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and now, part deux.”
    Pretty girl . He just called me a pretty girl. The words give me an electric rush.
    Or maybe I misheard him. Maybe I heard a word that just sounded like pretty.
    He grabs my uninjured hand and leads me toward the Dumpsters, and I don’t protest. This guy radiates something— something bright and big and open, something I’m not used to at all—and I’m drawn to him despite myself.
    No. He did. He called me a pretty girl .
    Pretty means the girls at school, with their blow-dried hair and matching silver heart necklaces.
    Pretty means normal.
    He stops next to the Dumpster, stooping to lift something. He turns back to me, holding a flat tire delicately between his thumbs and pointer fingers.
    “You, um, found a flat tire,” I say. I don’t know how this boy expects me to react to a bit of rubber, which he has obviously pulled from the inside of a dirty, smelly Dumpster, in the very alleyway where I was almost shot three days ago. Not that he could know about the last part.
    “Oh, I certainly did,” he says, without irony. “Here, just come a little closer. It doesn’t look like much now, but ”—he removes one hand from the tire and, as a magician might do, waves it back and forth in the air—“wait till you see how it got flat in the first place.”
    I don’t know why I decide to move even closer to this near-complete stranger, but I do. He lifts the tire closer to me and flips it around. Its entire backside is embedded with shards of mirrored glass, protruding from the ink-black tire like stars.
    “Wow. That’s—that’s really beautiful.” And I mean it, and move my fingers toward the glass. I’ve got to touch these stars pulled earthward, before they disappear.
    “Hey—don’t do that!” He yanks my fingers away. His hand is cool and big. I shove my hands into the pockets of my pullover, embarrassed.
    “See?” He shows me the palm of his own left hand, covered in tiny red gashes. “I got all cut up earlier. Bleeding from the hand isn’t as fun as you might think, believe it or not. But an artist’s life is full of hardship! And I guess they’re kind of like my battle wounds.”
    My wounded palm throbs inside my sweatshirt. My whole arm suddenly feels cut up—sharp and raw. He doesn’t realize that I’m suffering from my own battle wounds—the kind of battle wounds you get when you stumble onto the frontline by accident. The thought of the bullet, the explosion—glass flying everywhere— once again makes me shiver. I blurt out, “Battle wounds, huh? So what are you battling?”
    He hesitates for a second. Then his eyes light up. “My noble and single-handed fight for garbage rights!” He extends his uninjured hand to me. “I’m Flynt, by the way.
    ” “Lo.” I don’t shake his hand. Shaking hands reminds me of something adults do, and therapists when they’re meeting you for the first time and trying to prove they respect you as a person. I should know: I’ve been to a half dozen therapists in the past three years, including Dr. Janice “Call me Janice” Weiss; Dr. Aaron “This is a safe space , Penelope” Machner; and, most recently, Dr. Ellen Peech. Dr. Peech was straightforward, overworked, and obviously exhausted. By session number two, she’d already penned me a prescription for Zoloft and sent me on my way to Zombieland, where Mom lives. After two weeks of feeling dead numb, I decided the sewage system needed the pills more than I did, so I flushed them all down the toilet.
    Mom and Dad don’t notice, of course. They never notice. Anything.
    Flynt doesn’t say anything about the handshake snub—just puts the hand back into his coat pocket and bows again, still grinning.
    “So, Flynt,” I say, “you never answered me. What are you doing here? Besides fighting for trash-related justice?”
    He looks up at the sky for a few long seconds before responding: “I’m an artist. Don’t have the money to buy shit to make art, though.” He