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“Did a deer murder your family?” she asked.

“How’d you know?”

“Ha. Tell me. I won’t tease you. Much.”

“How do you know it’s something I get teased for. Did Mike tell you?”

“No! He knows?”

“He’s my best friend,” I said. “I’m surprised he didn’t regale you with the whole thing already. He loves to tell that story.”

“Well now you have to tell me because I’m going to find out anyway.”

I blew a breath through my nose. “I got attacked by a deer.”

She turned to blink at me. “You did? Was it protecting a baby or something?”

“No, it was licking me.”

She burst into laughter.

I gave her a moment to crack up before I continued. “I was eight,” I said, a smile in my voice. “We were up at Mike’s cabin for a week, and I was outside playing with Mike and this deer came out of the tree line and started licking the sweat off me. It was chasing me all over the yard. Mike ran inside crying and told his mom a deer was eating me.”

Larissa was gasping. I had to pause in my story.

“This is a joke. You’re kidding me,” she said.

“I’m not. When Donna came out, she started laughing so hard she could barely help me.”

“So you have a deer phobia now?”

“Yes, they’re terrifying. I have a recurring nightmare of three deer stacked up on each other’s shoulders under a trench coat in a dark alley.”

She choked.

To be honest, I didn’t love telling this story. The guys used it to tease me all through high school. But I did like making her laugh.

“If we ever encounter a deer, I’ll protect you, okay?” she said, still giggling.

I let a laugh out through my nose. “Oh yeah? How many of those things do you think you could take out in a fight? Real numbers here.”

“How many?”

“Yeah. They travel in herds. Have you ever seen fewer than two deer together?” I said. “Bare minimum, you’re in hand-to-hand combat with at least two. Realistically, you’re looking at five or six. You think you can take out five to six deer?”

“Deer run,” she said, looking amused. “They’re flight animals.”

“Not the ones I’ve met. Not the ones we’re talking about. If the deer come for us, it’s over, we’re screwed. They’ve got the numbers, they reproduce faster than we do. You’ve got a full-grown deer in three years. They weigh as much as a man, they run thirty miles per hour, they can jump eight feet, see in the dark, they have superior hearing and smell, they’ve got stabby sticks on their head—”

She gasped. “Oh no, not the stabby sticks.” She made a fake scared face.

I had to fight to keep my expression straight. “You’re laughing at me, but I’m being totally serious. We’re lucky they haven’t organized. You think we’d still be at the top of the food chain if deer finally got sick of our shit?”

“They don’t have opposable thumbs, Chris. They don’t speak, they can’t conspire, they have no language.”

“Yet. That we know of. Do you know how many people are killed by deer every year?” I asked. “I mean, sure, most of the deaths are from traffic accidents—or are they accidents?”

She was shaking her head. “You are too much. Deer are not scary. Be scared of something actually scary.”