Lemon, Lemon

Lemonade Parade

She had a brief—extremely brief—impression of a stream of pale yellow liquid rising in the air, sparkling in the light, and beyond them, a pair of alarmed brown eyes behind black-rimmed glasses.

Then the coldness hit her. A tsunami of tangy sweetness, although as she discovered shortly later, it wasn't actually a tsunami, just a couple of tall paper cups of iced lemonade poured directly down her front.

It even splashed right into her face when one cup rocketed upward for some reason, causing her to rear back, coughing and blinking madly at the stinging in her eyes. Reflex made her hands fly up to her face and wipe the liquid off, which caused her arm to loosen its grip around the paper bag she held against her chest, and she felt the now sopping wet bag go slack as its contents spilled out of a hole in its bottom.

"Oh, God," a voice choked. It was followed by the sound of several boys going from shocked silence, to snickering, to howls of laughter in three seconds flat.

She opened her eyes and stared at the trio of boys who were leaning against one another and clutching their stomachs. Before humiliation could engulf her in its fiery grip, she noticed that they weren't actually laughing at her. Instead, she followed the direction they were pointing at and looked down at her feet, where another boy was on his hands and knees gathering up the lemons that had burst out of the paper bag and gone rolling off in all directions. He hobbled away to chase one that had traveled across the supermarket hallway, pinballing into several people and a couple of shopping carts in the process.

He hurried back, holding several lemons in his arms, then stood before her, looking agonized. "Uh, I think I got them all. I'm sorry, I—wait, I know, don't go anywhere."

He rushed off again, only to come back with a canvas tote bag with the supermarket logo that he must have purchased from a cashier. "Here. This'll hold them," he said, handing her the bag that now contained her lemons. "I'm so sorry, miss. Are you okay? Heck, what am I saying? Of course you're not okay. I'm really sorry."

As if to echo the sentiment, one of the boys cried, "Oh, man, here we go. Keno strikes again, folks!"

"Dude, did you really just try to juggle that glass of lemonade like it was a soccer ball?"

"If only Coach were here to see your sweet, sweet moves."

At that, the boys laughed even harder. The boy named Keno threw them an evil look over his shoulder as he produced a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to her. When she made no move to take it, he hesitated, then raised a hand to wipe her face himself.

This jolted her to action, and she raised both hands as if to ward him off. "Oh no, you don't have to. I'm okay. Really."

"Yeah, you've done enough already," one of his friends said.

She and Keno looked down at the yellow stain spreading rapidly across the front of her uniform blouse and skirt, both of them mentally ranking the situation on a scale of "okay" to "disaster" and apparently coming to the same conclusion. "I-it's fine. I can just wash this off in the bathroom," she said with much less conviction.

Keno was already shaking his head. "I've got a better idea. Will you dumbasses shut up and help?" he snapped at his friends. "Give me my bag, will you?"

One of the boys passed a sports bag over to him, and he crouched down and dug through it until he found what he was looking for. "Here," he said, handing her a wad of white cloth. "Wear this, so you won't have to go home in that wet blouse."

She shook out the cloth, which turned out to be his own white, button-down uniform shirt, the green logo on the front pocket declaring him a student of St. Anthony Academy, the nearby private school for boys. "Don't worry, it's clean. At least, it's a heck of a lot cleaner than that mess you're wearing," he said when he noticed her reluctance, then cringed a little when he realized what he'd said. "Which is, I know, totally my fault."