I high-stepped back over the fence, out of the pasture, to stand beside Muncie. Ripley scowled across the field at us.

“Hey, Munchkin, grown any brains yet? Maybe with all this radiation in the air, you’ll mutate into something normal.”

I started toward him in anger but Muncie held me back.

“How much is two plus two, Munchkin?” Ripley yelled.

Muncie shifted on the uneven, tufted grass, staying me with her iron grip. I jerked my arm away, causing her to lose her balance. Muncie stumbled backward into the electric fence. Her hand brushed the hot wire.

She jumped at the sting.

Laughing, Ripley pointed at her. “Nyle Sumner, why do you hang around with that dwarf?”

The way he said it made it sound ugly.

I turned my back on him.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Muncie tucked her right arm tight against her chest. Tears stood in her pale eyes, magnified by her glasses.

“I’m going to kill him. Just walk over there and kill him,” I said, twisting around to face Ripley again.

“No, Nyle,” Muncie whispered, coming up close to me. She cradled her shocked arm.

Ripley shifted a big wad of spit in his mouth and hurled it. It arched and landed in the dirt road between us. I took another step forward. Muncie’s left hand reached out, this time to hold me back.

Just then Ripley’s dog caught the scent of something behind him in the woods. He backed up, lifted his head, and started baying. Turning tail, he took off, vanishing between the trees. Ripley, yelling for Tyrus to come back, stomped off after him.

Anger rose up in me like spring sap. I marched toward the road, meaning to cross over.

“Forget it, Nyle.”

Muncie struggled behind me, rocking on her short legs over the treacherous, sloping ground.

“You can’t fight Ripley, Nyle. No one can. Forget it.”

I swung around to face her. “I could—”

“He’s fifteen! And twice your weight. And besides, he’s a boy.”

“I could fight him.”

I stopped in the road to pick up the backpack I’d dropped minutes earlier. I stared at the place where Ripley and Tyrus had stood.

“This makes half a dozen sheep we’ve lost in one year to that dog.” I beat road dust off my backpack.

“At least he killed only one this time,” Muncie said.

Last May, Ripley’s dog slaughtered five of our sheep in one night. That was after Birch, our old guard dog, had died.

“Tyrus won’t kill any more of your sheep,” Muncie said. “Red Jackson’ll see to that. Come on, Nyle. Let’s get home.”

As we climbed the steep road, sloping pasture to one side, Ripley’s woods to the other, I slowed way down, matching my pace to Muncie’s. We didn’t even try talking. Climbing pinched the breath right out of her.

We stopped at the fork that led to my house. Muncie’s chest worked hard, trying to suck enough air in.

“Are you—coming up—to do homework?”