Bending my knees to pick it up, I notice glass shards. I broke it.
“Shit,” I whisper, looking at it for a moment before quickly picking up all the pieces as fast as I can and dropping them into my bag. I’m embarrassed… all those kids just watched me break my mirror.
I should never have come back for my water bottle. My heart starts to race, and I feel more nervous than ever. I wish Dad hadn’t just left me here.
That’s when I see bare feet walking toward me. The skin is tanned by the sun. I look up and gasp. A boy is approaching me, tall, topless, muscular in a stringy way. His eyes seem to glow blue in the bright sunlight, and I feel for a moment as if I’m looking into the eyes of a wolf.
Dark, jagged tattoos sheathe his arms, shoulder to wrists, and they run down the sides of his torso, too, ending at his hips.
He’s smiling at me, more of a cocky smile than a warm one, and I notice that he’s really attractive. It makes me all the more uncomfortable.
He looks a bit older than me, and he’s definitely not from the village. His face is nice, his jaw a sharp, straight line, and his hair dark and messy, and a little too long.
“Hey,” he says, his voice deeper than I expect it to be.
I furrow my brow at his accent. “You’re American?”
“Yeah.” He kneels down, picks up a shard of glass. “You broke your mirror.”
“It’s fine,” I say quickly.
“Do you have another one?”
I shake my head, tell him that really, it’s fine. It’s no big deal. It’s just a mirror. I care more that I broke it in front of everybody, rather than it being broken itself.
My heart is surging – I don’t know why I feel so nervous – but I do know that I feel drawn to him. I meet his eyes for a moment, and he smiles a warm smile at me this time, and all at once his face bursts with brightness, and cute dimples dig into his cheeks, and I can’t bear to keep my eyes on his any longer.
I look away.
“I’m Duncan,” he tells me. “Glass told me to introduce myself to you.”
“Deidre,” I whisper. “You call my Dad ‘Glass’?”
He shrugs. “That’s what he tells me to call him.”
“Do you know why that’s his nickname?”
“Like he’s made of glass, right? Because he couldn’t stay healthy when he was a boxer.”
I nod, feel his eyes burning into me. “Who are you, exactly? I mean, how do you know my dad?”
I’m too embarrassed to look anywhere but his forehead now – feel too awkward to meet his eyes, and definitely don’t want to let my gaze fall down his body.
That’s when I notice the scar just beneath the line of his tousled hair. It’s quite fresh, still red, still scabbed.
His reply is not what I expect. In fact, I don’t know what I expected.
“I’m,” he says, before his voice trails off. Then he shrugs. “I guess I’m your stepbrother.”
“What?” I say, stepping backward. I look past him toward the temple, and there see Dad sweeping out of it having a heated discussion with what looks like a monk. The monk, dressed in an orange garb and with a bald dome like Dad, is busy shaking his head, and together they gesture at Duncan.
“What do you mean my stepbrother?”
“Your father legally adopted me,” he says. “Six months ago.”
I tilt my head to the side. “You mean foster brother, then… I think. And I don’t believe you. Dad would have told me.”
His smile only disarms me further. He’s got a perfect set of teeth. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell me?”
Duncan shrugs.
I look around. Why didn’t Dad tell me?
“So what are you doing here?”
“Training,” he says.
“Training what?”
“Thai kickboxing.”
Again, I’m just even more confused. My eyes fall down his lean, muscled body, and that’s when I start to see the bruises. He’s got green and purple patches around his ribcage and on the outsides of his strong, defined, arms.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Seventeen. You?”
“Fifteen. But I turn sixteen in a couple of weeks.”
“Oh, yeah? When?”
“Umm, two weeks…” I make a face, surprised at the coincidence. “Exactly, actually.”
He gestures at my t-shirt. “You like cats?”
I look down, see the stenciled image of two cats touching noses on my top. “Yeah, but Dad doesn’t. He doesn’t let me keep pets.”
“We have a cat,” Duncan says. He looks around. “Somewhere.”
“We?”