were soaked through and gray with grit from the puddle. Her hands, she noticed, had begun to shake. They had not shaken at all during the thing itself. They had been perfectly still on the nozzle, perfectly still on the woman's shoulder. Now, five minutes afterward, standing in the rain with nothing to do, they would not stop. She knew what it was. Coach Imura had a name for it. The bill, he called it. The body always sends the bill afterward. She gripped the towel harder to make them stop, and they did not.
Mr. Farouk opened his fist. In his broad palm lay two lollipops, one red and one green, in their crinkled clear wrappers.
"Two," he said gravely. "Always two."
Dara looked at them. Then she looked up at him, at his tired kind face behind the thick glasses, the face she had known since she was twelve years old and came in with her grandmother for ten dollars of gas and a carton of milk, and something in her throat closed up so tightly that for a moment she could not speak.
"I'm twenty-two, Mr. Farouk," she managed at last.
"So?" said Mr. Farouk. "I'm sixty-one. I still eat them." He pressed them into her shaking hand and folded her fingers over them with his own. "I saw, Miss Dara. Through the window. I saw her pull it. I saw the gas come out. Thirty-one years I'm doing this. You know how many fires I've seen start from somebody pulling a nozzle like that? Two. One man lost his eyebrows. One man lost his car." He shook his head. "Nobody lost anything today. Except maybe her pride. That she can get back."
"I kicked her, Mr. Farouk."
"You pushed her," said Mr. Farouk firmly. "I know a kick. My nephew does the kickboxing. That was not a kick. That was a push. Like you push a door." He patted her hand once, the one with the lollipops in it. "Go sit in the car. Get warm. Eat your candy. When the police are finished, you go where you were going. And next week you come back and tell me how you did at the big tournament. Okay?"
"Okay," said Dara.
She sat in the driver's seat of the SUV with the door open and the rain falling just beyond her knees, and unwrapped the red lollipop with her shaking fingers, and put it in her mouth, and it tasted exactly the way it had tasted when she was twelve, and she sat there with her eyes closed and let it.
Brooke filled the orange car with premium at pump one, where the gray SUV had been. Her hands were shaking so badly that Officer Kim had to help her with the card. It was eight-fifty-eight. The arts district was seven kilometers away, on the other side of the river, in the rain, at rush hour. She did not even look at the clock. She already knew.
Before she got back into the car, she turned and looked across the forecourt, at the tall young woman in the leather jacket standing beside the open door of the battered gray SUV with her phone to her ear, talking to someone in a low voice, with her eyes closed.
Brooke opened her mouth. She did not know what she was going to say. Thank you, maybe. Or I'm sorry. Or I didn't mean it. Or help.
She did not say any of them. She closed her mouth again. She got into the orange car, and pulled the wing door down, and drove away, slowly, carefully, through the big puddle at the entrance, with a patrol car following behind her.
Dara did not see her go. She was on the phone with Coach Imura, and Coach Imura had just asked her a question, in his quiet, careful voice, and she was trying to answer it.
"Did you have to?" he had asked.
And for the first time in fifteen years, Dara Whitfield did not know the answer.
* * *
The man in the work truck at pump four had filmed it too.
Nobody had noticed him. He had been standing on the far island beside his truck, in a high-visibility vest and a baseball cap of his own, reading the OUT OF ORDER sign on his pump with an expression of disgust, when the orange car came roaring in, and he had done what an enormous number of people now do when something interesting happens in front of them, which is to take out his phone and point it. He did not start recording when the blonde woman got out of the car. He did not start when she began to shout. He started, as it happened, about a second and a half before she said make me, because that was the moment when it started to look, from where he was standing, like something might actually happen. And he stopped three seconds after the kick, when the blonde woman hit the hood of the orange car and slid off it onto the ground, because his own pump had suddenly started working again and he wanted to get his gas and get to work.