She looked down. At the pump. At the nozzle. At the woman's two hands resting on top of its grip.
And she reached out, with both of her own small pale hands, the nails painted the same glossy red as her shoes, and she grabbed it.
She grabbed the base of the nozzle where it entered the SUV, below the tall woman's hands, and she wrapped her fingers around the thick black rubber of the hose collar, and she pulled. Hard. With all her weight, leaning back on her stiletto heels on the wet asphalt, trying to wrench it out of the fuel tank of the gray SUV the way you would pull a sword out of a stone.
It did not come out. It was locked into the filler neck, and the tall woman's hands were on it, and Brooke was small. But it shifted. It lurched and rocked in the opening of the tank, and the steel spout grated against the metal of the filler neck with a horrible shrieking scrape, and the lock on the handle clicked off and the flow of gasoline stuttered. And out of the gap at the top of the filler neck, around the jerking nozzle, a thin splash of gasoline jumped up and spattered across the gray paint of the SUV and down onto the wet asphalt, and the sharp sweet poisonous smell of it rose suddenly into the damp air, so strong that Theo, twenty feet away, smelled it and flinched.
Brooke heard herself laughing. A high wild breathless laugh. She looked up into the tall woman's face from two inches away, gripping the nozzle with both hands, her chest heaving, her eyes blazing, and she said the two words that would be watched, over the next eleven days, by more than forty million people.
"Make me."
Everything after that happened very fast. Faster than anyone watching could follow. Faster, almost, than Dara herself could follow. Theo's video would capture it at thirty frames per second, and people all over the world would slow it down to a quarter speed, an eighth, frame by frame, and draw lines and circles on it, and argue about it in comment sections for weeks, and still not all of them would see what happened inside it.
What happened inside it was this.
Dara smelled the gasoline.
And in that instant, with the woman's hands on the nozzle beneath hers and the spout grinding loose in the filler neck and the sharp poisonous smell rising around them, every calculation in her head changed. The woman was not a threat to her. She had never been a threat to her. Dara could have stood there all morning and let her shout. But the woman was pulling on a live fuel nozzle, at an active pump, with the handle half open, in the rain, on slick asphalt, in four-inch heels, and in another second, if she pulled again, harder, the nozzle would come free of the tank, and the gasoline still in the hose and the spout would come with it, would spray out across both of them, across the woman's bare shoulders and her bare legs and the hot engine of that orange car not ten feet away that had just been revving at six thousand RPM. And the woman would almost certainly fall, on those heels, on that wet ground, with a gushing nozzle in her hands. And Dara could not let go of the nozzle to stop her, because if Dara let go, the woman would have it.
She did not decide. There was no time to decide. Fifteen years of training decided for her.
She kept both hands on the grip of the nozzle and clamped down on it, hard, holding it locked into the tank with her full grip, anchoring it. She shifted her weight, all of it, every pound, onto her right foot, sinking into it, so that the thick rubber platform of her right sneaker pressed flat and solid against the wet concrete of the fuel island and became the root of her whole body. And her left knee came up.
It came up fast and close, tight to her body, folding, the knee rising to her chest in the narrow space between the two of them, so tight and so quick that Brooke, looking up into her face, never saw it coming. And then the leg extended. Not in a swing. Not in a strike. In a push. A straight, hard, driving thrust from the hip, the sole of the black platform sneaker flat and level, the way you would push open a heavy door with your foot when both your hands are full. The front kick. The first kick Coach Imura had ever taught her, at seven years old, on a blue mat under a strip of plywood. The simplest kick in the world. The push. Its only purpose is to make space.