“Don’t worry, Ash,” Penny reassured me.  “Women don’t compensate.  We aren’t obsessed about the size of anything.”

“Oh, yeah?” retorted Josh, but whatever snappy comeback he thought he was about to make never made it past his lips, dying instead in a sound that was half choke and half gargle.  I wouldn’t have heard it, anyway.  We were passing the kids waiting for the bus.  One of them was standing apart, and I was staring at him.

He was beautiful.

He didn’t look like a boy at all.  He didn’t even look like a man, he looked like a statue.  He looked like someone had dressed Michelangelo’s David in stone-washed jeans and a black leather jacket and pulled his hair forward so that it covered David’s eyes.  He even stood like the David, bag over one shoulder and one foot drifted slightly to one side, and I would have sworn that under those perfect, curling black bangs sparkled eyes gray as ice, eyes that looked into mine and pierced my soul even as I was passing at thirty miles an hour, eyes that knew me instantly and completely and without remorse or pity.

I drove off the road.