Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,75

have to worry about me anymore,” I told him as I unlocked my seat belt. “Just have your lawyer talk to Mom’s lawyer.”

Then he snapped. He tried to grab me as I hopped out of the car, then jumped out his own door, slamming it so hard, the whole van rocked. I just stood and watched, with no idea of how crazy he might get. He flung open the back and pulled out my suitcase.

“Get back in this car now or your things go in the gutter,” he told me.

This was his best idea? Once he had taken my favorite possessions, the objects that reflected my personality and my passions, and he’d thrown them in the garbage. Did he really not know how little I cared about anything packed in that suitcase?

I smiled, which sent him into a fury. He lifted the bag over his head and slammed in into the asphalt. The clasps popped open and my clothes exploded out. A wind whipped up and blouses, pants, even socks rolled and danced away between and over other people’s cars as if I were running away in little pieces, too many and far to chase. My clothes took every direction and fled with glee.

I watched in wonder, instead of the horror he expected, I guess, which made him even more furious. He went red in the face and pulled out my book bag, flinging it right at me. I dodged as it hit a stranger’s car in the tire. Someone honked at him. Someone else rolled down a window and yelled. Even if he hadn’t been stuck in traffic, I don’t think he’d have turned the car around.

I slipped between idling cars, stepped up onto the sidewalk, and walked downhill along the block where an empty lot stood open to my left, a field with a fence on the far side.

As I stared across the dry grass, I saw something curve out of the alley beyond. A bike hit the chainlink fence and someone jumped off and then tackled the fence like a prisoner of war escaping. By the time his sneakers hit the grass, Billy was running for the cars that waited to get on the freeway. He limped as if the landing hadn’t gone right, but he didn’t slow down. He galloped like a madman.

I thought I might be hallucinating. Amazed at what I was seeing, I stepped off the pavement and into the field. At first he didn’t see me—he headed for the white van, the top of which was visible behind another car.

“Hey!” I called. He stumbled when he caught sight of me. In his face I saw both of them, the boy I’d met in a field in the middle of nowhere and the boy who had broken down my bathroom door to save me.

“Hey!” He pointed at me. He was a hundred feet off and still limping, out of breath, his shirt torn from the teeth of the fence. “You lived in a field.”

I’d been moving toward him, but that stopped me. I wanted him to remember meeting me when we were outside our bodies, but now that he did, it took my breath away.

“I remember you,” he called, loping toward me. He laughed. “You took us to the Lincoln monument and the Great Wall of China.”

He stopped to catch his breath a few yards away. “You took us to the Eiffel Tower.” He dropped to one knee, exhausted but smiling. “And you were freaked out when I took us to the moon.”

“It was scary,” I told him. I couldn’t move—I was as light and breathless as if he’d lifted me straight up into the sky.

He got to his feet and walked the rest of the distance. “You.” He shook his head. “You took us to a volcano.” When he got to me, he took my shoulders and held me at arm’s distance. “We had a fight.”

I nodded.

“You told me to go away.” Then he released me, took a step back, looking astonished. “But you waited for me.”

“Of course I did.”

He gasped in a breath and came at me. The first kiss knocked us to our knees. “You told me I wasn’t dead,” he remembered.

“You drew a line down the middle of the field,” I laughed.

“I did!” He pulled us into the grass and held me so tight, I could hardly catch my breath. “What a stupid ass!” he laughed. “You took me to Paris and I took you to the bumper cars at