“She has to do it, Theo. It’s her story.”

Theo jogged for his car, Dan still at his side. “Can you get Buddy and my aunt and uncle home?”

“Sure.” Dan prevented Theo from closing the driver-side door. “Do not let her run away from this any longer.”

Theo let out a bitter laugh, shut the door, and drove to the end of the residential street, where he barely caught the flash of Lucy’s red Toyota as it went around the bend. He ran a stop sign to catch up with her.

He immediately called her cell phone and got her voice mail. He checked his gas gauge and cursed himself for not filling up before he arrived at the Cunninghams‘. He had a quarter tank and no idea where Lucy was headed.

He stayed behind her on southbound 1-95, and for once he was glad there was a decent amount of traffic- at least she wouldn’t be pulling a Starsky and Hutch on him. He stayed close behind, heading toward Miami.

The fourth time he tried, she picked up her cell.

“Where are you going?”

Her voice was very small. “I don’t know.”

“Drive to my house. It’s closer than the city.”

“No.

“Then go to the gym. Park wherever you can.”

“All right.”

She hung up, but Theo was relieved that at least he’d heard her voice and he knew where they were going. He was on empty when she took the Miami Beach exit. He was running on fumes by the time he found a place to park. He jogged down Washington Avenue and caught a glimpse of her rounding the corner of Second Street, heading toward the strip.

“Lucy!”

She ignored him. Theo caught up with her and did a quick check to make sure she still had all her limbs. Lucy looked straight ahead, marching toward the beach.

“Are we going swimming, Luce?”

“No.”

She stomped across Ocean and walked up the sidewalk to the beach entrance. She took off her sandals and dangled them in her hand.

“Tell me. Whatever it is, now’s the time. Who’s Brad Zirkle and what did the son of a bitch do to you?”

“I’d like to be by myself.”

Theo laughed. “Not this time, sweetheart.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around. Lucy looked past his eyes toward the South Beach strip, already buzzing with the early dinner crowd. “Lucy. Look at me.”

Her eyes slowly focused on him, and her mouth began to tremble.

“You’ve been by yourself long enough. Now you’re with me, and you’re going to tell me what happened to you. Right now.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly, her eyes still on his.

“Hey! It’s Lucy and Theo!” A woman with two sunburned kids stopped on their way back from the beach. They stared, their arms full of beach toys and their mouths open in surprise.

“This isn’t a good time,” Theo said, taking Lucy’s elbow.

The mother pushed her two children on ahead. “I understand.” She smiled at Theo. “Good luck to the two of you.”

Lucy and Theo headed down the gentle slope of the beach to the surf. Theo put his arm around her waist and pulled her tight. The waning sun lit up her footprints in the wet sand and Theo knew it was a strange time to notice this, but Lucy had the cutest feet and the prettiest little toes.

“I was very athletic in high school, but somewhat overweight, as you know. I wasn’t particularly appealing to the most popular boys.” She looked straight ahead up the beach.

“Go on.”

“So when I got to Pitt State, it was a chance for me to reinvent myself. I really thought I could change myself-that I could leave behind the ‘fat chick’ label.”

“OK.”

Lucy stopped and turned toward Theo, the breeze lifting her hair off her shoulders. “Do you know what scares me the most about telling you this?”

He smoothed her hair back with his fingers. “What?”

“That you’ll hear this and you won’t ever see me the same way again.”

He cocked his head to the side. “How could that happen, Luce? What is there left that we haven’t seen in each other?”

Lucy half-laughed and half-sniffled as she resumed walking. “You want to know why I started gaining weight the second part of my freshman year? It was to avoid men. I wanted to become completely invisible to men.”

“Why did you want to do that?”

She pressed her palms into her eyes and stood still on the sand. When she looked at him, Theo saw no tears, just fierce determination.

“I’m a slump buster, Theo,” she said. “No, wait- I’m the famous Pitt State Slump Buster: Lucky Lucy, the fat girl who helped Brad Zirkle end his six-game rushing slump. The fat girl who thought she had a relationship with Brad Zirkle, only to learn she was being used, and she learned this in a packed stadium during a nationally televised game, no less!”

Rage thundered in Theo’s ears. “Say what?”

“The fat girl whose public humiliation brought down the entire Pitt State athletic department and caused the team to forfeit their Taco Bowl berth to their archri-vals, the Purdue Boilermakers. Does this ring any bells?”

Theo was struck by the tone of Lucy’s voice. She sounded like a TV news anchor giving background to a faraway tragedy. He wondered how many thousands of times she’d repeated that cold summary in her own head.

“So? Does that sound familiar to you?”

He nodded. “I knew I’d heard Zirkle’s name before-I watched that special on ESPN. I can’t believe that was you.”

Theo reached up to touch her face, but Lucy backed away and crossed her arms over her chest.

“It was me, all right.”

“Start from the beginning.”

Lucy took a deep breath and stared out over the ocean for a moment, then focused on Theo. “I met Brad in a geology class in October. He sat by me a couple times, was very nice, and I kept wondering why in the world he was acting interested in me. I was a freshman. I was overweight-around one seventy-five, probably about what I weighed back in May. I wore a size fourteen.”

“That’s pretty average size, Lucy.”

“I realize that now.”

“Go on.”

“So he was very sweet to me. Told me he’d seen me on campus. He asked me to have lunch with him at the student union. The thing is, he wasn’t very interesting, Theo. I didn’t really like the guy all that much, but I was blinded by the fact that the senior football star Brad Zirkle wanted to be seen with Lucy Cunningham! It just boggled my mind. The girls in my dorm were flipping out with jealousy.”

“And then what happened?”

“The next week, he asked me out on a real date- took me to see a rerun of Aliens and them out for ice cream. He kissed me good night.” Lucy shook her head and laughed. “I should have listened to my gut instinct right there.” She looked up at Theo. “I hated his kiss. His mouth was all slimy and cold and his lips were too thin and… and… the feel of his tongue creeped me out.”

The anger sat hard and icy in Theo’s gut. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. But he’d asked her to tell him, hadn’t he? “Go on.”

“So when Zirkle asked me out a second time, what did I say? I said yes! Duh! And why?” Lucy wiped her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. “Because I wanted the dream to continue. I wanted so bad to believe he liked me, found me attractive-”

Theo reached for her and Lucy pushed his arm away.

“On our next date he took me to a Prince concert, but it wasn’t called that back then because Prince was going by that unpronounceable symbol. Anyway, he took me to his fraternity room after, and we drank a bottle of Chardonnay. I pretended to be interested in his stories about football. I got pretty tipsy. I decided what the heck.”

“Oh, Luce.”

“I had no idea that this was all a setup. That a bunch of his teammates were outside the door listening, verifying that I was a legitimate, bona fide slump buster.”

“Shit.”

“Hey. It worked. Brad rushed for two hundred and eleven yards the next game. Broke the school record.”