I don’t think so.
She’s already there by the time I get to our spot. The rat doll thing is perched next to her, holding half a cracker, while the other is between her teeth, nibbling away like a rabbit as she reads her book.
The same pathetic sandwich is on the same useless, ripped plastic bag. Her pigtails are messier than yesterday, with one sitting near the center of her head and one just above the ear, tied with mismatching hair ties.
Her shoes are holey. A church would be jealous.
Her top is ripped.
The second she sees me, she becomes the same scared mouse from yesterday, hunching her shoulders and staring at the ground as if she’s willing me to go away.
I drop beside her, and she flinches, even though I am a safe distance away.
That needs to stop.
I’m not going to hurt her. Other people can try to.
Besides a sideways glance of curiosity, she doesn’t acknowledge me as I pull out Ugly’s or Skinny’s lunch box, clicking the side open and revealing the type of lunch I thought she would have.
A banana and a decent slice of bread with chicken, mayo, and greens layered in the middle. I push a finger into the bread, checking that it wouldn’t pass as cardboard.
“Eat.” I shove the whole container in her direction and grab her untouched sandwich.
Her eyes grow wide as I take a bite of the awful thing—I’m not even going to call it food.
I bare my teeth out of reflex when she snatches the bread from my hand.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Her pigtails swing side to side as she shakes her head frantically, trembling as she rips her sandwich in half to push it back into my hand.
Is she serious right now? She’s going to hog a sandwich and a half all to her—
She also tears the other sandwich in half, leaving one on the container and bringing the other to her lips.
“We’ll each have a side,” she says.
I shove the sandwich she made into my mouth and swallow it down. The other one tastes better than anything I’ve eaten in a long time.
Her gaze is trained on me with keen interest. “I thought you shouldn’t share food.”
“Shut up. You don’t count.”
She looks up at me with her little button nose and ridiculous hair, and her eyes sparkle with something I can only call admiration. She’s looking at me like I’m her savior. Just because of a piece of bread?
If she doesn’t stop acting like this, she will get eaten alive by people far worse than the two boys, who are probably still crying over a bit of pain.
But she doesn’t look away; with each bite, the light in her eyes only grows brighter. That look… I’ve never seen that look before. At least not when I’m involved.
And I don’t know if I like it.
It’s weird.
I clear my throat to end the silence as I bounce my foot. “Roman.”
Her little forehead wrinkles. “Huh?”
“My name.”
She blinks. “Oh.” Does this girl ever say more than a few words? What is wrong with her? She clears her throat and frowns at the ground between us as she says, “Woahman.”
“What? No. Roman.”
She sucks her bottom lip and hides part of her face behind a pigtail. “Woah-man.”
“No, it’s—" I snap my mouth shut.
What did Ugly and Skinny tell her to say yesterday? Raspberry…？ The angry beast—the same one that Margaret is always telling me I need to learn to control—rears its head.
Those dickwads.
“It doesn’t matter.” I try to save her from feeling bad. “I don’t like the name anyway.”
She looks back up at me, almond-shaped eyes glossed over, and I want to yell at myself for making them that way.
In her sweet voice, she says, “I do.”
“Why?”
I’ve never liked my name. No one has ever said it with any sort of love or care. It’s thrown around like some kind of insult.
The book she was reading flips to the cover page, where there are twelve drawings of different men and women with golden leaves around their heads and what look like white sheets wrapped around their bodies.
A tiny finger points to one of the men whose eyes are narrowed, covered in armor with a spear in one hand and a shield in the other. “He looks like a Woahman, just like you.”
“It says his name is Ares.”
She nods thoughtfully. “But he looks like a Roman.” The ‘R’ still comes out as a ‘W.’
“It says he’s the God of War.”