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Actually, he would have if his dad hadn’t said something.
Now he stood back and waited for his uncle to go through the doorway, then flipped the light switch and locked the door.
But he stopped Jay at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey,” he said, his voice low, “what did Dad tell you about girls?”
His uncle laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, and Hunter thought he was going to brush off the question.
But Jay leaned in and lost the smile. “Use them before they use you.”
Hunter thought about his father’s and uncle’s warnings all night.
He couldn’t line it all up in his head.
If Clare was using him, it was just for information, and that seemed kind of weak. She could learn practically anything about guns from Wikipedia. It didn’t seem worthwhile to follow him home from school for something she could find in zero-point-six seconds on Google.
And regardless of whether she was using him, he sure didn’t want to use her.
Clare’s apprehension about guns was real—his abilities were strong enough to sense that. Her concern for her brother felt real, too. Maybe she just craved some kind of experience, some way to understand what her brother would be handling.
And she’d hung close to him in the gun locker. She hadn’t minded when his arms went around her, when he’d placed his hands over hers and showed her how to grip the weapon.
But still, his father’s lessons were never something to be treated lightly. Hunter could feel the seeds of future disappointment taking root already.
I’ll be mad if you don’t learn it the first time around.
What did that mean? Did his father expect him to cut Clare off now, before anything else happened?
He could do that. It would be easy enough. They hardly knew each other, and this was the last week of school.
But it felt . . . wrong. He was sixteen years old, not six. He didn’t have to brush off some girl just because his daddy didn’t think they should play together.
Maybe he didn’t have to worry about it at all. The way they’d been caught had been plenty embarrassing. Today was his alternate schedule, too, so he didn’t have Government. Maybe he’d walk into school and find her giggling about him with her girlfriends. Even better, maybe he’d make it through the whole day without seeing her at all.
No. He found her waiting at his locker after last period.
Sleeveless sundress, brown hair shining, a splash of freckles across her shoulders.
He tried not to think of what it would be like to show her how to hold a weapon while she was wearing that.
She smiled at him. “I’ve been worried about you all day. Did you get in trouble because of me?”
He shrugged a little and worked the combination lock. She smelled like mangoes again, and it took effort to keep his eyes on the spinning numbers. “Nah. My dad was actually cool with it.”
“Really? So I can come back?”
“Sure—”
Then a hand smacked him on the back of the head, hard enough to slam his face into the locker.
Stars blossomed in his vision, but Hunter was already spinning automatically, an arm coming up to block, the other swinging a fist.
The other guy barely got out of his way. Garrett Watts, a heavyset junior who usually trailed after Jeremy Rasmussen. His brown eyes were small and beady above doughy cheeks, and the only thing about him that gave Hunter pause was the fact that this guy had to have seventy pounds on him.
But at least he couldn’t run fast. It was probably a lucky miracle he’d missed Hunter’s first swing.
Hunter was about to remedy that when a teacher appeared in the hallway. Miss Janney, the first-year Spanish teacher. She had guts getting between them. “Boys. Take a walk. In opposite directions.”
