“See, it’s fine,” she says.
A sharp snap ripples through the air and Emma shrieks, falling.
I jump the rest of the way down, landing on the rose bush seconds before Emma falls. Her body hits me and bounces off, landing in the grass.
Thorns dig into my skin in every direction while Emma holds her head in the fetal position on the ground.
“Are you hurt?” I say, pushing myself off the bush and rushing over to her. I kneel down and move her hands. “Did you hit your head?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Seriously, Emma. How could you be so careless? Do you want to get yourself killed? I told you that wasn’t a good idea. When will you learn?”
She blinks, staring at me for a moment. Her eyes focus on my arm.
“You’re hurt,” she says.
I swallow, looking down at my arm to see blood dripping down from where a thorn broke skin. I was so focused on Emma I hadn’t noticed my own pain.
I put pressure on it. “It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve gotten hurt because of you.”
18
EMMA
I’m the reason Myles got his first black eye.
It was back when I was in seventh grade, he was in eighth. We were on the school playground after lunch playing four square. It was a friendly game. Myles and I had been in at for a while, but another boy had been holding on to the serving position since the start of the game.
His name was Ricky, and he was tall and very focused while the rest of us skipped around and laughed in between serves.
The ball came into Myles’s square, and when he hit it, the ball bounced into Ricky’s square so quickly he wasn’t able to stop it from bouncing a second time.
His face turned bright red. “That wasn’t fair!”
It was completely fair. All Myles did was play the game. He didn’t pull out any tricks or cheat. Myles wasn’t the type to do anything wrong, and he hated making people upset. He was calm and quiet. I don’t think there was a rough bone in his body at the time.
Ricky got right up into Myles’s face and pushed him to the ground.
Myles winced as his hands scraped against the pavement and his glasses fell.
“Hey!” I screamed, running toward them.
Myles jumped to his feet and blocked me from crashing into the boy. I pushed forward, trying to get around him and pummel that boy to the ground for what he did, but Myles wouldn’t let me by.
He turned to me. His curls were a mess and there were scuffs on his pants. “It’s fine. I’m not hurt.”
My jaw dropped. “You can’t let him get away with that.” Myles and I had always been so different. I was impulsive, and he was the type to sit and think of a rational way to solve everything.
“Just let it go and help me find my glasses.”
The boy hooked the glasses underneath his shoe and dug his heel into the lenses, cracking the glass.
“Oops,” he said with a curl of a smirk on his lips.
My insides might as well have been a volcano and my blood lava. I stormed forward, yelling at the top of my lungs, ran up to that boy, and shoved him. “Take that, you eccentric brat!”
One of the teachers blew a whistle and started jogging toward us.
