When she reached up and kissed his cheek, Skeeter reddened to his toes. But the warmth of the gesture left him blinking too rapidly as she hurried away through the crowds, still clutching her single rose. He shoved hands into pockets, so abruptly lonely, he could’ve stood there and cried from the sheer misery of it. He was turning over possibilities for job applications when a seething whirlwind of shrieking up-timer kids engulfed him. Clearly dumped by touring parents, the ankle-biters, as Molly called them, were once again playing hooky from the station school. Screaming eight- through eleven-year-olds swirled and foamed around Skeeter like pounding surf, yelling and zooming around, maddened hornets swarming out of a dropped hive. Skeeter found himself tangled up in the coils of a lasso made from thin nylon twine. He nearly fell, the coils wound so tightly around his body and upper legs. Skeeter muttered under his breath and yanked himself free.
“Hey! Gimme that back!” A snot-mouthed nine-year-old boy glared up at him as Skeeter wound the lasso into a tight coil and stuffed it into his pocket. Skeeter just grabbed the kid by the collar and dragged him toward the nearest Security officer in sight, Wally Klontz, whose claim to fame was a schnoz the size of Cyrano de Bergerac’s. “Hey! Lemme go!” The kid wriggled and twisted, but Skeeter had hung onto far slipperier quarries than this brat.
“Got a delinquent here,” Skeeter said through clenched teeth, hauling the kid over to Wally, whose eyes widened at the sight of a screeching nine-year-old dangling from Skeeter’s grasp. “Something tells me this one is supposed to be in school.”