Towering

with each touch, I felt the same electric thrill.
    “You’re not from around here,” I said.
    He smiled. “How do you know that?”
    “It’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone else.”
    “Oh, I thought maybe it was because I was so special you’d have noticed me if you’d seen me before.”
    I rolled my eyes, even though it was true.
    “I’d have noticed you,” he said. “Pretty girl like you. I bet you’re the prettiest girl around here.”
    “Hardly.” I laughed. I certainly wasn’t. Emily had been, but I wasn’t even a close second. I’d never even had a boyfriend. Of course, that was partly because everyone was scared of my mother.
    He finished rubbing my ankle and began to wrap it with the ace bandage. His hands were firm, strong. “I find that hard to believe. Is this a town with inordinately beautiful girls?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never been out of it. Well, except sometimes to go to the mall down in Glens Falls for school clothes, but that’s not a big city either.”
    “You’ve never been away from here? And you’re how old?”
    “Seventeen, almost eighteen. And a lot of people have lived here their whole lives. I’m not some stupid hick, you know.”
    Although saying it made it sound like I was. And, really, how did I know I wasn’t?
    But he said, “I didn’t say you were. You might be the most brilliant person in the world, but how would you know if you never see anyone else?”
    It was like what I’d been thinking, only sort of the opposite, sort of turned on its ear.
    Of course, I’m probably not brilliant. At least, I’d always been a C student in school. I was always bored in my classes. Besides, what’s the point of killing yourself in school when you know you aren’t going to college, aren’t going really anywhere? Still, I secretly have always thought, hoped I was smart. I also hoped maybe there was something I was good at, best at. And, more than anything else, I hope that someday, something will HAPPEN.
    But, so far, in nearly eighteen years, nothing has.
    He finished wrapping the bandage and looked up at me to see what I thought. I nodded. Actually, it didn’t hurt at all.
    “You could be really good at something and not even realize it,” he said. “I think about that kind of thing sometimes, like what if the world’s greatest baseball player lived in a place where they didn’t have the game? Maybe he’d never know how great he was. He’d become a goat herder or something and never realize his potential.”
    I laughed, but I liked the idea of it, that I might still be special somehow and just not realize it, that the best part of my life wasn’t already over.
    “How about you?” I said. “Where are you from?”
    “Me, I’m from nowhere. Or everywhere. My family moved around a lot. I’m twenty, and I’ve lived in at least twenty towns, almost as many states.”
    “And now?”
    “I’ve been living in New York City for a while, trying to make it playing guitar and singing, but it’s hard. I wait tables, street perform for tips, but there are about a million other guys doing that there. I heard they were looking for an act at the Red Fox Inn in Gatskill, so I tried for it.”
    Gatskill is the next town over. My friends sometimes go to the Red Fox Inn for dinner, but I never have. “So you work there? You’re a professional singer?”
    He grinned. “I guess you could say that.”
    I noticed a guitar case in his backseat. “Will you play for me?”
    “Next time, I will. Right now, I think I need to take you to Mrs. McNeill’s before I turn into a pumpkin. I double as a waiter at the Red Fox, and they open at five.”
    I glanced at my watch. It was three thirty. He’d said next time.
    “You want to see me again?” I asked.
    “Danielle, I want to see you as much as possible.”
    I smiled inside at the thought of it even as I shuddered to imagine Mom’s reaction. He stood and walked to the other side of the car. He took me to Mrs. McNeill’s. When the old lady looked through her cataracty eyes and asked who my young man was, he didn’t correct her, didn’t say he wasn’t mine. Even though my ankle had stopped hurting, I held on to him anyway. I liked how it felt to be beside someone.
    When he drove me home, I told him to stop at the bottom of the driveway.
    “You’ll be okay?” he asked. When I nodded, he said, “When can I see you again?”
    “I’ll walk my dog this way again day after tomorrow, same time. Or I’ll