He held up the phone, lining up his camera. His friends jostled and snickered in his wake. “You should’ve given him a chance,” Dylan said. “You might have liked it.”

More than anything, it was a concept. An idea made of giggles and rudeness and wonder and heat and a couple of partial diagrams from a rigorously straight-faced health class lecture on the biology of it. It was loaded into a slingshot of shame when the idea was pointed at her or the other girls, but she didn’t quite understand why the joke was funny for the boys, but definitely not for her. She was embarrassed by it, but even more embarrassed just for being embarrassable in the first place.

Nothing waiting in the queue of her thoughts would make any sense to say out loud. Fire bloomed into her cheeks and the maddening tingle of tears felt like a hand around her throat.

Dylan smiled, starting to collect his reward as the people in the room helplessly took score.

No one was on his side, but the balance tipped. She could feel their acknowledgment. He certainly could as well. The cruel, smooth, ancient part of the crowd brain tilted irresistibly toward not what was right, but to what was strong.

Carly saw the woman seated to her left watching with her folded hands pressed to her lips. She shifted in her chair and leaned forward, enthralled. But the woman didn’t settle back. Instead, she got up and walked toward Dylan and the other boys, smiling.

She was tall. White shirt. Jeans. Really good boots, with cool buckled straps wound around them. As she went by, Carly saw that the woman’s jaw was messed up. The right side of her face was tight at the far edge and puckered with scars.

The woman walked all the way up to Dylan, arms crossed, back bowed into a casual slouch. She looked amused.

“You know, you might be the bravest boy I’ve ever seen.”

Dylan tried to smirk, but the color went patchy on his face. A sudden rash of alarm crept up out of the neck of his T-shirt.

“No, really. That was unusual. Not a lot of people would be that . . . that . . . I don’t know. What would you call it?”

Dylan shrugged.

“What’s your name?”

He stiffened to keep from squirming. It was plain he wanted to shrug again so desperately that Carly felt her own shoulders rising in unwitting sympathy. He dropped his gaze to the level of everyone’s knees.

The woman ducked her head into his sight line. “Oh, come on. Don’t lose the fire now. What’s your name?”

One of the boys behind him cough-shouted into his fist, “Dylan!”

The woman dropped her smile and uncurled from her friendly slump to her full height. She rolled her hand over with a flick of her wrist, palm up. “Give me your phone, Dylan.”