Love Story by Jennifer Echols

falling-out.” I shook my head to keep from dwelling on that awful night. “He and I avoided each other for the rest of the summer. And when school started in the fall, somebody figured out that his dad worked for my grandmother, and that Hunter helped out at the farm, too, sometimes, and everybody started calling him … wait for it …”
    “Stable boy,” Summer intoned. Then she grabbed my arm. “I was right! You’re Rebecca from your story! You’re loaded!”
    “Was loaded,” I murmured.
    “But Hunter’s loaded, too,” Summer insisted. “He was wearing a Rolex.”
    “I noticed. That was a nice touch on my grandmother’s part. What happened was—”
    She looked at me as she stepped forward. I saw movement beyond her shoulders. In a flash I threw my arm in front of her just before she walked off the curb and into the path of a taxi.
    “Hey,” she complained. Then she saw the taxi. Her eyes widened. “Whoa.”
    I put my hand to my heart and breathed through my nose to calm the adrenaline rush. “Be more alert until you’re used to walking around the city,” I scolded her. “Accidents happen.”
    “Everybody at my high school talked about a girl who was newspaper editor there a long time ago,” Summer exclaimed. “She went to New York City on scholarship and got killed in a crosswalk by a taxi her first day. I was almost that girl!”
    “My high school told the same story,” I assured her. “It’s an urban myth designed to scare you and keep you at home. Just look both ways before crossing the street, okay?”
    She blinked at the traffic whizzing in front of us until the light changed and we stepped into the crosswalk. “What happened was …,” she prompted me.
    I glanced up the street again, paranoid now about speeding taxis. We were crossing Fifth Avenue. The five-story town houses grew into elegant twenty-story hotels here, carved stonework on every corner of the buildings. Ten blocks up, the Empire State Building, already glowing white against the pink sky, peeked around the shoulders of the smaller buildings in front of it.
    I stepped up on the opposite curb. “When my grandmother was our age, she earned her business degree here in New York so she could run her family’s horse farm. She wanted me to do the same and take over someday.”
    “I thought you’re majoring in English,” Summer protested.
    “I am. A few days before high school graduation, I admitted to her that I did want to come to college here, but I would not major in business. I would major in English so I could write romance novels.”
    “And she freaked?” Summer asked.
    “My grandmother does not freak.” I felt my nostrils flare as I thought of her. “She waited until graduation night, when I’d come home to change between the ceremony and the parties. She called me into her office. Hunter was already there. She informed me that she didn’t need me anyway. Since blood clearly was not thicker than water, she would give Hunter my college money. He would major in business here, then run the horse farm. And when she dies, he will inherit the horse farm for his loyalty.”
    “What!” Summer squealed. But she had to step behind me, single file. We’d reached a portion of the sidewalk with scaffolding overhead so the construction workers in the building didn’t brain pedestrians with falling cement blocks.
    I kept talking over my shoulder as I entered the passageway packed with people forming two lanes of traffic. “The worst part is, I should have seen it coming. Our high school classmates would mention going to the University of Louisville or the University of Kentucky. Hunter would always shake his head and say, ‘I am getting out of here.’”
    The passageway narrowed to one lane. A huge puddle from last night’s rain blocked half the width of the sidewalk, cigarette butts and a fortune cookie wrapper floating at the edge like timid waders in a cold ocean. “So it doesn’t make sense to me that he would