He stepped into the sandbox. “How do you play?”
“It’s quicksand!” I squealed. “You can’t step in it!”
“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 across from me.
Maybe he wasn’t making fun of me; he just didn’t know the rules of Thunderdome.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re safe up here with me. I’m the princess.”
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 left that out.
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. But his face…
He was so… pretty.
“What happened to your hands?”
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 the school.
“A princess, huh?”
“The princess.”
“So who’s the prince, then?”
“Don’t need one.”
He looked at me. “Then who’s gonna save you if you fall in the quicksand?”
“I will.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then you can,” I said. “If you want to. But you might get stuck in there, too.”
He stared at me for a minute. Then he smiled, slowly, and it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.
“Then I guess we’ll sink together.” He took a couple of drags of his cigarette, his eyes squinting through the smoke. “You got a name, princess?”
“Jessa Mayes.”
“Jessa Mayes,” he repeated. “Don’t ever let those little shits talk to you that way, yeah? Next time they try, you make a fist, like this.” He showed me, clenching his fist until his split knuckles looked like they might burst. “And you hit ’em, right here, in the nose, as hard as you can. You do it hard enough, they’ll go down. Then you run away. You do that once, they’re not gonna bother you again.”
I shook my head. “I’m not supposed to hit people. My brother says sticks and stones—”
“Yeah?” He flicked the ash off his cigarette and spat on the sand below. “Well, your brother’s a pussy who doesn’t know shit.”
I gaped at him.
No one talked about Jesse like that. The other kids all thought he walked on water because he could play guitar.
“I can’t make a fifth-grader eat crap.” My face was getting hot and I looked down at the sand. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”
When I glanced up again, he was taking something off his jacket. He held it out to me. “Take it,” he said.
I took it from his outstretched hand and examined it. It was a little silver pin shaped like a motorcycle. It said Sinners MC on a banner that wrapped around the tires. There was a woman on the motorcycle but she wasn’t riding it, exactly. She was facing the wrong way and reclined back, her back arched, shoving her boobs out.
I was eight.
I had no idea what Sinners MC meant, so it never occurred to me to wonder why he had a pin that belonged to an outlaw motorcycle club.
“You wear that,” he said, glancing over my shoulder, “no one’s gonna mess with you.” He was looking in the direction of the school, his eyes narrowing as he dragged on his cigarette.
“Smoking on school grounds again Mr. Mason?”
I turned to find a teacher stalking toward us, one of those shit-eating bullies in tow, red-faced, looking anywhere but at us. “What will your parents have to say about this?”
“Can’t wait to find out,” he muttered. His blue eyes met mine as he tossed his cigarette aside. Then he smiled at me again.
I smiled back.
He leapt to the ground, jumping over the quicksand and landing in the grass.
“See you around, princess.”
I watched him shove his hands in the pockets of his jeans and walk away. But it wasn’t true; I didn’t see him around. He never even came back to school after that day.
Not for two whole years.
Those bullies never bothered me again, though. None of them did. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of some pin. It was because of him.
Because he’d made two fifth-graders eat shit for being mean to me, and no one wanted to eat shit.
The next year, when a new girl in my class asked me about my motorcycle pin, she didn’t believe me when I told her where I’d gotten it. As if I’d made up the whole thing about the badass boy in the leather jacket who saved me from a couple of bullies—then mysteriously vanished from school, never to return—just to impress her.
But I knew he was real.
I had his pin, and I had his picture. In the seventh grade class photo in the school yearbook he was standing right next to my brother, staring down the lens of the camera like he was ready to take on the world… and make it eat shit.
His name was Brody Mason.
He was the love of my life.
If only I’d figured that out a lot sooner than I did.
CHAPTER ONE
Jessa
I was late. For my brother’s wedding.
And because I was late, the universe seemed to be conspiring to make me even more late. All three legs of my
