Mr. Farouk came out at a heavy, flat-footed run, with a roll of paper towels under one arm and a bag of cat litter in the other hand, which he kept behind the counter for exactly this purpose, because in thirty-one years of running a gas station he had learned that there was no faster way to soak up a fuel spill. He was shouting. "Nobody smoke! Nobody smoke! No phones near the pump, no cigarettes, nothing!" He waddled to the gray SUV and tore open the bag of cat litter with his teeth and began pouring it in a thick gray heap over the gasoline on the asphalt, and then over the streaks on the side of the car, scattering it with his hands. He looked down at the two young women kneeling by the orange car. He looked at Dara. He knew her. He had known her since she was twelve years old.
"Miss Dara?" he said, in astonishment. "What happened? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, Mr. Farouk." She did not take her hand from the other woman's shoulder. "She pulled on the nozzle while it was running. It spilled. I'm sorry."
Mr. Farouk looked at the cat litter, and the dented orange car, and the crying woman in red, and then at Dara again. Something in his kind, tired face hardened slightly.
"I have to call the police, Miss Dara," he said. "I'm sorry. There's a spill. Somebody's hurt. It's the rules. The insurance." He spread his hands. "You understand."
"I understand," said Dara.
And she did. But as Mr. Farouk took his phone out of his pocket and turned away toward the store, speaking in a low voice, Dara looked down at her own left foot, at the black platform sneaker resting on the wet asphalt in the puddle, and she felt something cold and heavy settle into the bottom of her stomach and stay there.
The ring is the only place.
Fifteen years.
She had not even thought. That was what frightened her. Not that she had kicked. She was almost sure, kneeling there with the smell of gasoline in her nose, that she had had to. That it was the least she could do to stop the nozzle coming out, the least she could do to get both of them safe. Almost sure. But she had not thought it. She had not weighed it. Her body had simply done it, the way it did in the ring, faster than thought, and only afterward, when it was already over, had her mind caught up and begun, frantically, to check its work. What if she had been wrong? What if she could have done something else? Let go of the nozzle and stepped back? Shouted for help? Grabbed the woman's wrists instead? What if there had been another way, and she had not seen it, because fifteen years of training had seen the kick first?
She did not know. She would not know for a long time.
The police came eleven minutes later, two officers in a patrol car with its lights going but no siren. One was an older man with a mustache and a slow, careful way of speaking, named Officer Duane Pruitt. The other was a young woman, Officer Kim, who had a notebook and wrote down everything anyone said in quick neat shorthand. They separated Dara and Brooke, as officers do. Pruitt took Brooke to sit in the passenger seat of the patrol car with the door open and a foil blanket around her shoulders, and Kim took Dara to stand under the canopy by pump one, and they asked them both, separately, what happened.
Brooke told Officer Pruitt that a woman had attacked her.
She did not mean to say it. She would remember that, later, with a kind of horror. She had been sitting in the patrol car in the foil blanket with her ankle throbbing and her face streaked with black, still shaking, and the officer had asked her, very gently, what happened, ma'am, and she had opened her mouth to tell the truth, and what came out was, she kicked me. She just kicked me. I asked her to move her car and she kicked me in the chest. And once it was out, she could not seem to take it back. It was as if some part of her that was still standing in the bathroom on the twenty-sixth floor of a glass building with her hands on a marble sink, some part of her that had spent two years making sure that she always looked like she was winning, had seized the controls. She told Officer Pruitt that the woman had been rude. That the woman had refused to move. That the woman had threatened her. That the woman was some kind of fighter, she could tell, a professional, she moved like one, and she had kicked Brooke for no reason, and Brooke wanted to press charges.
Officer Pruitt wrote it down. He did not say anything. He had been a police officer for twenty-six years and he had learned to write things down without saying anything.