*
There was frost on the ground Monday morning as Bay walked down the driveway to the bus stop. Phin was already there, his hands stuffed into his yellow hoodie, a black knit cap on his head.
He grinned when he saw her. “Welcome back to the bus stop, where the fun never ends. Not grounded anymore?”
“I’m not sure,” Bay said as she approached. “There’s a baby in the house now, so I think my mom forgot about taking me to school. I just kind of … slipped out.”
Phin nodded with approval. “Bay Waverley, rule breaker.”
She stopped beside him and stared at him, brows raised, as if waiting for him to say something.
“What?” he asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I finally watched the video everyone’s been talking about, the one someone recorded on their phone of the fight at the Halloween dance,” Bay said. “That blur of something that knocked the guy from Hamilton High off of Josh? In slow motion, it looked exactly like someone covered in a bedsheet.”
Phin shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Huh. Is that so?”
“A bedsheet with a rosebud pattern. It was you,” she said. “You sent him flying.”
Phin didn’t say anything.
She gave him a shove. He was still as bendy as a straw. “Turns out, you really are the strongest man in town, Phineus Young.”
He waited a few seconds before acknowledging, “No one was more surprised than me. You knew my dad, before he died. He was a hulk. But then I got to thinking, my grandfather Phin was skinnier than me. He was in his nineties, and people were still asking him to dig wells and break through ice on Lunsford’s reservoir in the winter.”
“Riva knows, I take it?” Bay asked with a smile. “Is that the reason she gave you that note on Friday?”
He took the note out of his jeans pocket. “I haven’t read it yet. I’m savoring the possibilities.”
Bay smiled at him. “Possibilities are good.”
Phin tucked the note back in his pocket and they stood there, the world covered in a blanket of crystals, and waited for the bus to arrive.