Love, Accidentally by Sarah Pekkanen

inside. Not even after everything we’d been through together. Mike glanced at the front door, then at me, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he already knew; most people did by now.
    “Is Becky going to walk again?” Mike asked, casually sitting down and leaning back on his elbows as he stretched out his legs, like it was completely natural to carry on our conversation out here rather than inside.
    “She thinks she will,” I said as I plopped down next to him. “But I don’t know what the doctors say.”
    “Jesus.” Mike let out his breath in a long, whooshing sound, then winced and clutched his side, despite his claims that his ribs didn’t hurt. “Being in a wheelchair is the worst thing I could imagine. I’d go crazy.”
    “I guess you don’t know until it happens,” I said. “Becky handles it really well, especially for a kid.”
    “No. I’d go crazy, Julie,” he repeated. “To not be able to move? To have to depend on other people for help?”
    He suddenly sprang up and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, like he was reassuring himself he could still control his body. Mike was in constant motion. I hadn’t noticed it at school, but that afternoon I saw: His leg jiggled, or his fingertips thrummed a beat on a table, or his hand wove endless paths through his curly, dark hair. That was probably how he stayed so skinny, despite the fact that he’d gobbled most of the ice cream and raided the refrigerator to make himself two turkey-and-cheese sandwiches at Becky’s.
    Already, I was learning his mind was as hungry as his body. Mike told me he’d read half a dozen books about self-defense, not because he was worried about being attacked but because he read everything. That’s how he knew about the vulnerable spot in the middle of the throat: Hitting it hard enough with the side of a rigid hand would stun just about any assailant.
    Mike tore through his homework, devoured books at the library, and gobbled up newspapers and biographies of business leaders and World Book encyclopedias. He even read the ingredient lists on the packages of everything he ate (alas, this little habit of his ruined my love affair with hot pink Hostess Sno Balls). He’d skipped third grade, and he’d completed all the high school math courses by the end of tenth grade.
    Everything about Mike was quick. Weeks later, when I lay my head on his bare chest for the first time, I thought he was nervous because I could feel his heart beating so rapidly. But that was his normal heart rate; Mike was just wired differently than anyone I’d ever met.
    Maybe I would’ve fallen in love with Mike anyways, because of the unexpected parts of himself that he’d revealed the day Jerry attacked me: his bravery, and the way he’d joked about how brilliant I’d been to hang on to the chocolate ice cream: “I mean, if you’re going to use something as a weapon, for God’s sakes, use the strawberry! Strawberry’s kind of scrappy, but chocolate’s too mellow. It’s always getting stoned and sitting around listening to Led Zeppelin. You never want chocolate to have your back in a fight.”
    But there was something else—something he said that day on my front steps—that seemed to pierce me all the way to my core.
    Mike frowned at the horizon, as if it wasn’t really me he was speaking to. “Someday I’m going to have enough money to do whatever I want. I’m going to have my own company, and my own house, too, not something the bank owns. I’m not going to end up in this crummy town like everyone else. Nothing’s going to stop me.”
    I stared at him, unable to speak. Mike had just put into words everything I desperately wanted, like he’d peered into my brain and scooped out my deepest, most secret wish. It wasn’t so much the money, though at that point I couldn’t even imagine owning a house. Funny, because now we have two—in D.C. and in Aspen, Colorado. But the security that came along with money . . . well, I