Then, I heard the jingling of the little brass bells above the door.
I didn't turn around. I didn't have to. The woman who'd been helping me pulled off her apron and headed toward the counter as I paused with a spoon halfway to my mouth and saw Anna Fetterman's reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
"Can you help me?" Anna said, once the clerk drew near. "I need to have my inhaler refilled."
"Sure, honey." The woman took the slip of paper from Anna's hand. "Let me go check on this. It'll just be a minute."
I was already off my stool and crouching behind an adult diapers display, when I realized that all I was really guilty of was eating a hot fudge sundae so soon after lunch, and let me tell you—Anna has seen me eat way more than that (a certain incident involving Doritos, squirty cheese, and the winter Olympics comes to mind), so I was just getting ready to go say hi, when I heard something that made me freeze.
The bells rang again, and I glanced through the shelves to see Dillon and a bunch of boys from the barn dance walk in. But they didn't walk down the aisles. No. They'd already found what they were looking for.
"Hey, don't I know you?" Dillon asked, but he wasn't talking to me. It was worse. He was talking to Anna, and he wasn't simply asking a question. His words were too sharp. His tone too predatory as he stepped closer to little Anna Fetterman and said, "No, wait, you don't go to my school." In the mirror above the bar I saw him crowd Anna against the shelves. "I bet you go to the Gallagher Academy."
Anna drew her purse to her chest as if he were going to grab it and run away. "What a nice purse," Dillon said. "Did your daddy buy you that purse?"
Anna's daddy is an eighth-grade biology teacher in Dayton, Ohio, but Dillon didn't know that and Anna couldn't tell him. She was clinging to her cover just as ardently as I was clinging to mine.
The boys around Dillon started to laugh. And just like that I remembered why Gallagher Girls and town boys aren't supposed to mix.
Anna stumbled backward, because, despite nearly three and a half years of P&E training, she could hardly swat a fly. The town was swarming with Gallagher Girls that afternoon, but Dillon and his friends had found Anna. It wasn't an accident. Anna was alone and weak, so obviously someone like Dillon would be there to try to thin her from the herd.
"I'm just here to …" Anna tried to speak, but her voice was barely more than a whisper.
"What's that?" Dillon asked. "I didn't hear you."
"I…" Anna stuttered.
I wanted to go to her, but I was frozen somehow— halfway between being her friend and being a homeschooled girl with a cat named Suzie. If I were one and not the other, I could have stopped it, but instead I told myself over and over, She'll be okay; she'll be okay; she'll be—
"What's the matter? Don't they teach you how to speak at the Gallagher Academy?" Dillon said, and I would have given anything for Anna to bite back in Arabic, or Japanese, or Farsi, but she just took another backward step. Her elbow knocked a box of Band-Aids, and it teetered on the edge of the shelf.
Anna inched toward the door and mumbled, "I'll come back for—"
But a couple of Dillon's friends stepped in front of her, surrounding her with a wall of crimson lettermen's jackets, and I couldn't see her anymore.
She'll be fine, I said again, willing it to be true. Which in a way it was, because just then the doorbells chimed, and in walked Macey McHenry.
"Hey, Anna." To my knowledge, Macey had never said more than two words to Anna Fetterman, but as she strolled through the door, her voice was light and free, and she sounded like the tiny girl's best friend in the world. "What's going on?"
The four boys parted around Anna, backing away; maybe because of the way Macey chomped her gum then blew a bubble that popped in Dillon's face; maybe because they'd never seen a girl so beautiful in person before. But Dillon didn't stray.
"Oh," he said smugly, looking Macey's amazing figure up and down. "She has a friend."
Anna looked at Macey as if she half suspected her classmate to say, Who me? I'm not her friend. But Macey only fingered the bottles on the shelves, handing Anna a bottle of vitamin C. "You should really take these."
Macey walked down the aisle, examining the shelves, ignoring Dillon and the gang, who kept looking at their leader for directions.
"I should have known the Gallagher Academy wouldn't let its precious darlings out on their own," Dillon mocked. But Macey only smiled one of her patently beautiful smiles.
"Yeah," she said, eyeing his buddies. "We're not brave like you."
"Is there a problem here?" I knew the voice, but the accent was one Bex only used on rare occasions. To this day, I don't know how she got through the front door without setting off the chimes, but there she was, strolling past the Cold and Flu section, coming to stand on Anna's other side. I didn't know why she wasn't at the movie. I didn't care.
It was three against four now, and Dillon didn't like those odds. Still, he managed to look at Bex and say, "What's the matter? Is your yacht broken or something?"
Dillon snickered. The friends snickered. It was an idiot snicker-a-thon until Macey said, "Not that I've heard."
"Did you boys come over here to flirt with Anna?" Bex said, laying on her faux charm. She pushed a petrified Anna toward the clan. "Anna, tell the boys a little something about yourself."