Chapter 6: Over a Thousand Miles

He sent it from the galley table, with one thumb, while I watched.

Then he called his mother and told her about the water bottle.

Then he called the theater.

When he hung up, he looked at my hands.

I'd taken my gloves off. My palms were striped red where the cable had burned through.

He got up, took the first-aid kit off the galley wall, and sat back down across from me.

"Give."

"I'm fine."

"You held a two-hundred-thousand-dollar sampler on a slack line in a gale. Give."

I gave.

He wrapped my palms badly, with one good hand and his teeth.

"Say one word about my knots," he said.

"I wouldn't dare."

His thumb stayed on my wrist a second longer than the gauze needed.

Neither of us mentioned it.

Raegan woke up that afternoon.

The first thing she did, Bo said, was ask if she'd been robbed of the trophy.

The second thing she did was ask for my number.

She called at ten that night.

"Okay, so you're the evil twin," she said, before I could say hello.

"My brother says you saved his hand and told him who poisoned me. That's a very confusing evil twin."

"I'm a confusing person."

"He also says you're tiny and mean and you coil rope like a sailor."

"He said mean?"

"He said 'a lot.' Mean was implied."

I laughed out loud, alone in my room over the boathouse, for the first time in weeks.

She called every night after that, and by the end of the week I knew her whole life.

Those two weeks were the best I'd ever had.

I ran the water samples with the lab door propped open to the lake.

The town's water intake had closed again for an algae toxin nobody could explain, and I started a notebook about it.

The cook fed me until I couldn't move and started calling me Red to my face.

Then everyone did.

Two girls from the crew taught me cribbage. I beat them by Wednesday.

Bo stopped kicking my coils.

On Tuesday of the second week he held out a pair of good leather deck gloves without looking at me.

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