"The impact startled him, crashing onto his ears like a thousand breaking dishes. Dazed, he stared stupidly at the crumbled bricks on the smoking hood. Confused voices reached his auditory nerves as from a distance, incomprehensible. Dimly he associated the voices with the unfocused figures spinning frenetically across his field of vision. One of them with a red trembling nose flailed his arms at the wreckage. The man laughed.
The way she had laughed at him when he came off the diving board fully clothed. Showing off for the girls, as usual. With disastrous results, not as usual. That was the first time he ever saw her. It was his parents’ turn to host the monthly church social, and everyone was gathered in the backyard. The adults huddled around the grill debating methods of barbecuing ribs and recipes for potato salad. A couple of teenagers horsing around on the far end of the lot. His friend Beau, with sly looks in the direction of a gaggle of girls, had decided to demonstrate how to balance a pyramid of coke cans on one hand. Provoked into action by the evident success of Beau’s stunt, he declared he could balance the same tray of cokes on his head while jumping up and down on the diving board.
He took one look from the end of that diving board and it was all over. He had hauled himself out of the pool dripping and shivering in the October air while everyone scrambled to retrieve the rapidly sinking cans. All he remembered after that was the piquant mocking face over the side fence. He ran self-conscious fingers through his hair and tried to affect nonchalance. He sauntered in the general direction of the girl, his soggy sneakers making sucking sounds around his ankles.
“Haven’t seen you here before,” he said.
“I just moved here with my dad,” she told him, suddenly very interested in her cuticles. She added unnecessarily, “There’s water on your nose.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He rubbed his arm unhelpfully across his face. “Uh, wanna come over?”
“No, thanks,” she answered, abandoning her nails to look him over appraisingly. She flipped her red hair with an air of superiority. “My dad doesn’t let me hang out with strangers.”
He felt his stomach flip. “Levi,” he gulped. “I mean – I’m Levi.”
“From the Bible,” she said. “Me too. I’m Chloe. Ironic!”
A man came to the door of the house on her side of the fence and stood watching them. Chloe looked toward him and turned as if to go.
“My brother has a band,” Levi blurted, forgetting to ask what was ironic. “Sometimes I play drums for them.” He beat a haphazard rhythm on the nearest fence post, ending with a theatrical pirouette. He waited impressively for the admiring applause he felt sure his performance deserved, and felt his cheeks grow warm at the sound of her laughter.
“I have to go,” she said. She flipped her hair again and turned away, leaving him stewing on his own side of the fence. At the back door she turned mocking eyes back on him for a moment, and he hung breathless. “See you in school, Levi,” she said. The man stayed in the doorway, watching.
He moved away from the fence, feeling dizzy. Not noticing the Coke can under his feet. The bridge of his nose snapped on the pavement, and the can splatted against the wall with a hiss.
The world turned black while colors he’d never seen before exploded behind his eyes. A spray of red banished the blackness as his head snapped back in the grip of an invisible rubber band. He felt rather than heard the windshield implode, spraying glass and washer fluid all over the front seat. For a suspended moment he gazed fascinated at the rainbow pinpricks of light flying toward him as if fleeing from the crumbling wall relentlessly bulldozing a path through his engine."
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