Weird or not, I pull myself forward on the seat until I’m right up against Nora’s back. I slide my hands all the way around her, locking them in front of her body almost like a hug. And for the first time since I got on this thing, I actually feel safe.
A few wisps of blond hair fall out of her ponytail, lightly tickling my face. I close my eyes and rest my chin on her shoulder blade, letting every turn and bump in the path be a surprise. She smells like her room up on the third floor and like peaches and maybe a little like dirt, too.
She smells nice.
There’s this rush in my stomach, now that I don’t feel like I’m about to catapult off this thing. It’s actually pretty fun.
Soon we slow to a stop and everything goes quiet enoughto hear the crows and the wind blowing through the tall grass, and the sunshine just feels so perfect and warm on my face.
“Uh… Stevie?” Nora’s voice startles me as my eyes fly open and I realize we’re parked by a roll of wire fence, at our destination.
“Shit. Sorry.” I unclasp my hands and slide them back across her stomach, into the dip of her waist, and then into my own lap as I sit up straight. She twists around halfway, a smile turning into a soft laugh.
“You’ve got, umm… Your hair looks kinda crazy.” She reaches out, takes a strand from in front of my eyes, and tucks it behind my ear. The feel of her fingertips against my skin makes my whole body go rigid. As she switches focus from my hair to my eyes, she quickly pulls away and turns back around to face the front.
My face feels hot and I’m glad she’s not looking at me still, because I have no idea why I’m being so weird. “What can I do to help?” I ask as she scratches at her eye.
“Right.” She hops off the four-wheeler and into the grass, which has grown up well past her knees. “I’ve been working on pulling some new fence,” she says, pointing down the field at a line of freshly placed wooden posts stretching as far as the eye can see. I follow her over to the roll of new wire fence and a pile of tools beside it. Soon she’s explaining to me how all the tools function and what she needs me to do.
Basically, I stand by the “puller,” ratcheting it tighter when she tells me to, and Nora does… well, everything else. She hooks up the chains between the puller and the stretcher bar, which grabs onto the wire fence so we can pull it evenly aroundeach post. She staples it in when it’s in just the right spot. And then she moves the heavy-looking roll of the new fencing from post to post.
“Are you doing this whole thing by yourself?” I ask incredulously as she finishes stapling the wire to the next post.
“Albert, that guy in the shop, works on it too, but yeah, mostly. This is basically my entire job for the summer.”
“Speaking of Albert, he said he thought you’ve been sneaking around with some boy this summer. That true?”
Nora snorts out a laugh. “Albert needs to mind his own damn business.”
“Is that a yes, then?”
She drops the staple gun to the ground and gives me a deadpan look. “Stevie, I can’t think of a single thing that I would rather dolessthan run around with some dumb boy this summer.”
“I believe you,” I tell her, and I do. It’s odd, though. Most girls our age are at leastthinkingabout boys, even me… now.
Nora doesn’t seem like most girls, though.
I watch as she wipes her forehead off on her forearm and then drags it across the front of her homemade cutoff shirt.
“You don’t really care what people think about you, do you?” I ask.
“No. Why would I?” she asks, dragging the heavy wire down to the next post.
“I don’t know,” I reply. She’s sosureof herself. So confident in who she is… unlike me. “Most people do.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” she says.
“No, that’s not what I meant. I actually kinda love it.” Ismile, squinting at her through the sun. Sweat is starting to roll down my back, even though I’m barely doing anything. I don’t know how she does this all day.
“Do you really like this job?” I ask, having a hard time imagining how anyone could.
“Be more specific,” she replies.
I don’t know what other job I could be talking about, but okay.
“Do you like being out here in the blazing sun, pulling a wire fence around an endless line of posts?” I ask.
“Yeah. I do.” She lets out a grunt as she unrolls the fence, her toned biceps flexing underneath her tan skin. “I like being outside and I like working with my hands, building something. It makes me feel accomplished at the end of the day in a way that nothing else ever has… like school, for example. That was never really for me.”
