worriedly over at her.
Just then, the second guy – the one who had gotten a knee in the chest – decided that he hadn’t had enough yet. He got up, and ran at Logan from behind.
“Watch out!” Laura screamed, but Logan just gracefully – majestically – extended his left leg back in a roundhouse kick. Logan’s foot struck the guy in the chest, and he collapsed heavily to the floor.
Logan looked back at Laura. Seeing that she was still there, he walked over to Brady, who lay face-down against the floor. Gruffly, Logan kicked him over to his back, and dropped to one knee to pin both of Brady’s shoulders to the ground. From where Laura was, she thought Brady was in enormous pain.
“Listen to me, Brad,” Logan began, “I don’t want you doing that to her, or any other girl, ever again. Do you understand?”
Brady whimpered desperately and nodded his head in agreement.
“In fact, Brad,” Logan continued, “I don’t even want to so much as hear of you being in this part of the school again. Do I make myself clear?”
Brady kept nodding, over and over. Laura thought she could see tears running down his face. Somehow, holding him like that, Logan was hurting him. Really hurting him. She had to end it.
“Stop it!” she yelled. She tried getting up, to pull Logan off, but her knees were weak, and didn’t want to support her.
As soon as the words left her mouth, Logan looked to her. And removed his hands from Brady’s shoulders. Brady exhaled in relief, and weakly rolled to one side to cradle himself with his hands.
Logan rose, and stepped quickly over the bodies to walk up to Laura. Before she knew it, he had his hands gently under her arms, helping her up.
“Are you OK?” he asked, frowning with worry.
“Yes,” Laura answered. “But… why did you do that?”
“Do what?” Logan asked quizzically.
“Do that,” Laura emphasized, pointing to the four guys still mostly on the floor. “Why did you do that to them? Why did you interfere?”
“They had no right to treat you that way.”
“But I didn’t ask you to do that!” This felt wrong, somehow, arguing like this with her rescuer, but she couldn’t control her emotions. And right now, they were demanding an outburst. “Oh my God, now Brady’s going to hate me. They’re all going to hate me. All going to blame me!”
“You cannot be complicit in things like this, Laura…”
“Oh, like you would know?” she spat.
“I know more than you might think,” he said.
“Oh, give me a break. You haven’t lifted your head once in school! I don’t think you’ve even spoken to anyone other than me! You had no right to interfere, no right to do that at all!”
“And without me, Laura, what would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She felt herself getting close to tears, and had to bite off the end of every word. “But I know I still would have had a chance with Brady! Oh, who knows what he’s going to think of me now. He’s probably going to hate my guts! Why did you have to do that?” Her eyes began to water, and she clenched a fist, swinging it right at Logan’s stomach. He made no move to get out of the way.
Her blow connected, and it felt like she had hit a concrete wall. The reverberation ran all the way up her arm, hurting both her elbow, her shoulder, and her knuckles.
“Very well,” Logan said quietly. He turned and walked away, leaving Laura to slump against her locker. Tears began to stream down her face.
Chapter Five
~Shock and Murder~
Laura had run home as soon as her legs were strong enough to carry her. Run from the scene that lay before her. Run from the memories there.
She lay face down on her bed, the door to her bedroom locked. Away from her parents, away from her sister, away from her dog, away from everybody.
She hadn’t told any of her friends what happened. She hadn’t told anybody what happened, for that matter. She had dozens of missed calls from her friends so far, wondering why she didn’t show up in last class, wondering why she wasn’t there to walk home with them afterschool, wondering a hundred different things. She ignored them all. She was in no mood to talk to anyone.
It felt like in that one afternoon, everything had collapsed around her. She dreaded what school the next day would bring. An encounter with Logan, in