I hear Utah barking and Agnes yelling my name. Hear people in the crowd shouting. But all I can think about is the blood coming from this guy’s nose and where I’m gonna hit next.
But even though he’s skinny, he’s taller than me and probably a good thirty or forty pounds heavier. So after I get a few good punches and kicks in, he gets his senses together and shoves me on my back. My head hits the concrete, and for a minute I see stars. But I still manage to slam my knee up into his crotch. He grunts in pain, but he don’t let me up. Instead, he throws his own punch, right in my eye.
“Get the fuck off her!”
I just barely see the long white cane flying down and colliding with the back of this asshole’s neck.
He yelps and jumps up, but I’m guessing he’s more surprised than hurt. Either way, it gives me a chance to throw my weight—little as it is—at him, knock him back on the ground. I throw another punch and land it right on his mouth.
I might have a black eye, but he’s gonna be missing a tooth.
Then there are hands on my shoulders—lots of them—dragging me off the motherfucker. And there are hands on him, too, pulling him away, across the pavement.
A few people ask me if I’m all right. Others ask me what the hell is wrong with me and call me a crazy bitch. And someone else shoves a ziplock bag full of ice in my hand, tells me to put it on my eye.
“Bo,” Agnes says, at my shoulder. She’s got her cane in one hand and Utah’s leash in the other. “Oh my God. What were you thinking? I mean, thank you. But what the hell were you thinking?”
I ain’t got a chance to answer before someone shouts, “Cops are on their way.”
“Oh shit,” I say. “Agnes.”
But she heard it, too, and shoves Utah’s leash into my hand before taking hold of my arm.
I push through the crowd, avoiding hands that try to grab me, to hold us back. We dodge in and out of the crowd as strangers yell after us, telling us to stay, to stop.
But we can’t do that. Because we cannot be here when the cops come.
So we run.
After my grounding was over, Bo and I became inseparable. Not just at school, but everywhere. She spent nearly every Friday night at my house, and she must’ve been growing on my parents, because when she wasn’t around, they asked after her. How she was doing in school, if she’d taught Utah any new tricks, that sort of thing. Mama even asked once what she liked to eat so that we could have one of her favorite meals for dinner when she came over next.
But Daddy was the one who’d really taken to her. Probably because she laughed at his jokes more often than Mama and I did, and he loved talking to her about Utah, who camped out on our back porch whenever Bo was over. It was more than that, though. He even defended her when Grandma made a comment about rumors that I was spending time with “that harlot.” Daddy stood up for Bo real fast.
“She’s a nice girl,” he told Grandma. “And it’s sure hard to imagine she’s doing all the running around people seem to say when she’s at our dinner table most nights.”
I gave Daddy so many hugs in the days after that, he must’ve thought I’d lost my mind.
Daddy was also the one who convinced Mama to let me go out with Bo sometimes. Not to parties. They always had an excuse why that wasn’t all right. But sometimes they’d let us go grab some fries and a milkshake at Marty’s, a little fast-food place down the road. Colt almost always met us there, but we didn’t tell my folks about that. They may have liked Bo, but I wasn’t sure they could handle me spending so much time with a male Dickinson.
But the more time I spent with Colt, the more I realized how wrong people were about him. He was quieter than Bo, but obviously very protective of her. He seemed more like her brother than her cousin. And when he smiled at me—a smile so wide even I could see—it gave me this fluttering feeling in my stomach.
And sometimes, just occasionally, when our legs would brush under the table or he’d touch my shoulder for an instant—it made me think again about what it might feel like to kiss him. And I knew I was gonna be sad when he left for his new job in January.
Not that I’d told Bo that, though. It was one of the few secrets I kept.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you” had become our little game. We played almost every time we were alone together, and I devoured each detail I learned about Bo.
Like that her full name was Isabo June Dickinson.
Or that she was deathly allergic to bees and, because of that, was terrified of them.
Or how when she was eleven, her mama brought home a German shepherd puppy without any warning. She’d bought the dog from a guy in the next town, who was selling pups for cheap. Bo’d named her Utah after seeing a picture in a travel book. “It just seemed like a nice place,” she said.
But there were things I still didn’t know about Bo Dickinson. Like why, after spending the night, she was always gone when I woke up in the morning. Or why she never invited me to her house.