“What’s wrong with you, man? Breaking she nose!”

“Figure he finally throw a good punch now.”

Gogo looked from face to face to face. When he saw Edwin, laughing with the rest of them, he was seized by an urge to run at his friend and tackle him to the ground. It was Edwin’s fault. He had made this happen, matching him up with her. The blood had been thick and gummy, like the strawberry syrup at Milk Queen.

But when the sun went down and the boys dispersed for the evening, Edwin walked over to Clive.

“What you want?” Clive muttered, and kept walking.

“Come on, Goges, don’t be like that!”

“Get dead, Edwin,” Clive shouted behind him.

“Slow up, man!” Edwin sprinted after him. “I’m sorry, okay? For true.” He put his skinny arm around Clive’s shoulders, and though Clive wanted to shove his friend off, he didn’t. “You know, I think you finally rid we of she for good,” Edwin said. He grinned mischievously, like this had been their secret plan all along, the two of them. And Clive felt better. He grinned back at his friend. Together, they walked the darkening roads home.

WHEN THEY were fifteen, the island’s first big resort, the Oasis, opened on the south coast. A year later came the Grand Caribbee, and then, in quick succession, Salvation Point, the Villas at Sugar Cove, the Oleander, and Indigo Bay. The arrival of the resorts brought other changes. Sir Randall Corwin Airport underwent a massive expansion and began offering direct flights from New York and Miami. It became unremarkable to see a white family gnawing on jerk chicken legs at Spicy’s. The sleepy streets near the island’s only deepwater port were renamed Hibiscus Harbour as part of an initiative by the island’s Tourist Board; Victorian fa?ades were put up on the fronts of the buildings and stores opened selling duty-free perfume and timepieces, Tshirts and batik sarongs, Cuban cigars and souvenir bric-a-brac: palm frond hats and seashell picture frames and bottles of local sand. The port was rebuilt with berthing facilities for fifty yachts and a jetty that could accommodate up to three cruise ships. Within a few years, the island became a popular stop on cruise itineraries; during the high season, Carnival and Celebrity and Royal Caribbean ships moored at the port daily and disgorged thousands of tourists, and as many as half a dozen competing steel bands waited on the jetty to greet them. Paradise Karaoke opened, then Papa Mango’s, which became notorious for its thirty-two-ounce frozen cocktails.

The first of their friends to get a job at one of the resorts was Des’s older brother Keithley, who became head of water sports at Salvation Point when they were sixteen and Keithley was twenty-two. The resort offered windsurfing and sailing. There were two speedboats for snorkeling excursions. If for whatever mysterious reason the guests wished to, they could cling to a bright yellow banana boat and get dragged back and forth across the bay. At night as the boys drank and smoked wherever they were drinking and smoking that night—at Paulette’s Place, or behind Arthur’s father’s shop (for by then Arthur had given up his honor student ways and was drinking more than any of them)—Keithley regaled them with stories from work. He had watched parents chase young children across the sand for hours like fools, and a child turn inconsolable when his Shirley Temple arrived with only one cherry. His feet had been vomited upon by a middle-aged woman who drank four rum punches before she rode the banana boat. He had been told to “Take it easy, mon,” when he insisted that a man wear a life preserver to go sailing, as the resort required. He had gazed upon the supine bodies of teenage daughters and honeymooning young wives as they worked on their tans in the tropical sun.

Keithley had been at the job a few months when he showed up at Paulette’s one night with a small key in his hand. They waited until after midnight, then six of them piled into Keithley’s car and drove across the island to Salvation Point. He killed the lights and the engine at the entrance to the service road and coasted down the hill to the parking lot. They hurried across the resort grounds.

“Shit, man, check this place!” Don said as they snuck past the main deck with its three swimming pools. When they reached the sand, they broke into a sprint. They pulled off their Tshirts and dashed through the soft waves of low tide with their shirts held in their hands above their heads, to where the speedboat was moored some twenty meters out. Des reeled up the anchor and whispered, “Now! Now!” Keithley turned the key and they sped away from the lights of the resort and out into the night.

For a few weeks, until they got caught and Keithley was fired, they spent their nights joyriding. (After Keithley was dismissed, he would work for a spell at the gas station on George Street before trying his luck in Liverpool, returning three years later with a wife and a son, Jamie, who would die at nine, the freak consequence of a collision on the football pitch behind Horatio Byrd Primary, one of those moments you could puzzle over for the rest of your life—the millimeters and milliseconds by which you had been given this fate in place of all others.) They cut through the placid waters off the coast and limed on one beach or another; they drank and smoked, tussled in the shallows, blasted Public Enemy and Run-DMC, and shouted up at the stars, which wheeled overhead so fine and bright it hurt to try to understand what they were. Just to be a little bad. During the day, the beaches belonged to the snorkelers and picnickers. At night, they became theirs.

From the boat, they discovered coves you couldn’t see from land because they were hidden behind thick scrub. One night, they found a small crescent of sand surrounded on three sides by steep rock faces. They returned the next night with a rope. Keithley scrambled up the rocks and tied the rope to a tree at the top of the cliff. They returned to this spot often. They would climb the rope from the beach to the top of the cliff and stand, toes curled around the edge, the moon like a massive searchlight on the water.

“Do it! Do it!”

“Don’t pussy out, bro!”

“Three-two-one, man!”

The fleeting infinity between when his feet left the edge and when the water sucked him under was the closest to weightless Clive had ever felt. Don, Des, Edwin, Damien, Keithley—each of them in turn left the world ever so briefly behind. You could hear cars from the top of the cliff; they were less than a five-minute walk through the scrub from Mayfair Road, and from there it was less than half a mile to Indigo Bay, yet nobody saw them, or knew this spot. It was a nameless place on an island where they knew the name of every last dog and dinky fishing boat—a promise that this world, these lives, could break open.

“Someday when I’m making mad cheddar in New York I’m gonna build a mansion right up there, so close to the edge when you look out the window you just see sea,” Edwin declared one night. It was three A.M., and they were lying on the sand at the base of the cliffs with the radio turned down low.

“Cheddar,” Don snorted. “Man, quit your Yankin’. You’re not going to no New York.”

“Up yours, Don. Anyway, is what you know about it? When I’m in Brooklyn and you all still live with your mummies, you better not be expecting any barrel from me!”

“We’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Damien said.

“What you want with New York anyway?” Don asked. “Why freeze your rod off doing shit work there when you can do it here where the weather fine?”

“And hang with we at Little Beach on your day off?” Des added.

“And with we youths,” Clive whispered. He was so stoned his own words flew at his skin like wind.

“With we youths!” Don gasped, slapping his knee. “What the ass you talking about, man?”

“Nah, nah, he right!” Des shouted. “The Goges see it clear! All we liming in the shade with some Cruzan, and we wifeys making chat, and we sons playing windball in the sand.”

For a moment they were quiet as the vision Des had painted seemed to take life above them in the dark sky.

“We wifeys nagging and we babies whining, you mean,” Edwin said. “Anyway, I’m not gonna be doing no shit work in New York. I got plans, what you think?”

“Hear that, breds?” Don said. “Edwin gonna be a big man! What I think? I think you’re full of shit. I think ten years from now you still living with your fat sisters. I think you gonna dead here, same as all we. Except the Doc here.”

Damien smiled modestly. He had done well on his A-levels. He would be applying to college next year.

“The frig you know about it?” Edwin continued. “I’ll swim off this island, come to that. Gogo will come with me.”

“I can’t swim,” Clive said.

Edwin pinched the fat on his shoulder. “You buoyant.” Edwin shrugged. “You’ll float.”