The diner had become so quiet that people could hear the fryers crackling behind the counter. A little boy asked his mother why those boys were being mean. The mother pulled him closer but still did not stand.

Then Lily said something that changed Tyler’s expression. “You need three people to scare one girl in a wheelchair?”

Mason stopped smiling.

Drew looked away.

Tyler’s face hardened.

He threw the burger onto the tile.

“You think you’re funny?”

Lily wiped sauce from her glasses with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “No.”

Tyler stepped back.

For one second, several witnesses believed the humiliation was finished.

Then he kicked the front of her chair.

The wheelchair rolled backward hard enough for one wheel to catch against the base of a table. Lily’s hands flew toward the armrests.

“Hey!” somebody shouted.

Tyler kicked the chair again.

This time it tipped.

Lily hit the tile with one shoulder while the wheelchair crashed beside her. A glass of soda fell from a nearby table and shattered several feet away.

The entire room reacted at once. People stood, chairs scraped backward, and somebody near the register yelled for the manager. Lily curled onto her side, trying to catch her breath while one hand searched blindly for her glasses.

They had landed beneath the edge of a table.

Mason stared down at her. “Tyler, man, that’s enough.”

Tyler looked around and realized everyone was watching now. Instead of embarrassment, something uglier appeared in his face.

He liked the attention.

“Stay down,” he told Lily.

She pushed herself onto one elbow.

Tyler nudged her shoulder with the toe of his sneaker. Not hard enough to injure her seriously, but hard enough to send another wave of outrage through the crowd.

“Stop it!” a woman shouted.

Tyler looked toward her. “Mind your business.”

That was when phones finally began recording openly. The older man near the window stood and took several steps forward. Two teenage girls near the condiment station started filming from different angles.

Drew released the overturned wheelchair and backed away.

“You’re going too far,” he said.

Tyler laughed. “She’ll be fine.”

Lily found her glasses and pushed them onto her face. One lens was smeared with sauce, and a small crack had appeared along the corner of the frame.

She did not ask Tyler to stop again.

Instead, she looked around the diner.