Page 24

We walk and walk, until we’re well past the party. Luke stares down stragglers on the beach, and even Danny is frustrated. “Bro, who are we looking for, anyway?” he asks.

Luke frowns, glancing briefly at me then away. “Never mind. Let’s just go.”

It feels like we’re a mile from the Jeep at this point. We start to walk back through the crowd, and then I come to a stumbling halt.

I recognize the eyes first. Their coldness. The details I actually remembered—the tattooed knuckles, the pierced eyebrow…those come a second later. I freeze, and Danny hasn’t even noticed but Luke has. His gaze jerks from me to the guy.

“Is that him?” Luke asks, close to my ear. His hand rests at the small of my back. “The guy who grabbed you?”

I have no reason to be terrified. Outside of the car, he’s just a guy of normal height and normal weight. Bigger than me, but no match for Luke or Danny. I’m frozen anyway. I make a noise of assent, nodding…and Luke takes off after him at a sprint.

The guy’s eyes widen and he starts running, but he’s no match for a college athlete. Luke tackles him, and they’ve barely landed before Luke’s fist is driving into his face. It’s as if something has unleashed inside him, something terrifying, something he’s barely held onto.

That’s why we’re here, at this huge party. To find this guy. And Luke’s been looking for him since it happened.

My mouth opens but no sound emerges. Danny, beside me, seems frozen too. It’s only when the guy’s friends dive at Luke that we both wake up. Danny runs forward, grabbing one of them and holding him back while I dive to the ground, snatching a beer bottle, the only weapon I can find.

By the time I reach them, though, Luke’s shaken off the guy Danny isn’t holding and is hitting him—his fist plunging into the guy’s stomach, then his face, then his stomach again.

I’m almost glad I hear sirens in the distance because Luke’s going to kill someone if it continues. And he’s already done plenty of damage, so I need to get him out of here, fast, before the cops arrive.

Danny shouts at Luke to stop, and Luke simply turns and swings, hitting the guy Danny’s holding dead in the face with a blow that makes his knees give way.

“Jesus Christ, Luke, stop!” Danny yells.

Luke turns to the bloody kid on the ground, the one who grabbed me. “If you even breathe in her vicinity again, I’ll fucking kill you and I won’t think twice. I’ll beat you until you can’t fight back, then I’ll hold you under water until you’ve taken your last breath. That’s a promise.”

The drone of the police walkie-talkies parts the crowd, but Luke remains where he is, rigid and unmoving—lip and knuckles bleeding—as if he doesn’t care about getting arrested.

“Run,” I hiss. “Go! You threw the first punch. That makes it assault.”

His face is carved in stone.

“If you do something, you own it,” he says without inflection or fear. He throws Danny the keys to the Jeep. “Go ahead. Get her out of here.”

Danny looks between us, torn. He doesn’t want to get in trouble, but he also knows Luke might need our help. When his gaze turns back to me, I shake my head.

If Luke won’t run, I’m not running either. I won’t abandon him.

“I have no idea what the hell I’m going to tell my dad,” Danny says bitterly as the cops push through at last.

“Tell him I took care of something you should have been a little more concerned about,” Luke snaps.

There’s no time for Danny to respond, though I’m not sure what he could have said. It never felt like Danny wasn’t upset enough on my behalf. I’m questioning it now, though.

Luke and two of the kids he hit are taken in the back of a squad car. “That was fucked up,” says Danny as we follow them. “I don’t know what he was thinking. We could lose our scholarships over something like this. You understand that, right? If I’d gotten involved, I could have lost my scholarship. He still might. And you don’t solve violence with violence.”

He slides his fingers through mine as he waits for my answer.

“Yeah,” I reply without conviction. “I get it.”

But the old Juliet, bad Juliet, is smiling wide, feeling like the world is being set right again.

* * *

When we get to the station, Luke has already been led away to be photographed and fingerprinted. I wonder if he needs a lawyer, and I already know he’s screwed if that’s the case. None of us have that kind of money.

Danny is taken to give a statement, and a few minutes later a cop appears, looking at me as if I’m the guilty one, as if I’m the one who started this.