She’d been mostly quiet on the walk to his house, and he’d been walking a cord of tension himself, ready for Jeremy or Garrett or one of those morons to come flying out of the trees.
But nothing had happened.
“You could take them, couldn’t you?” she said out of the blue.
He didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. After that display in the hallway, he wasn’t surprised those thugs were on her mind, too. He smiled. “Take them,” he mimicked. “I don’t really want to fight them.”
“Why not? Don’t you think they’d leave you alone?”
Hunter stopped at the edge of the tree line. There was a long stretch of grass here before the cornfield started, and his dad had set steel targets of varying heights into the ground. He set his backpack gently on the ground.
“That’s not how it works,” he said, dropping to sit in the grass. He unzipped the nylon. “If it were that easy, I’d have done it at the beginning of the year.”
She hesitated, then dropped to sit beside him, pulling her skirt over her knees. The grass was warm here, the sun beating down. “I don’t understand.”
“People don’t really leave me alone,” he said. “Kind of an occupational hazard.”
She frowned. “I still don’t understand.”
Hunter smiled and shook his head. “Sorry. I just mean, when I fight them, it seems to inspire them to fight more. You know how sometimes when you put up resistance, it just makes people push harder?”
She was staring at him, and he couldn’t figure out the tension in her expression.
“What?” he said.
She shook her head quickly. “Nothing. So they keep coming after you?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged and started snapping bullets into an empty magazine. “It’s like they keep coming up with more creative ways to try to kick my ass. And if I fight them at school, it just gets me in trouble. Getting in trouble pisses off my dad. I mostly try to avoid them. Want an apple?”
“Sure.”
He snapped the last bullet, then slid the clip into a 9mm Beretta. He’d chosen this one because it was smaller and might not make her so uneasy.
o;Did you answer them?”
Hunter wasn’t ready for a question. He was ready for lecturing. “Most of them.”
“Good.” He looked at Jay. “Thanks for coming over. You have time to stay for dinner?”
That was it?
“You’re not mad?” said Hunter.
His dad glanced at him. “Not yet.”
Hunter frowned. “Yet?”
“You’re about to teach yourself a lesson a lot more effectively than I ever could. I’ll be mad if you don’t learn it the first time around.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.” His father looked back at Jay. “The file for this weekend is upstairs if you want to take a look.”
His uncle straightened. “Sure. I have time.”
“File?” Hunter’s ears perked up. If Uncle Jay was involved, that meant it was Elemental business. His father worked private security jobs on his own. “You have a job this weekend?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” said his father.