Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard

in the summer, helping implement renewable energy in the village. Did you know like fifty percent of Nicaragua’s population doesn’t have dependable access to electricity?”
    I shake my head.
    “It’s a tragedy. Anyway, one day I’m heading back to the dorms in the late afternoon and I turn down a side road. It rained that day, so there are puddles along the gutters. Mud in the street. Right away I get this creepy feeling, even though I’ve passed this way a million times before, and it isn’t even night yet, but the feeling’s impossible to ignore.
    “Then this arm comes around in front of my face. And suddenly, I’m on the ground.
    “I fight like a wildcat—which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do. The majority of injuries during muggings happen when the victim fights back, did you know that? But the kicking, the screaming is involuntary—I can’t stop.” She drops her feet.
    “Then, over my mugger’s shoulder, I notice this man standing there with his motorbike. And so I direct my screams for help toward him. But he just stands there, watching. Finally, the man wrenches my bag from my hands. And then—get this—he goes and climbs on the back of the other guy’s motorbike, and they speed away. They were in it together.”
    “So all he wanted was your bag?” I ask.
    Starling nods animatedly. She’s standing now, leaning over the seat between us. “If I’d known that’s what he was after, I’d have given it to him! Hell, I would have curtsied. I fought because I thought he was going to—well, you know what I thought. A big mistake. I didn’t even know I was bleeding until I stood, and I saw it in the dirt.” She pulls out her bottom lip with two fingers. “I bit all the way through it.
    See the scar?”
    So it wasn’t from a piercing. “I would have been on the first plane home,” I say.
    “Well . . .” Starling seems to realize she’s standing, and sits back down in her own seat. “I thought about it. But I’d moved out of my last apartment. I didn’t have anywhere to go home to, other than my friends’ couches. I hadn’t spoken to my parents for ages, so I didn’t want to call them. I couldn’t even bring myself to go to work. For a week, I just hid in my room.”
    “What made you stay?”
    “Rowan.”
    I glance at him. He’s looking out the window.
    “He’d come to visit me twice before, for a week each time,” Starling explains. “The first time, he got his Advanced Open Water certification. The second time, he got his Rescue Diver certification. The third time, he never left. He traveled to other countries, of course. But never home.” Two years. I still can’t wrap my brain around it. I wonder what he was like before he left for his perma-vacation. Less than a week into my own, I already feel changed. Although not nearly as changed as I’d like to be.
    “Rowan reminded me that those muggers were just two bad people out of millions of good ones. Great ones, like my host family. And that it had happened to me—well, it was just luck of the draw.”
    “Having hot-pink streaks in your hair didn’t help, though,” Rowan says.
    “Victim-blamer! You should be ashamed of yourself.” Starling nods at me. “Your turn, Bria.”
    I take a deep breath. I listened to her story, but at the same time I was deciding what I wanted to tell. “When I was four-teen, I almost drowned,” I begin.
    Starling looks disappointed.
    I tell them how I woke up underwater with no idea how I got there. I could see the place where the wall met the bottom of the pool. But it didn’t occur to me to kick. I just hung there, unmoving, suspended in silence. Then a pair of hands grabbed my arms, and with a sucking splash, someone lifted me into the world of noises again. I’d learn later that I’d hit my head on the diving board. Blacked out for just an instant.
    Drank half the pool into my lungs. I’d slipped, Olivia said.
    “Luckily, I didn’t need help breathing,” I add.