Page 6 of Crew Girl

Lake and river, actually. And if you didn’t factor in Liam, the cox.

Details.

He was a big-picture kind of guy and a natural-born leader.

He hadn’t needed to know everyone’s names or run a Reign of Terror to get here either. Not with his pedigree. He was a sixth-generation Regis gracing the halls of the East Coast’s most exclusive prep school. His crew were some of the wealthiest teenagers in the USA. If you didn’t count Cam. They razzed him about being a scholarship kid, but everyone knew bank balances didn’t matter when you were in the boat. Earning your seat did.

Meaning, the Josh Regis style of leadership was more… benevolent. He’d finished his stuff-a-kid’s-head-down-the-toilet phase years ago. The rest of the crew, too. Apart from Quaid. He’d given a guy a swirly last year, but he’d had his reasons. And he’d filled the tank with Evian beforehand. Quaid was thoughtful like that. And he gave great piggybacks. Which is why the team was always there to back him up.

That was how the Easton Eagles’ rowing team rolled.

Sometimes, though? A leader needed to knock some heads together. Remind them of the mission. Winning. After this morning’s inaugural practice session? Six of the guys needed to demand refunds from their training camps or admit they hadn’t gone.

Cam had probably spent the summer brooding under the hoods of cars he could only dream of driving, let alone owning. How that townie had come back looking so ripped was a mystery. He rowed in whatever seat Coach put him. Apart from Josh’s. No one who glowered that much could sit in stroke seat. Actually, no one apart from Josh could sit in stroke seat. It would stay his until the day he threw off his graduation cap to make some waves at the college of his choice. Or at least that was the plan.

The Easton Eagles had fallen off the map of crews to watch. Making it Josh’s responsibility to put it back on recruiters’ radar. That meant going Chad Alpha on the team. It was time to make some waves. His future depended on it. Meaning, theirs did, too.

They didn’t need to know why. Or what happened in Baltimore. They just needed to win.

“Right, boys.” Shower time was as good a time as any to dole out the tough love. “We need to wash off today’s disaster and start fresh.” He grabbed the bar of soap his girlfriend, Britney, had given him last night with instructions to use it after practice because she didn’t like it when he smelled like “wet lake.”

Wet lake? What other kind was there?

Whatever. It kept her happy and as it was the first day of the fall term, he knew she was as busy as he was, setting the stage for them to continue their reign as King and Queen of Easton Prep.

The bar wouldn’t lather. Yet another thing that wasn’t performing the way he wanted it to. He threw it into the next stall. “Catch, Crabby!”

Crabcatcher—the pipsqueak at the back of the boat—caught it, lost it, caught it again, then somehow sent it flying into the trash can. Everybody cheered. All of which set the stage for Josh to towel off and jump up on one of the cedar benches with the grace of a tiger.

And then he let rip, detailing where they’d gone wrong, how to turn it around next practice, and what would happen if they didn’t.

Half an hour later, he and Ryder, the team’s number two rower, led the pack up to the school’s main quad. As Noah, the team’s brainiac, started talking about all the books they were meant to have read over the summer, Josh caught up with his cousin.

“How was Baltimore?” asked Ryder.

“Intense.” Josh wasn’t going to give anything away. “Princeton?”

“Same. Their team is full of giants.”

Any college team worth joining was.

“We’re still growing. We’ll be the same when we get there. But better.”

Fist bumps.

Ryder had wanted to go to Johns Hopkins with Josh, but he’d nixed it, framing it in a way that made it look like he only had his cousin’s best interests at heart versus what it really was—pushing him away. It was always a delicate balance with Ryder because a) they needed him on the crew if they stood any chance of winning, b) he was a loyal right-hand man, and c) they were related. Unfortunately for Ryder, his mom was the poster girl for the black sheep side of the family. The side Josh’s dad not-so-secretly called “The Egregiouses.”

“Hold up.” Josh stopped Ryder with a hand on his chest. “Girlfriends. Twelve o’clock.”

The rest of the team formed a semicircle behind them.

“What are we looking at?” Bronson, aka Baloo, looped his mammoth arms around their shoulders. He was the team’s powerhouse, chief of the boat’s “engine room,” and its cheerleader and heart-on-his-sleeve peacekeeper, too. He was always saying “Don’t fight, guys, please” whenever the team got into one (which they did on a daily).

“Britney. Amber. Determining the new year’s world order.”

“Ohhhh…” Baloo knew the drill. Josh’s girlfriend was his twin sister. “Britney’s doing her Queen Bee thing with the newbies?”

That she was.