She hit him square in the midsection with her head, driving her skull into his soft stomach with the full force of her running weight. Derek let out a surprised wheeze and stumbled backward. Lily grabbed his arm and bit down.

"OW! What the -- get her OFF me!"

Travis lunged forward. Ethan didn't think. His body moved before his mind caught up, and he drove his right foot into Travis's stomach with everything he had. It was a clumsy kick, more desperation than technique, but it connected solidly with the soft flesh below Travis's ribs. Travis doubled over with a sound like a punctured balloon, his face going white, and collapsed against the recycling bins.

Derek flung Lily off his arm. She hit the ground hard, skinning her palms on the pavement, but she was already scrambling back to her feet, her eyes wild, her teeth bared. There was a red mark on Derek's forearm where she'd bitten him, the skin not quite broken.

For a moment, the alley was still. Derek looked at Travis, groaning on the ground. He looked at the bite mark on his arm. He looked at Ethan, who was standing with his fists raised, breathing hard, and at Lily, who stood beside her brother with her small hands clenched and her chin jutted out like a terrier facing a bear.

Something in the calculus of bullying shifted. Two-on-one was easy. Two-on-two, when one of the two was a feral seven-year-old who bit, was less appealing.

"You're both crazy," Derek said. But he was already backing up. He reached down and yanked Travis to his feet. "Give me the money."

"Come and get it," Lily said.

"Lily." Ethan's voice was steady. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the crumpled twenty-dollar bill, and tossed it on the ground between them. "Take it."

Derek snatched it up. "Freaks," he spat. Then he turned and dragged Travis toward the mouth of the alley. At the corner, he stopped and looked back. "This isn't over. When we get home, I'm telling Dad you attacked Travis. See what happens then."

They disappeared around the corner. The sound of their footsteps faded.

The alley was quiet.

Lily's composure collapsed all at once. Her face crumpled, her shoulders shook, and she sat down on the dirty pavement and cried. Not loud, theatrical crying -- the silent, shaking kind, the kind that comes from a child who has learned that making noise brings worse things.

Ethan knelt beside her. He pulled her into his arms, and she buried her face in his chest. He could feel the wetness of her tears soaking through his thin jacket. He could feel the fine tremor running through her whole body. She was so small. She'd always been small for her age, but lately she seemed to be getting smaller, as if the world were pressing down on her and compressing her into something hard and dense and breakable.

"Your hands," he said softly. He took her palms and turned them up. The skin was scraped raw, tiny beads of blood rising through the abrasions. He blew on them gently, the way their mother used to before she'd left, before it was just Dad and then just Uncle Ray's grudging charity. "We'll wash these when we get home."