Page 8 of Wicked Brutal

“Maybe.”

Her smile faded into something smaller. Not gone. Just aware.

Tobias saved us. “Can I keep him?”

“No,” Ally said immediately.

Tobias started appearing on our side of the shoreline after that. Not because the families suddenly started spending time together — they didn’t. Roman was in and out, Dad was in and out, Mom came up when work allowed and left when it didn’t, and Jane stayed inside enough that sometimes I went two days without seeing her. Tobias didn’t care about any of it. He cared that our dock had frogs, and minnows, and that I’d throw a lacrosse ball with him even though he had absolutely no concept of where it might go after leaving his stick.

Ally came to retrieve him. At first. Then she’d stay ten minutes. Twenty. An hour. Sometimes she brought a book and sat on the end of the dock while Tobias and I attempted whatever terrible idea he’d invented that day.

One afternoon Tobias went inside for lunch and Ally didn’t. She sat with her legs hanging over the edge of my dock, a paperback open across her thighs, while I worked beside her on my laptop. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. I looked at her. She kept reading.

“Your brother left,” I said.

“I noticed.”

Another five minutes went by. “You don’t have to supervise me,” I said.

She turned a page. “I know.”

I smiled and went back to my screen, and she stayed.

After that it happened more often. By July, Tobias wasn’t required. Ally would appear through the trees with a book or a notebook, and sometimes she’d text first — Outside? — and I’d write back No, and thirty seconds later she’d walk onto my dock and find me sitting there.

“You’re a terrible liar,” she said the first time.

“You came over anyway.”

“I knew you were lying.”

“Then why ask?”

“Politeness.”

“You’ve never been polite to me.”

“Correct.” And she sat down beside me.

I liked her. That realization was annoyingly simple. I liked her dry little comments and the way she got viciously competitive over cards. I liked that she read constantly and wrote stories she refused to let me see — until one afternoon she silently handed me her notebook and stared at the lake while I read four pages. I read them twice.

When I handed it back, she wouldn’t look at me. “Well?”

“They’re good.”

Her eyes found mine. “Don’t say that because you’re being nice.”

“I don’t do nice.”

“You do sometimes.”

“Name one time.”

“You helped Tobias catch his frog.”

“Self-interest. I wanted the screaming to stop.”

The first time I kissed her, we were on the dock after midnight. Tobias had been asleep for hours, Roman wasn’t at the lake, Jane’s bedroom light had gone off sometime before eleven, and my parents were inside. Ally sat beside me with her knees pulled against her chest, and we’d been talking about college.