“What a freak.” Gallant’s voice was hard. “What the hell was his problem, anyway?”
Before she could respond, he shook off her grip and stalked away, the offer to skip class forgotten.
Hours later, when the last bell rang, Aubrey headed to cheerleading practice. She was cutting through the frosty brick alley between the cafeteria and the gymnasium when she ran straight into a wall of people. Which only ever meant one thing, here.
A fight.
She groaned and delved into the throng. She was at least mildly interested in finding out which hotheaded jock had caught another guy eyeing his girlfriend, but mostly she just wanted to get to practice on time. Then she glimpsed two heads at the crowd’s epicenter—one bronze, the other dark and shaggy-curled—and stopped as abruptly as if she’d face-planted into a wall.
Oh, god. The new kid. Why hadn’t he stayed out of Gallant’s way? Why hadn’t Gallant justlet it go?
She flung out elbows, forcing her way to the front. The students had formed a ragged ring, and Gallant swaggered within, fists up. The new kid stood uncannily still, assessing his opponent with hard black eyes. He wore a threadbare bomber jacket he’d clearly acquired secondhand. His backpack lay discarded on the asphalt.
“Gallant!” Aubrey shrieked. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!”
Gallant didn’t hear or, more likely, didn’t care. He darted forward, his letterman jacket flapping open on the icy air.
But the new kid turned to look straight at her. The touch of his eyes harpooned her to the spot.
She flung up her hands in astopgesture just as Gallant’s fist connected.
The boy’s head snapped sideways. His curls straightened and sprang back like stretched rubber bands. He stood there, hunched, his hair shielding his face, while Aubrey wondered wildly whether she could catch him before he toppled.
But he didn’t go down. A hush blanketed the crowd.
Gallant retreated, glancing from his clenched fist to his opponent and back again, as if he couldn’t figure out what had just happened. After a long moment, the new kid straightened, then hauled his hair back with one hand.
And smiled.
It wasn’t much—just a thin, hard flash on a mouth that was split and bleeding—but it did something funny to Aubrey’s stomach. A tiny sound snuck from her throat as the boy raised his fists. The gesture looked so... fluid. As if he’d done this a thousand times. As if he’d come into the world already knowing how to curl his fingers in that particular way.
Gallant blanched and edged backward. The new kid moved with him, surefooted, then pounced.
Aubrey’s breath hung suspended, her need for air receding. She’d seen fights before, lots of them. Inevitably, they involved more grunting and huffing than anything else, and usually ended with a few panicked, graceless swings that rarely found their targets.
This was... not that. This was something else entirely. Because this kid was ferocious. And beautiful. And he knew exactly what he was doing.
He spiraled around Gallant, his fists flicking out with bruising precision. He delivered a strike to the jaw. One, two to the torso. He melted from Gallant’s answering bludgeon like so much air parted by a blown breath, then slid back in and drove a knee into Gallant’s stomach.
The whole time, his face never changed. He looked... calm. Certain. The hardness from just moments ago gave way to a resolve so serene that Aubrey swore she’d been made privy to something extraordinary. With a backdrop of brick wall and packed bodies as his canvas, the boy blurred across her vision, a living artwork of sinew and grace.
Her heart quit beating, then restarted again, double time. In another life, he would’ve been a warrior, she decided. Because what she’d mistaken as fear in the hallway was instead a sort of smoldering poise—fury distilled into a purer, harder form.
And yet she couldn’t reconcile this with the boy who’d shunned her in English. Who’d stopped in the hallway to write in his notebook. He was like an equation she couldn’t work out—too many variables, not enough data.
She wanted to know his name.
Gallant’s swings grew wilder. The boy responded with a few measured strikes, and as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Gallant crashed to his knees on the frigid asphalt, trapped in some kind of chokehold, his face purpling. The new kid set bloodied lips beside his ear.
“Leave me. The fuck. Alone.”
Aubrey heard, but couldn’t be sure anyone else had. The kid tossed Gallant aside like a sack of rotten potatoes. The crowd rushed in, fawning over their fallen hero.
But she only had eyes for the boy. He snatched up his backpack and slipped through the surging crowd, vanishing around the side of the cafeteria.
She pushed against the tide, curiosity like flames licking at her bones. Where had he learned to fight like that? And why had he refused to talk to her? What had he been writing in that notebook?
If only she could solve for X, she could solve for Y. And Z. And the dozen other variables she suddenly hungered to define.
