Then a snowball came out of nowhere, from somewhere behind him, and hit him in the back of the head.
* * *
It made a sound like a pillow dropped on a wooden floor. Snow exploded off his skull in a little crown, and a good portion of it went down inside the dark scarf and the collar of the overcoat and presumably down his spine, because his whole body did something complicated and involuntary, and his eyes squeezed shut.
Behind the spruce, three boys screamed in the high, pure register of total triumph and total terror and ran.
He did not turn around. He stood there with his eyes closed and snow melting down the inside of his shirt and said, quite calmly, "Kevin Shea. I know where you live. I've been in your mother's kitchen."
From somewhere in the next yard a voice called back, "It wasn't me!"
"It's never you, Kevin."
Lena realized she was still holding a fistful of his coat. She let go and stepped back, and the snowball in her other hand, forgotten, dropped into the drift at her feet. She was suddenly aware of how she must look: no coat, a dress, boots soaked to the ankle, her hair full of snow and doubtless collapsing under it, mascara at serious risk. The cold arrived all at once, as if it had been waiting politely for the fight to end.