"What are you doing?" Kira is giving me a wary look as if I've just tried to kiss her.

For the record, I haven't. I've been thinking about it a gazillion times since I saw her wrestling her way out of the bushes at the bridge, but I haven't tried, not even once. Friggin' impressive self-control on my part because, seriously, this girl's lips were made to be kissed.

By me! Only by me!

"I'm walking you home," I enlighten her about the mind-blowing activity currently happening. What the hell is her story? We've come down to the footpath, and instead of walking down it to the road like a normal person, she is standing still, looking at me expectantly. At least, her look was expectant; now she's just frowning. I'm already carrying a school bag over each shoulder and have the hockey stick in my hand. Did she want me to carry her too?

"You can't walk me home!" she exclaims as if I've suggested running naked in the sprinklers again. We did that when we were small. Okay, I might've been the only one running through the sprinklers naked, and Kira and Deli were mostly just running away from me.

What can I say? I like being naked, being one with nature. One would think that Kicks would understand that since she's always trying to make herself physically one with nature, but she is extremely anti-naked for some reason.

"Why not?"

"Then everybody will know."

"Know what?" I ask, looking over my shoulder at the absolutely nobody around us. What's there to know?

"That we met in the forest."

"And that's a problem because...?"

"We can't be seen together."

My mouth is hanging open now, placing me in danger of swallowing some bugs, but I cannot help it. What is this chick on about now?

"We literally live next door to each other; we are often seen together."

"No, we're not. I'm seen with Dell, and you're just there too sometimes."

"Kicks?"

"Yes?"

"Did you hit your head when we fell?" I step closer to her and use my fingers to see if I can feel a bump under her hair. Of course, she does what she always does when I come within two feet of her. She dives, ducks and dodges, and I have to grab her and hold her in place with one arm to feel her head with the other hand, careful not to hit her with the hockey stick in the scuffle.

"Stop it! Get off me, you big oaf!" she shouts, and if I had a coin for the number of times she's said that to me in the 12 years I've known her, I would be a millionaire right now.

"If you're really not going to go swim at the waterfall and absolutely have to go home now, at least take the shortcut route through that empty yard and the swamp behind our houses."

I know which route she means. It has some obstacles, like climbing through a barbed wire fence at the beginning and over our back wall at the end, which means that Kira only uses that route if I'm with her to help her. She's rather small in stature, and though she'll get through the fence in the empty lot just fine, she has a very hard time getting over the wall and has to go a long way around to get to their front gate anyway. When she's walking alone, she always just follows the road.

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel right now. She really doesn't want to be seen with me, and I honestly don't get why. Yeah, I know people like to gossip about me and girls, but this is Kira; she's practically family. We're often in each other's vicinity, and she's wrong; Dell isn't always with us. I'm starting to think she has selective memory.

Is she ashamed of me?

"I want to make sure that you get home safely." Awesome, now she's blinking at me as if I'm a friggin' Martian who just asked her to take me to her leader. "What?!"

"Why do you suddenly need to make sure that I get home safely?" she really seems to want to know. Does she seriously not know?!

"That's what boyfriends do," I explain, hoping that it will wear her down into a yes. It's worked on me before.

"You're not my boyfriend. I haven't said yes yet."

Yet! I love that word! It's so much nicer than "no".

"Kicks, I always make sure that you get home safely," I finally just tell her the truth, still surprised that she, apparently, doesn't know that.

"No, you don't."

"Yes, I do."

We're trying to out-glare each other now, and I win because, after about a minute, Kira is blinking her eyes as if she'd seen something in mine that startled her.

"Really?"

"Of course. I know this is a fairly safe town, but still... I always look out for you and Deli... even if it is from a distance."

Kira is tilting her head, looking up at me with a thoughtful expression on her face.

"That's nice," she says, smiling at me now. I love it when she smiles; it lights up her eyes, causing a million flickering lights to flit about in them like fireflies. Kicks has beautiful eyes filled with life. "Thank you. Could you do it from at least 10 paces away, please?"

Now I kinda want to extinguish those friggin' fireflies.

"Sure," I grunt, making a sweeping gesture with my hand, telling her to go ahead, but she is looking at me expectantly, holding out her hands. I take them in mine, and she snatches them away with a startled sound, and now she's glaring at me again.

"My schoolbag and the hockey stick, please."

"Why? I'll carry it. Your bag is heavy," I'm not kidding; it must weigh more than she does. "Did you have to pack all your books?"

"Yes, unlike you, I cannot just charm the girl at the desk next to me into sharing her textbooks with me."

I don't charm anybody into doing stuff... I just ask them... nicely.

"I'm sure you could charm Deli into anything," I remind her; since she's my sister's desk mate in virtually every class except Math, I'm her desk mate in Math now. She can totally charm me into anything she wants, that's for sure.

"Please give me my bag."

"Fine," I help her put it on her back, and when I'm done, and she tries to take the hockey stick, I hold it out of her reach.

"I won't hit you with it, I promise," she grins, and to be honest, I did wonder about that. "You've already ticked that off my to-do list by doing it yourself."

"Yeah, yeah," I chuckle. "It's going back to Deli; I might as well carry it."

"That would be weird, and then she'll know I met you in the forest, and there will be uncomfortable questions."

Seriously? Are we starring in a spy movie now? Normally I would love to star in one, but this one makes no sense to me.

"I have no problem with Deli knowing that we met in the forest," I tell Kira, hoping she will see how ridiculous she's being. "And you guys are always sending each other stuff via me as if I'm a friggin' courier, so...."

She narrows her eyes at me but then acknowledges my superior logic with a snort and spins around to tackle the footpath leading to the road home. I follow her, but my strides are so much longer than hers that I keep on catching up and almost crash into her when she suddenly stops. After a glare at me over her shoulder - that would make the dead quake in their caskets, by the way - she starts walking again, and I wait until she's about 10 steps away before I follow again. We seem to have a routine on rinse and repeat now.

"Seriously, Kicks," I grunt when I almost crash into her for the fourth time. "Why do you keep on stopping?"

"I really don't like having you stalking me from behind," she says, turning to frown up at me.

"I'm not stalking you! I'm walking home, and you happen to be in front of me."

"True," she admits, biting her lip, and if she keeps that up, it's going to fall off, and that would be such a waste. "Please go ahead, walk in front."

"You prefer me to stalk you from the front?" I grin.

"No," she scoffs. "I'll stalk you from behind instead."

"Sure, you can stalk me anytime, Kicks," I tell her, and when she gives me a horrified look, I laugh, and shaking my head, I start off down the road, trying to keep my paces short enough for her not to get left behind too far. I wasn't kidding. When I'm around, I always make sure that Kicks and Deli are safe where ever they are. Usually, when I'm not there, they're together, and Simon is often with them, which makes me feel better. There are bad people everywhere in the world. Friendly towns like Egret's Rest are not exempted.

When I reach our gate, I stop, leaning against the pillar supporting it, my grin growing bigger and bigger as I see Kira's scowl growing in depth the closer she gets to her gate.

"What are you doing now?!" she wants to know when I join her at their gate.

"I'm saying hi to my neighbour." Yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that I'm being annoying and am poking the bear, but it's fun to see her pinch her lips together tightly and narrow her eyes at me. She is so friggin' cute. I still want to kiss her, even if I cannot see her lips now.

"You don't have to say hi to me; we've said hi and lots of other things already, no need for any more hi's."

"So, we're hanging out; what's so weird about that?"

"You and I never hang out, Ethan!" she exclaims as if I just said something weird and scandalous. What exactly does she think "hang out" means?

"Yes, we do!" I argue, making a face at her. "We were hanging out just yesterday afternoon."

"That was detention!"

"Okay..." Good point, that wasn't strictly hanging out and was probably also not supposed to be fun... It was, though... for me. "Wednesday, then, we were hanging out in our yard."

"We weren't hanging out then either, Ethan Fletcher!" Whoa, she is on a full-name basis now, which means her tolerance is being revved into the red. "I was trying to find my sock your cat stole from my room and left in the hedge, and you were washing your stupid bike-."

"Hey! My bike is not stupid!"

"- and then you decided to wash me too, so I threw mud at you, and you ran away! That is not called hanging out!"

That's true; Kicks is an expert mudslinger... the physical kind, not the slanderous kind.

"Yes," I agree reasonably, "but you chased me around our yard, and that counts as hanging out."

"Actually," she laughs. "The part where you face-planted in a flower bed and got dirt in your eyes, and then I had to help you rinse them is the hanging out part."

"See," I grin, cocking my head. "We do hang out."

"Yeah, fun times... Well," she sighs, rolling her eyes. "I don't want to hang out with you now, no matter how much I love throwing things at you."

"Okay," I agree; not really in the market to have mud thrown at me right now, either. "Then we're just here together to say good night. Neighbours can say good night to each other, even when they're us. It's not weird at all."

"It's not even night yet," she grumbles, glaring at me again. I wonder if she realises that we've been standing here at her gate long enough for all those imaginary people she is so worried about to make up imaginary stories about us. What is really bothering her about me being here at the gate with her?

"You're right," I agree, tugging at her hair. "I'll come over to your place later to say goodnight."

"No! Good night!" she shouts, slapping my hand away and yanking the gate open, she runs down their driveway, and I'm left laughing at their open gate. I pull it closed and turn back to the gate leading to my home. When I open it and step into our yard, I'm startled to see my dad working in the flower bed near the wall.

Has he been there this entire time?!

I think so because he has a collection of gardening tools and a bucket filled with weeds on the ground next to him. He is giving me one of those knowing looks of his. The one I always get from him when I've messed up the garage or broken a window or dressed the naked marble girl in Mrs Henderson's garden in some of Deli's underwear, and he doesn't know about it yet, but he somehow just knows I've done something that's going to make him mad.

The guy reads me like a comic strip.

"Hi, Dad," I say, turning to close the gate behind me, reminding myself that I really didn't do anything wrong this time. Unless messing with Kira is suddenly against the rules. I did think about kissing her soooo many times this afternoon but haven't tried it even once. Is thinking about it an issue now? If it is, I'm in serious trouble because I cannot stop thinking about it.

My dad loves Kicks as if she's his own daughter. He likes her a lot more than he likes me these days, that's for sure.

"Hi," he says and when I'm done with the gate and have to face him again because his face is on my route to the house, I am surprised to see a slight smile playing on his lips. "You're almost there, don't give up."

I have no idea what to say to that. I don't think he means I'm almost home. I can see that. The front door is right over there... and that smile he's giving me... it's that reading skill of his showing up again. Is he actually rooting for me?

I glance at the Croft's house, and then I return my dad's smile with a grin of my own.

♂♀