I stared down at my savior as his unkempt hair fluttered in the breeze. He wore a Foo Fighters T-shirt under his leather jacket and his jeans were ripped, like mine. “You can go home now, you know,” he said, like maybe Iwasslow.
I just sat there, picking dried mud from myjeans.
“Aren’t your parentswaiting?”
I didn’t answer. I knew better than to answer questionslikethat.
When other kids found out what happened to Dad they either made fun of me or worse, they felt sorry for me. And Jesse said not to tell anyone Mom was sick again. He said if they knew how sick she was, they might take us awayfromher.
So I said, “I’m waiting for mybrother.”
He glanced around at the empty playground. “Who’s your brother? And why isn’t he here kicking those little shits uptheass?”
“Jesse,” I said. “My brother is Jesse. He’s in detentionwithZane.”
He took a step closer, teetering on the edge of the sandbox. “Yeah?Howcome?”
“They… um… got in an argument with Ms. Nielsen because she said I can’t come to school in dirty clothes. They do that a lot,” I mumbled, wishing maybe I hadn’t said all that, except he looked kind of impressed about the detentionthing.
He looked at my jeans; I’d gotten them muddy when I sat in a ditch to listen to music before school. I could pretend it didn’t hurt me if he said something mean about it, but that didn’t mean I wanted tohearit.
Why didn’t he justgoaway?
“Well, you can come down. Those little shits aren’tcomingback.”
I picked at the hole in the knee of my jeans, where my kneecap was pokingthrough.
He leaned over, resting his elbows on Thunderdome. “What’re you doing upthere?”
“PlayingThunderdome.”
I knew how stupid it sounded when no one else was there. It wasn’t like I didn’t haveanyfriends to play with when my brother wasn’t around, but they all had parents who picked them up after school. Anyway, I thought it might impress him. Thunderdome was outlawed by the teachers and we only played it afterschool.
He stepped into the sandbox. “How doyouplay?”
“It’s quicksand!” I squealed. “You can’t stepinit!”
“Oh. Shit.” He jumped up on the dome. “Almost lost a shoe.” He looked up at me and his hair fell over his eye again. Blue; his eyes were a deep, dark blue. He climbed to the top of the dome and sat acrossfromme.
Maybe he wasn’t making fun of me; he just didn’t know the rules ofThunderdome.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re safe up here with me. I’m theprincess.”
It was true; my brother and his friends always let me be the princess so I’d stay out of the way while they played, and sometimes they let me decide on the winner in case of a tie. But I figured it sounded more important if I leftthatout.
He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a shiny flip-top lighter that had been scraped and dented all to hell, and started smoking. His hands were scraped too, his knuckles split and scabbed over. His fingernails were too short, chewed all down into the nail bed, his cuticles all ragged and blood-encrusted. They were a mess. Buthisface…
He was so…pretty.
“What happened to yourhands?”
He didn’t answer. Just smoked his cigarette and looked out across the school grounds, his arms wrapped around his knees, watching as parents picked their kids up in the distance, along the road in front of theschool.
“Aprincess,huh?”
“Theprincess.”
“So who’s theprince,then?”
