Pulse

face-to-face with Dylan, which forced her to look into his eyes for a split second. They were dark, deep, and worrisome, like he thought she might have gone too far. Faith was sick of everyone at Old Park Hill, and as she stomped away, she made sure everyone knew it. “And tell your sister she’s a bitch!”
    “I’m standing right here,” Clara said. She was holding the ball and chain like she might swing it over her head a few times and aim for the back of Faith’s head.
    Dylan followed Faith off the football field as Clara stood next to her brother and handed him the hammer.
    “Your turn to throw,” she said, looking at Dylan like she wanted to reach out, take his hand, and pull him away from Faith. All she could think about was how it would feel to have Dylan look at her that way, like he wanted her. There was something about his dark eyes and that solid frame that made her think the unimaginable: Would he ever be into someone like Clara as much as he obviously cared for Faith? But it didn’t change the way she felt: there was something about Dylan Gilmore that felt powerful —and she wanted it.
    Faith wasn’t just distracting Wade from the important work he needed to do. She was also standing between Clara and Dylan. And that, Clara began to realize, was unacceptable.
     
    At one time, years before he’d met Faith and Liz, Hawk had been a sneaky little kid. By the third grade he’d fashioned himself a persona that allowed him to drift through school without being noticed. He’d gotten into the habit of finding discarded Tablets—all too common with eight-year-olds hell-bent on playing tag on the playground. Grade school kids don’t keep a lot of interesting, private information on their Tablets, but it had been a thrill all the same to find some nugget of information he could use when he needed it.
    Hawk was always the smallest guy in the room, and for the most part it hadn’t bothered him at all. It seemed to him that the other small boys in grade school were trying too hard in order to make up for their size. They were all clowns or live wires, full of aggressive energy, their voices stuck at an annoyingly high volume. It wasn’t in Hawk’s nature to be obnoxious or hold center stage. He didn’t talk much; but when he did, his comments were wry and cutting, the stuff of legend. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of a well-crafted Hawk comeback, so very few kids scuffled with him verbally back then. It was how he’d gotten his nickname. Hawks were quiet watchers; but when they were ready, they moved with purpose and struck with deadly force. It helped that Hawk seemed to know secret things about almost everyone, in part because he had big ears and listened to every conversation, but also because he’d been inside most of their Tablets at one time or another.
    Unfortunately for Hawk, he’d lost every ounce of his early confidence in the sixth grade, and it had never returned. Grade school was so simple: stay quiet, provide a biting remark when required, sneak around as much as possible. But middle school had been like a wrecking ball on his quiet personality. He’d tried a cutting remark only once and chosen badly, finding himself with a bloody nose at the hands of a large, mean, popular kid. The incident had put a black mark of humiliation on Hawk that dogged him all the way to Old Park Hill. His quiet charm turned reclusive and weird. Other kids kept their distance and mocked him when he tried to fit in. One might say he was driven underground, deeper into himself, where he spent endless hours hacking into his Tablet. By the time he met Faith Daniels at Old Park Hill, Hawk was one of the few people in the outside world who had cracked the Tablet code. It was a dangerous thing to have done, he knew, because it gave him access to things he wasn’t supposed to see. He hadn’t told anyone, for who would he tell? His parents were as isolated as he was, content with their books and their writing. For them, the outside was a quiet place to be left alone for as long as the world would allow them the peace and quiet.
    Hawk always liked the reason for his nickname: that he could strike at any moment, and the victim wouldn’t see it coming. Though, to be fair, he hadn’t struck anyone with deadly force in his entire life. He thought about it a lot, because he had long ago acquired the skills to inflict a lot of misery on his enemies, and he often reveled in these thoughts for longer than