Chapter 3
DOMINIC
Bear Hollow Park
Ossipee, New Hampshire
I scan the beach, panicked and looking for a grownup I can call out to for help, but there ain't any in sight. This is the rocky part of the beach, where the sign to my right says it’s unsafe to swim. The pit in my stomach grows to the size of a boulder.
“This is what you get for eating my chips, shithead,” Kenny sneers.
I feel his spittle dot my neck and want to tell him how rank his breath is, but he’d just punch me in the face, and if I have any hope of not drowning, I’ll need to rely on all five senses.
Donald is laughing behind me, the sound brittle and sinister as he gives me a hard shove, and I jerk forward, but Kenny doesn’t let me roll down the rocky hill.
He lets me stumble and scrape both shins on the jagged rocks, but no, letting me go would give me a chance to escape, and he ain’t about to let that happen.
Kenny continues hollering insults at me as he yanks me upright, and a sharp jolt of pain in my shoulder makes my vision blur.
There’s a sound in the distance, I think. A shout from somewhere behind us. Hope fills my chest at the possibility of someone witnessing this and coming to my rescue, but that hope is dashed when the edge of my tennis shoe meets the water.
Time. I need time.
Time to fight back. Time to get away. No matter how pointless, no matter how much smaller I am than my older brother, I need time.
I throw myself backward, trying to create as much resistance and dead weight as possible.
When my butt hits the dirt, I use my free arm to scramble backward like a crab on a stovetop.
Two feet is the only distance I can put between my body and the lake before I feel Donald at my back, grabbing me by the hair and hauling me to my feet.
My eyes sting with tears as reality sets in. My brother might kill me today. If he throws me in the lake and walks away laughing, which I expect him to do, and I drown, there will be no one to take proper care of Mamaw.
I’m the one who checks to make sure she takes her diabetes pills every morning and night.
I’m the one who buys her the tasteless brown bread from the grocery store for her grilled cheese sandwiches instead of the white bread with the higher sugar count.
Mamaw relies on me to get the mail, mow the lawn, do the laundry, wash the dishes, clean the gutter, and all the other chores needed to keep her crappy old double-wide from falling apart.
Kenny doesn’t do any of that. He’s lazy and cruel, and it seems like he’s in trouble with the law every other day.
He’s eighteen now, so I don’t know what’s stopping Mamaw from kicking him out.
And I don’t know why she invited him on this camping trip with us.
She could’ve left him at home back in Tennessee. I really wish she had.
She and I could’ve had a nice week playing Gin Rummy and listening to her dusty Patsy Cline cassettes.
“Hey!” I hear the greeting roared moments before Kenny shoves me into the water with his hand pressing hard on the back of my head until I’m below the surface.
My palms burn as I try to pull myself away, the skin tearing away on jagged rocks.
Streaks of red chase my hands in the water, but I don’t care how much I bleed.
As long as I can avoid drowning, these rocks can cut my hands clean off for all I care.
My eyes squint as I struggle to hold my breath, and I start to panic. It’s the last thing you’re supposed to do when you’re trapped underwater, but I can’t help it. The clock is ticking.
I twist my body enough to get my feet under me and use that leverage to push against Kenny’s grip. He’s stronger, but I don’t quit.
Suddenly, I shoot upward, Kenny’s hand leaving my skull. When I land on my feet and rub the lake from my eyes, the sight before me has me sucking in a breath. It-it has to be a hallucination.
It’s…a girl. A slender, very pretty girl with silky black hair whirling around her as she backhands my brother so hard across the face that he lands straight on his ass.
Kenny cries out when his butt meets a sharp rock, and the girl whirls around to throw sand in Donald’s eyes, causing him to stumble back and scream words I can’t even understand.
With Donald no longer a threat, she faces Kenny once more and yells, “Suck on this, you little bitch!” as she brings her Converse-covered foot down hard on his crotch. He curls in on himself, clutching his frank and beans and wailing like she severed them from his body.
A strange rumble is coming from my chest, and it takes a minute to realize it’s laughter. I shouldn’t laugh at seeing my brother in pain, but well, shouldn’t I? Most days, he terrorizes me. He’s a prick who never leaves me alone. It’s nice to see him get what he gives for once.
Kenny starts crawling toward Donald, and the girl kicks sand at both of them, some of it hitting Kenny in the eye this time. His crawl turns into a pitiful one-handed, keeled-over scramble to reach his still-blinded lackey and get out of her way.
“If I see you bullies again, I will scratch your eyes out!” Then she roars, actually roars a loud, menacing sound with her entire chest. The entire campground must’ve heard it.
I scan our surroundings, ready for someone to show up looking for an escaped jungle cat, but besides me and my fierce savior, it’s just Kenny and Donald quietly whimpering as they huddle together and crawl back up the hill to the road that cuts through the camp.
My feet slosh through the water as I assess the damage to my body.
There’s a throbbing pain in my shoulder, but I don’t think it’s dislocated, so that’s good.
My knees are sore and I imagine there will be minor scrapes and bruises that I’ll still be discovering tomorrow.
The worst of it is my hands. Blood pools across the shiny, torn-up skin of my palms, and the sting is worse than a thousand paper cuts.
I suck in a breath as my hands begin to tremble.
“You okay?” the girl asks, now only a foot away from me. She’s shielding her eyes from the sun. I can’t see her eyes, but the freckles that dust her nose and cheeks are awfully pretty. Her skin is a warm light brown, and her long limbs are lean and muscled.
She doesn’t have an accent like mine, so she must be from around here. New England folks have a strange way of speaking. A rushed, halting sort of speech that doesn’t have any R’s. Hers isn’t as thick as the others I’ve heard, but there are hints of it when she says certain words.
I reckon I look like a shrimp to her. She’s at least four inches taller than I am. Hopefully, we’re not the same age. That would be embarrassing.
“Yeah,” I finally reply when I realize I’m staring. “Just some scrapes. I’ll be fine.”
Her fingers gently wrap around my wrist, and she lifts to inspect it. “Is this the worst of it? Your hands?”
I nod, trying to ignore the strange tingling sensation where she’s touching me. My dick swells in my shorts, and I stick my butt out slightly to mask it. Clearing my throat, I repeat, “I’ll be fine.”
She rolls her eyes and mutters, “Come on,” as she drags me up the beach. We find a break in the rocks, and she plops down on the sand, patting the spot next to her.
I ease my body down, wincing when I accidentally put too much weight on the arm connected to my sore shoulder. “Where did you learn to fight like that?”
Opening her neon-green fanny pack, she pulls out a pack of antibacterial wipes, gauze, and medical tape. “My dad. He told me to fight dirty when it comes to bullies.”
I attempt a smile through gritted teeth as she wipes my wounds clean.
“Who were those guys?”
“My brother and his friend.”
She nods knowingly. “The one I kicked in the pecker looks like you.”
A laugh bursts out of me, and I’m not sure if it’s because of her surprising choice of dick slang or the memory of her stomping so hard on Kenny’s junk that his face turned as red as a tomato.
She’s not laughing, though. Her expression is hard and probing as she asks, “Has he hurt you before?”
That’s when I notice her eyes. They’re not the same color; one is a rich brown and the other is green.
I’ve never seen eyes like hers before. Her brown eye has flecks of gold and a ring of orange close to the pupil, and her green eye reminds me of dew-covered moss, with a tinge of turquoise near the outer edge of the iris.
“Your eyes…” I trail off, mesmerized. I want to tell her how beautiful they are, how easily I could tumble into them and never want to climb out, but unfortunately, what comes out is, “…pretty cool.”
She looks away, as if embarrassed. “Yeah, so I’ve been told. I fell into the edge of a table when I was little, and the injury changed the color of one eye.” She shrugs and repeats her earlier question. “Your brother. Has he hurt you before?”
I nod. “He changed a lot after our ma died. He’s angrier now. Distant.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says in a quiet voice, gently placing gauze on my palm before securing it with tape. “How long ago was that?”
“Three years ago.” The next part, I don’t like to share with people, but this girl, whose name I don’t even know, feels different. Safe. “She overdosed. Kenny found her.”
She blows out a breath, the warmth of it tickling my wrist. “That’s rough.”
“Yeah.”
We don’t say anything for a while, and I feel like an idiot for bringing down the mood, not that it was particularly high to begin with. “Hey, um,” I begin, attempting to change the subject, “thanks for helping me. You didn’t have to do that.”
She examines her work. My hands are cleaned and bandaged neatly, but still, her hard gaze makes it seem like her wound care is shoddy. “Bullies only stop bullying when you stop them”––her gaze lifts to meet mine, and I notice the corner of her mouth lifting slightly––“and I like stopping them.”
“You’re brave,” I mutter, in awe. She really is like a jungle cat. “I wish I were as brave as you.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”