by Nicole Baart
“I’m sorry I was so late.”
Jenna clicked the phone off and laid it on the kitchen counter. She looked him up and down, but she didn’t ask anything. “Whatever.”
Lucas felt the weight of his unspoken confession fall between them like a lie. He couldn’t stand it. “We need to talk,” he said. It probably wasn’t the right place or the right time, but Jenna had to know.
“Not now, Lucas.”
He fought the urge to take her in his arms and pull her against his chest. To press her body against his so he could absorb all the hurt she would undoubtedly feel. “You don’t understand. There’s something I have to tell you.”
“You’ve already told me everything.” She sighed. “I just can’t. I can’t deal with it tonight.”
“This isn’t about us. Well, it is, but it isn’t . . .”
“It always comes back to us. I told you: I can’t do this tonight.”
Lucas pulled a chair out from beneath the table and nodded toward it. “I think you should sit down.”
“I’m not sitting down.”
“Please.”
But Jenna’s gaze slid to the ground. She moved around him quickly, careful not to let her shoulder graze his chest, and left him standing alone in the middle of a silent kitchen.
4
MEG
Meg and Dylan were best friends long before he ever taught her to do a wheelie or ride the handrail at the public library from top to bottom. And within days of their first real interaction, Meg knew that even if she never mastered half of the tricks in his repertoire, they were linked. It was complete, irreversible.
The fact that Dylan was older than her, or the truth that Meg was a girl and Dylan a boy, didn’t bother them either. Their friendship was something that they couldn’t have denied, whether or not they decided to care what other people thought of their peculiar companionship. And people did find their relationship unusual.
Sarah pouted when she was suddenly and unapologetically replaced by the new boy in her friend’s life, and it took months for Meg’s parents to become accustomed to Dylan’s frequent presence in their home. As for the rest of Sutton, everyone just assumed they were boyfriend and girlfriend.
Dylan went to great pains to rid his peers of that particular notion.
By the time the weather had cooled enough to make walking to school distinctly unpleasant, Meg had achieved some success with her aging BMX. She was thrilled with her own daring, and each new triumph ignited a fire in her belly that she couldn’t quite quench. It was freezing outside, but she didn’t care. After school she begged, pleaded, and finally threatened Dylan to coerce him into continuing her training regimen. Since he couldn’t say no to her, and because he was almost equally as eager to see her progress, Dylan gave in.
Bundled in hats, scarves, and heavy gloves, they took to the roads for the few hours of wan sunlight that clung to the late afternoon with admirable tenacity. It hadn’t snowed yet, but Meg could see her breath in the air, and each exhalation made a cold, damp cloud around her mouth so that her lips were cracked to the point of bleeding. Gone were the tortoiseshell clips and the ladylike maturity that Meg had experimented with her first day of high school. Instead, her long tresses were relegated once again to messy ponytails, and her clothes faintly resembled the cool grunge of a bona fide BMX girl. When it was really cold, she biked in a black cap pulled down past her eyebrows and a mack jacket that her dad had once used for pheasant hunting. It was red plaid, and it hung halfway down her knobby, bruised legs.
Meg was thus bedecked—knit hat tugged low, jacket dwarfing her thin limbs, jeans one good fall from fraying at both knees—when a group of guys from Jess’s class happened upon her trying a new jump.
The boys who were dropped off in front of the Langbroek home were not familiar to Meg, but they acted as if they knew her anyway. As the car pulled away and turned out of the cul-de-sac, the boys aborted their path toward the house and sauntered instead to the bottom of the driveway, where they stood, arms across their chests, watching Dylan and Meg.
The unlikely duo had created a ramp of sorts at the end of the Painters’ driveway. The Painters’ was the highest house in the neighborhood, and the small hill it was situated on made for a short, steep driveway that ended at a sharp angle to the tar-streaked road. Dylan and Meg had taken a long piece of plywood and propped it on two plastic, sand-filled drums that they butted up to the end of the cracked cement, making an almost flawless seam. It was no half-pipe, but with sufficient momentum, it afforded Dylan enough air to pull a few tricks.
A minute before the carful of boys drove up to the Langbroeks’, Meg had tried unsuccessfully to launch off the end of the ramp and spin her front tire 360 degrees before landing. She chickened out at the last minute, and spilled ungracefully off the side of the ramp, but any mild concern for her own safety was eclipsed by gratefulness that no one but Dylan had seen her wipe out. The only evidence that her ride had been less than she hoped for was Dylan’s presence at her side, his hand outstretched between them as if ready to help. Or comfort.
With the boys across the cul-de-sac, Meg batted away his hand and narrowed her eyes in challenge.
“Whoa, tiger,” Dylan muttered under his breath. He seemed amused. To the boys he said, “What’s up?”
The shortest one of the bunch, a redhead with acne along his hairline, said, “We’re just waiting for the show. We hear your girlfriend thinks she’s hot stuff on two wheels.”
Meg took a furious step toward them, eyes blazing and tongue smoldering with insults, but Dylan placed a stilling hand on her arm and yanked her back. When she whipped her head around to glare at him, the look on his face stopped her short. Though a smile lit up his mouth, his gaze was steel, and his jaw cut a severe line in the hazy afternoon half-light.
“Dylan,” she started, and was cut off when he squeezed her arm. Hard.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he told the boys, still smiling.
The redhead shrugged nonchalantly. “Could’ve fooled us. We wouldn’t hang out with a girl that much unless we were getting some.”
Meg felt Dylan bristle. His anger was so sharp, so acute it was as if she could feel his fury like hot, sizzling sparks that burst from his body. She opened her mouth to sass back, to defend Dylan, but he only tightened his grip on her forearm. It was all she could do not to gasp.
“I hang out with her because she’s got more guts than most of the guys around here. I can’t help it if you guys are . . . well . . .” he trailed off, lifting his hand in harmony with his eyebrows. Everything about him implied that the boys who dared to oppose him knew exactly what he was trying to say.
“Spit it out, city boy.” The redhead’s cheeks were beginning to match his hair.
“Nah.” Dylan seemed to barely contain a chuckle. “My mom says if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all.” Sarcasm dripped from his words, and he turned his back on them with a distinctly superior air. Pulling Meg with him, he bent to pick up the bike as if nothing at all had happened, and quickly checked it over to make sure that she hadn’t done any permanent damage in her fall. Satisfied, he held it out for her, and when she hesitated to take it, Dylan dipped his chin in an almost imperceptible command: Take it.
She did.
Someone from behind them began to yell: “If she’s so great, let’s see it! Come on, Little Miss Painter, let’s see you do your trick.”
Dylan looked down at her and winked. His back was turned to Jess’s friends, but he whispered anyway, “Go ahead, Meg. Show them what you’re made of.”
She began to shake her head no, but Dylan widened his eyes in what she took to be warning. The look was obvious, and Meg was surprised to realize that in spite of his confident words, Dylan cared what the older boys thought of him. More accurately, he cared about what they thought of his friendship with her. Now that she was staring at him instead of the guys across the road, Meg could tell that he was desperate for he
r to back up his claims.
“I can’t do it,” she hissed. “You know I’ll fall.”
“No, you won’t. This is just what you need—a little pressure. A reason to get it right.”
“Dylan . . .” Meg implored him, but she didn’t know what else to say.
“Meg . . .” he coaxed her right back, drawing such influence into the one word of her name that she wavered.
Giving him a dark look, she threw her leg over the frame of the bike. “If I kill myself, it’s on your head, Dylan Reid.”
“You won’t,” he assured her. His grin was so triumphant, she had to look away.
As Meg biked slowly up the driveway, standing on the pedals and taking her time in the hope of slowing her racing heart, she whispered an impassioned prayer: “Don’t let me fall. Don’t let me fall. Don’t let me fall.”
It was a futile endeavor, and she knew it, even though she kept uttering the words. The God she met in Sunday school, and believed in without cause for doubt, did not worry himself with little girls and their bicycles. He had bigger problems, like famine, world peace, and orchestrating an Armageddon of alarming proportions. In comparison, her troubles seemed tiny. What was the worst that could happen to her? Humiliation? Another broken bone?
With a start, Meg understood that she could survive those things. They were temporary, insignificant. What she couldn’t bear to do, what made her equilibrium on the wobbly pedals of her bike unsteady, was the thought of disappointing Dylan. She couldn’t let him down.
And she wouldn’t.
Meg stopped at the top of the driveway with her back to the garage door. Holding the bike between her legs, she peeled off her gloves and threw them down in the brown grass beside the cracked cement. Her hands were sweaty, and she swiped her palms against her jeans. They were watching her, she could feel their eyes boring into the top of her head, but she ignored them. She breathed through her nose once, twice, three times for good measure. Then she gripped the handlebars, positioned herself beside the bike, and started with a two-step sprint. Meg flung herself forward, straining every muscle in her body, pushing with all her might.
In one quick movement she was on the bike, feet falling to the pedals so cleanly Meg felt as if God himself had positioned them for her. Adrenaline burst through her. She stood to pedal, only three full revolutions before she hit the ramp full speed.
It was all over in a flash. Meg was flying before her front wheel cleared the edge of the plywood. Instinctively, she pulled up and thrust the handlebars away from her, anticipating with a sort of frenzied joy the moment when her hands would find the grips again.
It didn’t happen.
The back tire of the BMX hit the concrete with the sudden scratch of sliding gravel and the high squeak of rubber inflicting a dark scar along the road. A split second later the front tire bounced against the ground at an awkward angle. After that, as far as Meg was concerned, the world spun out of control. She was vaguely aware of careening over the handlebars, but then everything was a blur of slow-motion pain.
Meg didn’t pass out, but her brain was so jiggled in her skull that it took her nearly a full minute to realize where she was. Everything clicked back into place bit by frustrating bit. First she felt the cold of the cement beneath her back and a dull, throbbing ache in her head. Then came a singeing pain in her cheek. Flexing her muscles, she learned that her limbs felt okay, but her left hand was hot and stinging. Meg could deal with all that. What bothered her were the faces above her, the strange boys who had been sidetracked on their way to Jess’s and, worst of all, Dylan.
He was on his knees beside her, one hand beneath her arm as if he was going to help her up. When she could focus on his eyes, she saw concern there, but it was immediately trumped by the uneasy laughter he forced as he told the guys, “She’s all right.”
Jess’s friends joined him in an anxious chuckle.
“You’re good, right, Meg? That was a totally righteous spill.”
A totally righteous spill? Without even pausing to make sure that everything would work the way it was supposed to, Meg yanked away from Dylan’s supporting grip and rolled to her knees.
“Get off me!” she yelled. And then she abused him with every obscenity she could remember, whether or not she knew what the ugly names meant.
There was a stunned silence as she stumbled to her feet and raised a bloodied hand to her equally bloody cheek. Her jaw ached, and bits of cement nestled in the broken skin along her cheekbone. Meg picked at it carefully with dirty fingernails, leveling a look so deadly at the boys surrounding her that no one ventured to say a word. Then, using her tongue, she gently explored the swell of her bottom lip, and felt a rush of blood pool behind her teeth. Without an ounce of hesitation, she spat pink at Dylan’s feet.
At that, the redhead exploded with laughter and his buddies followed suit. He looked for a moment like he was going to give Meg an appreciative punch on the arm, but apparently thinking better of it, he shook his head instead and said, “Girl, you are something.” He continued to mutter to himself as he walked away, but he did turn back long enough to tell Dylan, “She’s a wild one, all right. You’re a lucky man.”
The guys laughed all the way to Jess’s house, throwing the occasional awed glance back at Meg as she stood like a warrior princess over her mangled BMX.
She was so busy watching them go that she didn’t realize Dylan was beside her until he put his arm around her shoulders. Shrugging him off, she whirled on him.
“How could you?”
“What do you mean?” Dylan countered, palms up in supplication.
“You knew I would fall and you let me do it! You let me do it.”
Dylan took a step after her. “Are you kidding me? You’re a hero, Meg. Don’t you get it? You’ve earned more respect in thirty seconds than most guys accumulate in years of trying to impress.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her aching hand beneath the familiar folds of her dad’s jacket. “You’re full of shit,” she said grudgingly.
“No, I’m not.” Dylan crossed the space between them and reached tentatively for her arms. When Meg didn’t move away, he caught her by the shoulders and gave her an excited shake.
“I made a fool of myself,” she complained.
“You should have seen yourself. You went for it. It was . . . wow.”
Meg cocked a disbelieving eyebrow.
“You were awesome,” Dylan told her. “Awesome.”
“I fell on my face.”
“You’re not crying. Most girls would cry. Heck, most guys would cry. It only made you more cool in their eyes.”
“I don’t care about them,” Meg blurted out. She instantly regretted it when Dylan’s eyes clouded in confusion.
“Then why . . .” he began, but she didn’t give him a chance to finish his thought. Wrenching away from him, she went to salvage the twisted mess of her bike. But Dylan matched her step for step and put himself between her and the BMX.
“What are you doing?” Meg demanded.
“You can’t be mad at me.”
“Oh, yes I can.”
“You’re only set for life because of me. Eternal coolness,” he teased. “You can thank me now.”
“I could have gotten killed.”
Dylan sighed. “Don’t be melodramatic.” But then he pulled her hand from beneath the crease of her coat and examined it intently. The knuckles were scraped and bleeding, but the abrasions were shallow. “How’s your thumb?” he asked, tracing the puffy skin that was already beginning to turn purple.
Meg waggled it, wincing.
“It’s not broken,” he proclaimed. “I give you a clean bill of health.”
“What about my face?”
“It’s lovely,” he told her, dropping his gaze so quickly she didn’t have a chance to read it.
Meg swallowed. “I mean my cheek.”
“So do I,” Dylan said lightly. “Battle wounds look good on everyone.”
> It was Meg’s turn to sigh. “I’m going in. I have a headache.”
Dylan leaned over the bike and lifted it, straightening out the handlebars and kicking the front tire back into alignment. “It’ll be fine,” he reassured her. “It just needs a little TLC. I’ll bring my tools tomorrow and tighten everything up.”
“Whatever,” Meg mumbled.
He looked lost for a moment before he shrugged and told her, “I need to call my brother for a ride. It’s getting cold and I don’t feel like walking.”
Meg rolled her eyes. “You live less than a mile away.”
“But I have at least fifty pounds of books in my backpack.”
They started toward the house side by side, Dylan walking the bike and Meg gingerly fingering the raw skin of her cheek. When they made it to the garage, he stopped and studied her in profile for a moment. Then he stretched out his hand to curl it around her ponytail. He lifted the blond waves out of the collar of her coat, smoothing the strands down her back.
“You did good.”
Meg felt like his dog, like she was being petted. She snatched the ponytail from his grasp and swung it over her shoulder, away from him. “If you’re so determined to turn me into a boy, I’m cutting this thing off.”
Dylan’s gaze turned serious. “No,” he said. “Don’t do that. I like you just the way you are.”
Meg scooted up to her room before her mother could get a good look at the damage inflicted by the jagged concrete of the cul-de-sac. “Dylan’s gonna use the phone!” she yelled, taking the stairs two at a time and avoiding the hallway that led to the kitchen.
From the back of the house, Linda Painter called, “He can stay for supper! We’re having roast and mashed potatoes.”
