Rules of Prey

Lucas’ car was parked a block toward Town Center and they strolled together along the sidewalk.
    “Listen,” she said when he stopped beside the Porsche. “I get over to Minneapolis once a week or so. I show in a gallery over there. If I stopped in some morning, could you let me know how things are going? I’d call first.”
    “Sure. I’m in the basement of the old City Hall. You just leave your car—”
    “I know where you are,” she said. “I’ll see you. And I’ll call you this afternoon, about the shoes.”
    She walked off down the sidewalk and Lucas got in the car and started it. He watched her through the windshield for a moment and she looked back and smiled.
    “Hmph,” he grunted. He rolled down the street until he was beside her, pulled over, and rolled down the passenger-side window.
    “Forget something?” she asked, leaning over the window.
    “What kind of music do you listen to?”
    “What?” She seemed confused.
    “Do you like rock?”
    “Sure.”
    “Want to go see Aerosmith tomorrow night? With me? Get you out of your apartment?”
    “Oh. Well. Okay. What time?” She wasn’t smiling but she was definitely interested.
    “Pick you up at six. We’ll get something to eat.”
    “Sure,” she said. “See you.” She waved and stepped back from the car. Lucas made an illegal U-turn and headed back toward the Interstate. As he pulled away, he glanced in hisrearview mirror and saw her looking after him. It was silly, but he thought he felt their eyes touch.
     
    Sister Mary Joseph had grown up as Elle Kruger on the near north side of Minneapolis, a block from the house where Lucas was born. They started grade school the same autumn, their mothers walking them down the cracked sidewalks together, past the tall green hedges and through the red brick arches of St. Agnes Elementary. Elle still ran through Lucas’ dreams. She was a lovely slender blonde girl, the most popular kid in the class with both the pupils and the teachers, the fastest runner on the playground. At the blackboard, she regularly thrashed the class in multiplication races. Lucas usually finished second. In the spelldowns, it was Lucas who won, Elle who finished second.
    Lucas left St. Agnes halfway through fifth grade, after the death of his father. He and his mother moved down to the south side and Lucas started at public school. Later, at a hockey tournament, he was warming up, swinging down the ice, and he stopped on the opponents’ side of the rink to adjust his skates. She was there in the crowd, with a group of girls from Holy Spirit High. She had not seen him, or not recognized him in his hockey gear. He stood transfixed, appalled.
    It had been six years. Other girls, gawky as she had been beautiful, had blossomed. Elle had not. Her face was pitted and scarred by acne. Her cheeks, her forehead, her chin were crossed with fiery red lines of infection. The small part of her face free of scarring was as coarse as sandpaper from attempts at treatment.
    Lucas skated away, around the rink toward the home bench, Elle’s face bobbing in his mind. A few minutes later, the players for the two teams were introduced and he skated out to center ice, his name booming from the public-address system, unable not to look, and found her grave eyes following him.
    After the match he was clumping toward the tunnel to the locker rooms when he saw her standing on the other side ofthe barricade. When their eyes met her hand came up and fluttered at him and he stopped and reached across the barrier and took her hand and said, “Can you wait for me? Twenty minutes, outside?”
    “Yes.”
    He drove her home after a tour of southern and western Minneapolis. They talked as they had when they were children, laughing in the dark car. At her house, she hopped out and ran up to the porch. The light came on, and her father stepped out.
    “Dad, do you remember Lucas Davenport, he used to live down the street?”
    “Sure, how are you, son?” her father said. There was a sad edge to his voice. He asked Lucas in and he sat for another half-hour, talking to Elle’s parents, before he left.
    As he walked out to the curb, she called him from her bedroom window on the second floor of the house, her head backlit against the flowered wallpaper.
    “Lucas?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Please don’t come back,” she said, and shut the window.
    He heard from her next a year and a half later, a week before graduation. She called to tell him that she was