“What neighborhood?”
“Brooklyn. My parents still live there. Same house.” With a shake of his head, he drew back. He could make her out now in the dark, could see the way her eyes were smiling at him. “How come we’re talking about me, when I asked you about your nose?”
“I like hearing it.”
“There was a fistfight,” he said, prompting her.
Bess sighed. “One of those girl cliques,” she began. “You know the type. The cool kids, all hair and teeth and attitude. I was the nerd they liked to pick on.”
“You were never a nerd.”
“I was achampionnerd. Gawky, top of the class academically, socially inept.”
“You?”
There was such pure disbelief in the tone, she laughed. “Which of those descriptions don’t you buy, Alexi?”
He considered a moment. “Any of them.”
“I guess I’m two-thirds flattered and one-third insulted. I was tall for my age and skinny. A very late bloomer in the bosom and hips department.”
“You might have bloomed slow,” he began, proving his point with a sweep of his hand, “but you bloomed very well.”
“Thank you. My mind, however, had developed quite nicely. StraightA’s.”
“No kidding?” He grinned in the dark. “And you were the kid who always trashed the grading curve for the rest of us.”
“That’s the idea. Added to that, I was more comfortable with a book, or thinking, than I was tittering. Young girls do a lot of tittering. Because I was hardheaded, I automatically took a dislike to anything that was popular or fashionable at the time. As a result, I took a lot of flak. Bess the Mess, that sort of thing.”
She paused long enough to shift some pillows. “Anyway, we had this history exam coming up. One of the cool kids—her name was Dawn Gallagher... Heart-shaped face, perfect features, long, flowing blond hair. You get the picture.”
“Prom-queen type.”
“Exactly. She was flunking big-time and wanted me to let her copy from my paper. She’d made my life adolescent hell, and she figured if she was nice to me for a couple of days, let me stand within five feet of her, maybe sit at the same lunch table, I’d be so grateful, I’d let her.”
“But you hung tough.”
“I don’t cheat for anybody. The upshot was, she flunked the exam, and her parents were called to the school for a conference. Dawn retaliated by pinching me whenever I got too close, getting into my room and breaking my things, stealing my books. Small-time terrorism. One day on the basketball court—”
“You shot hoop?”
“Team captain. I was an athletic nerd,” she explained. “Anyway, she tripped me. If that wasn’t bad enough, she had a few friends on the other team. They elbowed the hell out of me during the game. I had bruises everywhere.”
An immediate flood of resentment had him tightening his hold. “Little bitches.”
Pleased with the support, she cuddled closer. “It was an epiphany for me. Suddenly I saw that pacifism, while morally sound, could get you trampled into dust. I waited for Dawn outside the science lab one day. We started out with words—I’ve always been good at them. We progressed to pushing and shoving and drew quite a crowd. She swung first. I didn’t expect it, and she bopped me right on the nose. Let me tell you, Detective, pain can be a great motivator.”
“Separates the nerds from the toughs.”
“You got it. It took three of them to pull me off her, but before they did, I’d blackened her baby-blues, split her Cupid’s-bow mouth and loosened several of her pearly-whites.”
“Good for you, McNee.”
“It was good,” she said with a sigh. “In fact, it felt so good, I’ve had to be careful with my temper ever since. I didn’t just want to hurt her, you see. I wanted to mangle her.”
He took her hand, curled it into a fist and raised it to his lips. “I’ll have to watch my step. Did you take much heat?”
“We both got suspended. My parents were appalled and embarrassed enough by my behavior to cancel my summer plans and switch me to another school.”
