I set my piece of cookie on my napkin Jace had actually remembered to pack, and opened my chips. Plain chips weren’t my favorite, but I was hungry and I would rather eat them than the mushy sandwich.
Gray picked his sandwich up and made a face as a glop of jelly fell onto the table. After grumbling something under his breath, he took a bite of the sandwich but quickly spit it out on the ground behind him. “I think your brother is trying to poison me, caterpillar.”
I laughed, but he wasn’t kidding. Jace and Gray couldn’t get along to save their lives. They argued and fought every day. Alicia even had to break them up sometimes because they wouldn’t stop. It made me sad that my two favorite people couldn’t be friends. But Jace wouldn’t actually try to poison him. He knew I would be mad if he did.
For the next ten minutes, we ate without talking much. Other kids were laughing and playing while they should have been eating, but none of them came over to us. I was sure that the boys in my grade were scared of Gray, and the girls were always too tongue tied to talk to him, so they stayed away. Even when he had a grumpy face on, he was still the handsomest boy I had ever seen.
When we were done, he picked our trash up and tossed it into the trash can a few feet away. Sitting back down beside me, I saw he was grumpy. “I can’t walk you home today, Kassa. I have detention. Mr. Peabody is making me stay after school.”
Disappointment made my tummy hurt, but I didn’t let him see that. Usually when something upset me, it upset him, and I didn’t like it when he was upset. I saw him all the time, at home and at school even though we hadn’t been in the same building for the last two years. Still, I liked walking home with him. He made sure the dog at the corner of our street didn’t come out of the yard to bother or chase me, and he held my hand the entire four blocks from the school to our house. That was my favorite part of all.
“What happened?” I asked instead.
“The guy who sits in front of me was running his mouth, so I shut him up.” He shrugged like it was nothing, like it happened all the time.
It did. Gray was always getting into fights—not just with Jace, either. If someone made him mad, he punched first and didn’t care about the consequences. If he was only getting detention, that meant he hadn’t had to go to the office. Whenever that happened, he got sent home, and I always found Alicia crying in her room.
“I can wait for you,” I offered. He was going to be in a bad mood when he got out of detention, but if I was there, he wouldn’t be grumpy for long. I could make him smile. Or laugh. I liked it when he laughed.
“No, little caterpillar. You go home and start on your homework.” He put an arm around me, giving me a tight hug, and then stood. “Be careful. Don’t talk to strangers.”
“Okay,” I promised in a small voice. “See you later, Gray.”
“Later, Kas.”
My teacher was calling for all of us to line up so we could go back inside, but I just sat there for a minute, watching him walk away. His head was down, his shoulders drooping. He was mad at himself again, and like always, my heart felt funny as I watched him leave. I had this crazy strong feeling to run after him and give him a hug.
“Gray,” I cried and jumped to my feet to run after him.
He turned to face me, concern on his handsome face. I threw my arms around him and hugged him as hard as I could. For a second, he stood there stiff as a board, but then he relaxed and hugged me back. I closed my eyes in pleasure when he kissed the top of my head.
After only a few seconds, I lifted my head to look up at him. “Love you, Gray,” I told him, and then I ran over to my teacher, who was glaring at me for not having listened to her.
***
After school, I put all of my homework in my backpack and left with all my other classmates. Outside, some got on buses and some got in their parents’ cars. I was lucky that I lived close and got to walk home. Some of the bus-riding kids didn’t get home until an hour later because they had to stop at the high school to pick up the older kids before the driver would drop them off at home.
I glanced over at the middle school, hoping that Gray would be waiting for me after all, but there was no sign of him. Sometimes Jace would walk with us, but he had baseball practice after school.
With a heavy sigh, I turned in the direction of home.
“Kassa, wait up,” someone called, and I cautiously turned to see who it was.
When I spotted Gray’s friend Sin, I let out a relieved breath and smiled up at him. “Hi.”
He didn’t smile back. Sin didn’t ever smile. At least, I had never seen him do it. He looked mad all the time, but Gray said that it was just because he had ADHD. I thought maybe it was something else, but I still liked Sin, even though he looked so grumpy all the time. He was nice to me, and he was a good friend to Gray.
“Gray asked me to walk you home,” he told me.
My heart became just as mushy as my sandwich from lunch had been. Even though he couldn’t be there with me, Gray had still made sure I was okay.
Sin was quiet as we walked to my house. He had his backpack slung over one shoulder, and it, like his clothes, was worn but clean. His mom and dad didn’t have a lot of money, but they were really nice. His mom was always making cookies, and he would bring them over when he came to our house.
At the corner of our street, I stiffened, my gaze going to the yard where the mean dog lived. The people who lived there never tied him up or put him on a leash, but they let him out every afternoon around the same time we walked home. He was a big dog with black fur and a brown face and stomach. Gray said that he was a mutt, because he wasn’t a full-blooded Rottweiler. All I knew was that he scared me.
The dog never bothered me if Gray was with me, but if he wasn’t, the dog would run out of the yard, snarling and barking, with drool making his mouth all foamy. He would chase me all the way home, snapping its teeth at me if I didn’t run fast enough and he got too close.
One time, I had tried to throw a rock at him to scare him, not to hurt him, but the owners had seen and yelled mean things at me. They called Alicia that night, but she didn’t get mad at me. Alicia had said words I didn’t think she knew because they were so bad and told them that, if the dog ever bit me, she was going to make sure they didn’t ever see the light of day again—whatever that meant.