They’re the people I trust most in the world.” Wylie felt her stomach flip. It shouldn’t have mattered, but she hated the idea of Tinka being that important to Phinn.
“How old are you guys?” Phinn asked the rest of the party. They answered in unison:
“Seventeen.”
“And when will each of you turn eighteen?”
Again, they responded at the same time:
“Never.”
Copyright © 2016 by Sara Saedi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.