Tammie

“Watch out!”
He sailed through the air and landed at the side of the road, in a crumpled pile. Scrambling to sit back in the grass, Evan’s mouth hung agape like a fish. He was, somehow, almost intact.  The truck continued rumbling past, and the sounds echoed in his head, circling round his confounded mind.
He struggled to process what had just occurred: one moment he stood bang in the middle of the road, death looming – but the next… The next, he was where he sat now. He looked up; someone was crouched down in front of him, gesticulating, talking to him. Tamara. What was she saying?
“...okay? Hello? Say something! Shit!” she poked and prodded frantically at his head, his ribs, his legs. His mouth felt dry. He blinked at her.
Pulling the words from the back of his mind, he responded:
“Yes…. I… what..?” he croaked. Had she just..? And how could…?
“Oh, thank god! I thought you’d lost it, or something! Does anything hurt?” Her brown eyes were wide, searching his face, skimming over his grazed forehead and arms.
“No, I think I’m okay,” he replied, as he gently extended his limbs. His clothes were slightly ripped and smattered with dust, but his skin was more or less unscathed. “I don’t understand – what… what just happened? Did you just… How did I end up here? I was in the middle of road. Did you lift me?” His head swirled.
“What? You ran across by yourself! I think you’re in shock. You might have a concussion,” she tittered nervously. “We should get you checked out by a doctor, or something. Don’t move: I’ll call an ambulance.”
Shifting her gaze away from him – a little too rapidly – she took out her phone and dialled. As she talked breathlessly to the emergency line, Evan attempted to piece everything together.

He and Tammie had been wandering along their usual route home from the station, where the old oak trees canopied the road. They’d been coming up to the paddocks, chattering animatedly about the intentions of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar.
“… her own motions and emotions, but through a different character, which definitely enhances the emotion behind it.”
“But Esther isn’t married to a famous poet, with children, or being cheated on, or whatever – it’s completely detached from Plath’s actual experiences…”
He’d been in the middle of the road when the truck came hurtling towards them at high speed. He’d stood motionless, as though his feet were trapped in quicksand. A moment later, he’d found himself in the soft grass, unhurt; how had he escaped with barely a scratch? For that matter, how had she? She’d been right behind him…hadn’t she? Perhaps he was concussed…
***
Tamara bit her lip as she climbed into the ambulance after Evan. Stupid, stupid truck driver! If she hadn’t been able to – oh, crap!  Could she - would she – get away with it? She didn’t want to uproot her life and move house all over again; her father would be so disappointed, and he was already looking so weary these days. At least, this time, she’d only been in Pembrooke for five months: not long enough to get attached, really…
Evan. She was already attached to Evan. Calm, easy-going, reliable Evan. He was quiet, but not particularly shy; he just seemed to absorb his environment without judgement, seemingly unfazed by the madness that surrounded them at school. She was the complete opposite: always buzzing, awkward, overwhelmed. She liked to pretend she was confident and carefree, but she was sure he saw right through her act.
He was, she thought, the best friend she’d been wishing for, for such a long time. She was used to being lonely, used to being the ‘freak’, and had become accustomed to keeping herself occupied by climbing trees and devouring entire books in one sitting. Since she was eight years old, it had been just her and her father. Her mother had left, walked away and never returned; she couldn’t deal with the occasional… incidents and fractures.
But from the moment Evan and Tamara met, when she and her father had arrived in Newhaven (with Lettuce, her pet chameleon, in tow), their unexpected friendship had sprung – as though they’d been friends since childhood. It was five months ago, now.

Bubbly Mrs Adams and her – rather more serene – husband had arrived at their emerald-green door, presenting a rather large carrot cake on a platter, barely an hour after they themselves had opened their new home up for the first time.
“Hello, new neighbours!”  Amy Adams had exclaimed, her copper-coloured corkscrew curls bouncing enthusiastically. “I’m Amy Adams and this here is Steve, my husband, and Evan, my son. We live right next door at number 14. Welcome to the neighbourhood! Do you need help unpacking?”
Evan had stepped from behind his vibrant mum and corresponding cake, slight and tall but a little stooped, as though he hadn’t quite grown used to his own height. He gave Tamara an embarrassed, apologetic smile. His green-grey eyes scanned over her frazzled hair, and the mountain of boxes behind, and then settled on her brown, almond-shaped eyes. He smiled again, a genuinely warm smile, and she knew that this time round, in Newhaven, things would go better.

At least, that was what she had thought, before she’d effortlessly flung him aside, just in time for the truck to zoom past them.
Shit, she thought. Not again. Notagain notagain!

A month or so before they’d moved she’d messed up. She hated to recall the incident: her Pembrooke classmate’s shocked faces , the sudden silence, all eyes focused intently on her. She hadn’t meant to do it, to hurt anyone. Vanessa had been pulling at her afro-tangle of hair, over and over, sneering at her gangly frame and calling her monkey-girl; it had been the final straw. She’d rapidly spun round and smacked Vanessa’s hand away, just a bit too powerfully. The ambulance had to be called: Tamara had broken Vanessa’s hand.
From then on, she would hear the mutterings in the hallways – but they’d quickly hush upon her approach.  She’d sense eyes following her; the students would stand back along the corridor walls to let her pass, whisperings of ‘freak’ resounding after her.  It was as though she’d suddenly switched on a searing hot spotlight. The unfortunate incident had violently jolted her out of her comfort zone: she’d been used to the comfortable obscurity of being a ‘no one’.
The best option, her father had decided, would be to leave town, and start anew… before word any spread further.
Again.
***
When Evan had first encountered Tamara, he’d been drawn to her electric energy and refreshed by her strange quirks. Most people tended to bore him: the senseless gossip at school; the brash, competitive personalities of his peers; the obsession with wearing the latest trends, and the lack of enthusiasm for actually learning.
It’s true; he was a bit of a nerd. Well, a lot of a nerd. He zoomed through his calculus homework as easily as he wrote his philosophy essays or geography coursework. He was riveted by the periodic table and loved learning about worldwide cultures. The barrage of information sent his way only served to excite him more.  
The few people he really appreciated and got along with well at school were in the senior years, above him. Although he felt like an outcast, others perceived him as cool and aloof: his geekiness worked in his favour.

Tamara, however, seemed to be the opposite of aloof. Five months ago, the new neighbours had arrived at number 12, with a moving van filled to the brim. The word circulating the small neighbourhood was that a single father and his daughter were moving in. Evan’s mother, ever the sociable butterfly and art freak, had insisted they all went to introduce themselves when the new neighbours arrived. She’d spent the morning in anticipation, baking a giant cake (her usual paintbrush twisted in her hair) topped generously with white icing and a marzipan carrot.
The three of them shuffled over to neighbour’s vivid green front door.
“I love that shade! It means good things are coming,” his mother prattled on eagerly, as she rapped the ornate chrome knocker four times. The door was the exact same shade of green for the last neighbours too,  Evan thought, rolling his eyes. They weren’t particularly pleasant.
The door was opened by a tall, broad-shouldered man, with sandy hair and earnest brown eyes, clad in a deep blue t-shirt and jeans. Evan’s mum started babbling excitedly, his dad nodded and smiled placidly, whilst Evan absorbed the scene. The man seemed to be in his mid-thirties, with hair greying at the temples, looking slightly worn out – probably from the move. Evan glanced curiously through to the house and found Tamara looking back at him. She was not what he’d been expecting – a small child with her father’s complexion. Instead, she was caramel-skinned, tall and slender as a fawn, with a halo of tightly-curled hair. She had her father’s warm chocolate-brown eyes.
They soon established a pattern of witticisms and laughter, and spent most of their free time together. Walking together to the school bus in the mornings and back together in the evenings became their routine: he would bring brownies, or peanut butter cookies, or banana bread (whatever his mother binge-baked that week), and she’d bring a new book, or recommend a band to him. He’d never been particularly interested in literature before he’d read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, followed by 1984 by George Orwell, followed by Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.  
Tammie inspired him – aside from the copious amounts of literature she threw at him, her never-ending stream of bizarre verbal expressions and animated faces made her seem so much more alive than everyone around him.
But he hadn’t suspected she actually hid something more than that… that she could have an actual force that others didn’t. He didn’t think he’d imagined it. In fact, the more he thought it over, the more convinced he became of some superhuman force presenting itself in her at that moment.  
***
“I’ve got to tell you something,” she said, her hands wrung tightly together in her lap, heart in her throat. “But try not to freak out.”
They were heading home on the 380 bus, finally, after an hour and a half of faffing about at the hospital.
“Okay, shoot,” responded Evan, ready to hear the truth.

Tamara had called her dad earlier, whilst Evan was having his head scanned, to explain her delay in getting home… and let him know what she had done. He’d remained calm on the phone, as though confident everything would be okay. She imagined that he was, in fact, already anxiously planning their next move.
“Tammie, sweetheart, have you called Amy? Would you like me to pick you both up?” he enquired.
“Nah, I’ll call her now. I think we’ll be able to grab the bus home; Evan should be done being checked out soon, I think. Thanks, Dad.”
Her call to Mrs Adams hadn’t gone so serenely.
“What do you mean, at the hospital? What happened? Is Evan injured? Are you? I’ll come over now! I’ll be right there!” she squealed, as Tamara attempted repeatedly to interject. Twenty minutes of cajoling later, she’d managed to convince Mrs Adams that the bus was a perfectly sound option.
She needed that extra time alone with Evan: she had to deal with the consequences of her actions.

Tamara couldn’t look him in the eye; not yet. She focused on her hands, and tried to take slow, calm breaths.
“Well… Evan, I did… uh, crap, how can I put this,” she paused to consider her words carefully, biting her lip. “You know how, well, you didn’t get hit by that truck that you were right in front of..?”
“Ye-e-es…” Evan waited patiently.
“I sort of ran up and, uh, chucked you across the road.”
“Oh,” Evan responded, not certain how to react. “Oh.”
She looked up, nausea building in her stomach, surprised to see his composed expression. Maybe he was holding it back, really well: the horror that he was surely feeling, the utter revulsion. I’m a freak.
“Oh?” she repeated, stupidly. Maybe he hadn’t understood her.
“Yeah,” he looked her in the eye. “I kind of figured that, seeing as I was not flattened by the truck, I somehow got moved. That and – you were right behind me, weren’t you? – so, you somehow moved too,” he considered it for a moment, furrowing his eyebrows. “I just don’t get how you did it, Tammie,”
“Uh,” Tamara’s mouth felt dry, her throat constricted. “I ran to you, picked you up, ran across, and… flung you into the grass. That’s it.”
“Okay... Right, okay. So you’re really strong,” Evan muttered, as though talking to himself. “And pretty fast, too, I guess...”
“You’re… you’re okay, yeah? I know it’s a lot to digest,” Tamara stammered nervously. “I mean, I –I’m a bit of a freak of nature, really – bu-but I guess you already knew I was a weirdo! Ha-ha!”
Her attempt to make light of the situation quickly dwindled. This was a serious situation – her life had been turned upside-down by far less than this, in the past, more times than she’d care to admit.
“Please, Evan,” Tamara implored, her voice little more than a whisper. “Please keep this between us? I couldn’t bear…”
“Yeah, of course.” Evan interjected confidently. “Well, if you keep it a secret that I’m—” he paused dramatically, his face a deadpan mask.

“I’m freakishly good at maths.”

Well, that’s a secret I don’t mind keeping, Tamara though warmly.