Dumplin - Julie Murphy Page 0,16

around myself. I wait for the words—either his or mine—but nothing comes. The shock I feel is etched into his expression. I run my thumb along my bottom lip and walk back inside. He doesn’t stop me.

Closing takes forever. The dining room is a mess and so is the kitchen, but I barely notice because my thoughts are absorbed with Bo and my first kiss. My first kiss, which took place behind Harpy’s Burgers & Dogs and next to a Dumpster full of day-old trash.

Yet, it was perfect. Every bone in my body aches, like I’ve been in a car accident and there’s nothing physically wrong with me, but still I can feel the impact of it everywhere.

At the end of the night, I’m in my car and pulling out of the exit before Ron’s even locked the door behind him.

I roll to a stop at the light on the corner and scrub my hands up and down my face as I try to process all that happened tonight.

A car horn honks and I glance up at the light, but it’s still red. I hear a muffled yell to my right.

Bo sits in the neighboring lane, waving his arms, pointing at my window. This isn’t even how he goes home. We always turn in the opposite direction. Him, east. Me, west.

The minute I roll down my window, he starts talking. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have just”—kissed you, my head fills in—“done that. I just—” He glances up, and I watch as he notices the light for the intersecting street turning yellow. “Follow me. Please.”

I glance at the clock. It’s already 1:35 in the morning.

The car behind him honks. “Please.” He drives off and changes lanes so that he’s in front of me.

I probably shouldn’t follow a guy I only kind of know down a dark road in the middle of the night. Because he could, like, kill me, and then it wouldn’t matter if I was fat or if my first kiss had been next to a Dumpster, because I’d be super screwed.

When the road splits and it’s me who should be heading right, I veer left and follow a strange boy down a dark road, the sky above us in a deep sleep.

NINE

We drive all the way to the edge of town to the old elementary school that caught on fire a few years ago and has since been condemned.

This is probably one of those red flags. I think maybe I’m missing some kind of self-preservation alarm in my head because this has cautionary tale written all over it.

When we park, I wait for him to get out of his car first. If El were here, she’d tell me to grab a tire iron or to heat up the car lighter, but she’s not. I search my front seat for a weapon, but all I’ve got is an empty jar of peanut butter, a buck thirty-two in change, and some junk mail I forgot to take in the house a few weeks ago. I weigh my keys in my hand for a moment.

Aha! I take my three keys on my ring (car, house, El’s) and hold my hand in a fist so that each of the keys is peeking out from between my fingers. I remember seeing this on a self-defense special of Maury. Television saves lives.

I feel ridiculous, but whatever.

Bo leans against the hood of his old truck. Along the side is the shadow of lettering, like he bought the truck off someone who’d owned a business.

“So this is creepy,” I say, motioning to the school with my non-key-shiv hand. The whole place is singed, but you can still see the definitive structure of a school, except for straight down the center, which is entirely gone. The elements have not done the exposed structure any favors. From here I can see the outline of the playground, entirely dark except for the highlights of the moon. On the entire lot there is only one lone streetlight. We are far outside of its glow.

“Sorry.” He’s taken off his work shirt—I can see it draped over the bench seat inside his truck—and is wearing his crewneck undershirt. The chain I always notice peeking out from beneath his work shirt carries a patron saint pendant. “I used to go here. Before it burned down. It’s the only place on this side of town that I could think to go to at this time of night.”

“Oh.” I want to ask him