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Kevin couldn't take his eyes off her hair. When her fist shot out, she snapped her head sideways and the long hair whipped past like a comet's tail. Fierce green eyes flashed out before the hair swept down again in front of them. She looked beautiful.
A boy worked his way to the front of the crowd watching the fight. He elbowed past Kevin as though he didn't exist. Kevin glared at the back of the stranger's denim jacket but kept his mouth shut. Kids had been doing that all day.
"Hey, quit, Charley," the boy called out. Kevin thought he sounded amused. Maybe he felt sorry for the guy being creamed by the girl.
The girl shook her head and the red hair flew as the boy in front of her smashed into a row of lockers.
"No way," she grunted. Then the guy she had pinner against the lockers took advantage of her attention shift to throw his weight against her and shove her back. She kicked one of his legs out from under him and the two of them thudded down, rolling across the floor as a couple of kids cheered.
Kevin caught his breath and edged forward, ready to jerk the kid off her. He wanted to sling him against the lockers and make him leave her alone. Not that the girl needed any help - she knew how to stand up for herself. But in his mind Kevin could see Orion draw his sword and leap into the battle. Orion was Kevin's Dungeons & Dragons character, a sixth-level Ranger. Kevin knew Orion would never let a girl fight alone, not even a warrior maiden who outranked him. He'd finish off the troll, then offer the maiden his sword in eternal fealty.
Gasping, the troll got the upper hand for a second and Kevin saw his face for the first time. It was Chris Waverly, the only ninth grader besides Kevin whose father was in the Army. With a sinking feeling, Kevin could hear his father's voice playing like a tinny tape in the back of his head: "Military families stick together, Kevin. Remember, I have to work with these people. That means you have to get along with their kids. We have to support each other." Kevin understood what his father meant. Soldiers in combat had to stick together. They depended on each other for their very lives. And even though it was peacetime, career officers stuck together.
The Army was just different from the civilian world. Kevin had grown up accepting that peculiarity. When other kids goofed up, they got yelled at, and maybe grounded - no big deal. When an Army kid goofed up, the word went all around the military post, and he wasn't the only one in deep trouble. His father would get read the riot act by his commanding officer, and then he came home and read it to his kid.
It wasn't so much that Kevin was scared of hi father's coming down hard on him. He simply respected his father too much to let himself goof up and embarrass him very often. Sometimes, though, having to watch his every move drove Kevin crazy. He felt like he'd somehow been drafted into the Army before he'd been born. There seemed to be some sort of unwritten rule that military families were under just as strict command as the military officer himself. Kevin didn't have a choice about getting along with other military kids - he had to.
Kevin knew his father would expect him to stick by Chris. What Kevin thought about the girl wasn't important enough to go out on a limb for. Getting involved in a fight on the first day of school was not what his father, or the Army, would consider getting along.
Kevin squeezed past a couple of jeering kids and leaned against the wall. He wanted to forget his father and the Army, and just stand there and watch her a little while longer. What the other guy called her? Charley? She was too beautiful for a name like that.
Then Chris crashed to the floor and the girl was on her knees, straddling him. Her blouse had pulled out of her belt in the back, and at the sight of it Kevin felt an unfamiliar heat rush through him.
Chris cursed and twisted under her, struggling to break her grasp and knock her down, but she got a knee on one of his arms and grabbed his other wrist and twisted it backward. She punched him in the chest, hard.
"Had enough?" Her voice was sharp and angry, but something else, an underlying warm intensity in her tone, made the words echo inside Kevin's head.
"Okay!" Chris gasped.
She let go and stood up gracefully, stepping over him as though he were a cockroach she had just squashed. She wiped her hands on her tight jeans and firmly tucked her blouse back into place. Kevin grinned to himself. She hadn't needed him after all - he didn't have to feel guilty about following his father's orders and leaving her to win her own fight. Chris just lay there at her feet, coughing shakily.
"Just remember," she told him, "you keep out of my way."
She smoothed out the dark red hair and flipped it neatly over her shoulder. Then she took her books back from a girlfriend and threw Chris one last fierce glance.
"Stupid Army brat," she said.
Kevin's chest felt heavy, like he had stopped breathing without noticing. Why did she call Chris an Army brat?
Copyright ©1992 by Elaine Marie Alphin
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