Page 95 of Mad Mabel

“Better stay away from me,” I said, as Billy wheeled his bike out of the shed. “Since I go around killing people. Wouldn’t want you to be next.”

He scowled, but he picked up his pace on the way out the door. Christos and I managed to hold in our laughter until he was gone, but when it came, I’m pretty sure he could have heard it from back at his house.

After the incident at school, Christos insisted on walking me home.

“You are the one who was injured! I should be walking you home!”

He rolled his eyes. “Come on. A little bump to the head isn’t going to stop me being chivalrous.”

He threw me a wink, and I felt so shy I had to look away. We walked in silence for a moment.

“Why did you come back anyway?” I asked him. “I thought you had a shift at the fish-and-chips shop.”

“I do,” he replied, blinking against the afternoon sun. “But I felt like I needed to come back. Call it a feeling. You know?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “A feeling?”

“A gut instinct that something was going to happen.”

“So you came back to check on me?”

The idea that he was thinking of me—worried about me—felt foreign and almost impossibly lovely. He had always been kind to me, but this was something more.

“Yep. I should have known that you’d have it covered.”

He started to grin, then winced and pressed his fingers lightly to his temple.

“You okay?” I asked. “You hit your head pretty hard.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Stop worrying.”

But as we approached the turnoff toward my place, he kept wincing, and his usually olive skin seemed almost ashen.

“I think I’ll walk you home,” I said. “Just to make sure you get there okay.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted again, though his voice lacked its usual confidence. “I just have a bit of a headache, that’s all.”

“Because you hit your head. Which was my fault.”

Christos refused to accept that it was my fault, but he let me walk him back to the fish-and-chips shop. The scent of hot oil and salt announced we were close, as did an angry-looking, dark-haired woman standing out the front, her hands clasped.

“Uh-oh,” Christos muttered. “My mother.”

Christos’s mother wasn’t smiling. She stood upright, her handstightening, her knuckles white as she fiddled with her flour-covered apron.

The moment she saw him, she stepped forward, her voice sharp. “Where have you been, Christos? You’re half an hour late.”

“He hit his head!” I blurted before Christos could answer, hoping to shield him from her wrath. After everything that had happened today, the last thing I wanted was for him to be in trouble with his mother too.

After assessing her son, presumably for injury, her dark eyes flickered to me. “And you are?”

“Mabel Waller, ma’am.”

I saw the recognition in her eyes and braced myself. I knew my reputation preceded me, but I had hoped that, being new to the community, she might not know who I was. Her expression hardened.

“I see.”

She turned back to Christos, pushing a few loose hairs back into her bun. “What happened to your head?”