His body was huge. Every part of him thick and solid and filling up space in front of me. But his eyes were empty. Gray and flat, colorless against the red of his face.
There wasn’t a part of me that wanted to be standing there, inches away from him. But I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what my father and Mr. Finn had been arguing about, but I knew the tone of my father’s voice well enough to know he’d been angry. And it was obvious that Mr. Finn was either drunk or a jerk. Maybe both.
Now all the emotion from this morning flooded my mind. The pain in my ankle was a white heat spreading up my leg. The word ding-dong swirled around in my head. Kat’s face flashing in front of me. My father’s scared eyes and crazy grin.
My head spun, a small hurricane building inside of me, and before I could stop it, words spilled out of my mouth.
“My father taught me a lot of things,” I blurted, standing on one foot as tall as I could. “One of them was not to hit people.”
Mr. Finn’s eyes lit up. Flashing from dull gray to slivers of ice.
“Well, see, you’re a girl, so I wouldn’t expect you to know the difference. But that was a tap. Not a hit. See, a tap says, ‘hey, listen up, kid,’ but a hit. A hit’s something different. A hit puts somebody on the ground.” He watched me, waiting for my response.
When he didn’t get one, he leaned closer. “Ask your father. Ask him if he thinks someone who gets hit by me would still be standing.”
I heard a rattling noise and turned to see a rusted silver pickup truck behind us on the street. We shuffled to the side so it could pass, and it parked directly across from us. The door opened, and a boy stepped out of the driver’s seat and glanced over at us. Mr. Finn tipped his chin up as a hello, but the boy didn’t return the greeting. Mr. Finn turned to me again, and I felt my body stiffen, but he stepped away, talking as he backed up.
“Tell your mother I said it was a great party. And don’t forget,” he warned, pointing his finger at me. He walked backward until he reached his truck. A loud rumble filled the air as he drove away, disappearing around the bend.
I leaned down, looking to see how bad my ankle was, when suddenly there was a shadow over me. Dark and large. I sucked in my breath and stood up quickly. The boy from the truck put up his hands and stepped back.
“Whoa. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Here to help.”
“Did I ask for your help?” I snapped. “What is this? The sneak-up-on-people street?”
I turned away from him, hopping on one leg over to my bike.
“Wait a second,” I heard him say, and I looked over my shoulder at him.
“You’re bleeding,” he said. “Look.” He pointed to the line of blood running down my ankle, dripping over the side of my flip-flop.
I wanted to get on my bike and ride away as fast as I could, but the pain in my ankle was making me nauseous. I hopped over to the curb and sat down.
The boy walked over to his truck and leaned in through the open window. When he came back, he handed me an old beach towel.
“It’s clean,” he said, gesturing to my foot. “Use it.”
I reached out slowly and took it, mumbling a thank-you and pressing it to my ankle. After a minute, I lifted the towel and saw the cut was just a deep scrape, but the side of my foot was swollen.
“It looks like it’s sprained,” he said, and I glanced up, trying to get a look at him out of the corner of my eye.
He had a baseball hat pulled low on his forehead. He wore a baggy T-shirt with tan cargo shorts so worn that strings of fabric from the frayed edges dangled around his knees.
I reached down and pressed gently against the side of my foot, a bruise already spreading over the swollen area.
“Do you need a lift somewhere?” he asked. “You can’t ride that.” He pointed to the bike.
The only thing I wanted was to leave this street. I stood and put my weight on my good ankle.
“I don’t live far. I can hobble.”
“You don’t live far as in next door? Because that’s about how far you’ll get.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
He looked at my ankle and shrugged. “Okay. Hold on.”
He walked over to the bike and wheeled it over to me. I took a step, and a sharp pain shot up my leg. I winced, and he grabbed my elbow, taking the bike from me with his other hand. I had no choice but to lean my weight on his forearm for support.
He was only inches from my face now. The brim of the baseball hat had shielded his eyes until he looked at me. His face was sharp and angled, a shadow of brown stubble on his chin. He smelled like my skin after a day at the beach. But it was his eyes that made me suddenly aware of how close he was to me. They were green. The color of the inside of a kiwi, with specks of tan and black in the center.
Besides an awkward kiss with Robbie Messina in back of the gym at the eighth-grade dance and the two times I’d slow-danced with Josh Brown at the semiformal, this was the closest I’d been to a boy.
But even the word boy seemed wrong.
He wasn’t a man, but mannish—more mannish than Josh Brown would ever be.
“Hello?” he said, craning his neck at me.
He’d been talking to me, and I’d been thinking about how mannish he was. I dropped his arm and hopped back a step. He stood with his arm extended, as if he wanted me to know I could still grab hold if I needed to.
“Look. Are you sure you don’t want a ride? We can throw your bike in the back of the truck.”
I shook my head, hopped back to the curb, and sat down, thinking about what to do next.
“Okay. Well,” he said, taking his hat off and running his hand through his hair. It was brown, and curled up at the ends from where his hat had pressed down. “You can’t walk. You won’t let me drive you anywhere.” He paused. “I have a phone inside. You can call your mom . . . or dad . . .”
“No!” I said, remembering the lie I told about babysitting. “Nobody’s home. . . . My parents are out on our boat for the day.”
“How about a friend, then? Look, I know I scared you earlier, and I’m a stranger, but I can’t just leave you here on the street . . . hurt and bleeding . . .”
“I didn’t say you scared me.” I blushed.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I just meant I sort of snuck up on you over there. And you’re smart about the ride. I mean, I wouldn’t want my daughter getting in a car with someone she didn’t know.”
“You have a daughter?”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I thought you meant you had a daughter.”
He smirked, raised his eyebrows. “It was sort of hypothetical.”
I blushed again. I didn’t know if it was the pain in my ankle or his kiwi-colored eyes, but suddenly I was nervous, frazzled.
“Wait a second,” he said, a look crossing his face. “How old do you think I am?”
“I—I don’t know,” I stammered, not wanting to study his face with him staring at me the way that he was. “I’ve never seen you at school, and it’s a small town, so I just figured you were older.”
“How old?” he pressed.
“I don’t know.” Thinking, Does it matter?
He tilted his head to the side and waited. Apparently, it did.
I shrugged. “Nineteen. Twenty?”