Hit by Delilah S. Dawson Page A

eyes glaze over at the thin red line his knife made on my neck before wandering up to my posters, and he almost smiles again. He runs a hand through his hair, making it stand up in ragged spikes in the red glow of the clock. I probably look like a corpse, but it’s not like I’m trying to win a beauty pageant. I just want us both to get out of this mail truck alive, without hurting each other any more than we have to. And maybe, just a little, I want him to understand.
    â€œYou didn’t know your mom was in debt?” he finally says.
    â€œI knew we were poor. And I knew her insurance sucked and the hospital time and meds were a serious problem after her accident. I didn’t know she’d been fired, lost her insurance, and pawned the car title. We were doing pretty good a year ago. You’ve probably passed our neighborhood. River Run? It’s just around the corner from you, but my entire house would fit in your living room.”
    â€œYeah, we pass it all the time.” He tosses his hair. I wonder if he straight irons his bangs. “That’s why I don’t know you. We go to different schools.”
    I snort. “Yeah. You go to Haven with all the rich kids, and I go to Big Creek with all the losers.”
    â€œThere’s nothing wrong with that,” he says. “I didn’t ask for . . . It’s not like . . .”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œI’m not going to say I don’t want to be rich, because we both know that’s stupid. Everyone wants to be rich. But I knew what my dad was doing. I knew he got fired for embezzling, and I knew he was blackballed, and I knew the bills were racking up. I saw them in the trash, the ones that they start sending in pink instead of white. Like you just forgot to pay them because they weren’t a bright enough color or something. But my dad . . . It’s not like I could have said anything. I mentioned it once, that we might need to make a budget or cut out . . . some stuff. And my dad went ballistic and smashed my laptop.”
    Now it’s my turn to stare at him. I feel curious about this strange fake-rich boy who somehow tracked me down in the rain, possibly to kill me, and who is now waxing philosophic about his father’s debt. Did he actually think he could kill me? Does he really have what it takes to do that? Pulling the trigger on his dad was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and that was four feet away with a gun. What does it take to put a knife through someone’s throat? He’s playing with it now, cleaning out his fingernails like it’s just the most normal thing to do with a steak knife. But maybe he knows how to use it on more than steak. I probably look pretty harmless from the outside too.
    â€œWhy am I telling you this?” he finally says.
    He looks up, and our eyes meet somewhere in the center of a repurposed delivery truck.
    â€œStages of grief?” I venture, fiddling with my locket.
    â€œLet’s see. What am I feeling? Well, I watched my dad die, and I felt confusion, fear, anger, and sadness. I got in my car in my pajamas to drive to the hospital because they wouldn’t answer the frigging phone and saw a familiar girl driving a big-ass mail truck past my neighborhood. That was anger again. I followed her into the middle of nowhere to kill her in some weird action-movie-­revenge scene with the knife from my glove box. So that was more anger, and I’m pretty sure I felt insanity in there. I sat in my car for two horrible hours, crying and thinking and raging and waiting for this stupid truck to do something, anything but sit there in the rain.”
    I open my mouth, and he stops me with a finger in my face.
    â€œAnd I finally charged over here to kill you before the rain quit and I had to see your face in the sunlight. That was desperation. When I failed, there was more anger. And now that we’ve talked and I know we like the same music and