The Initial Insult - Mindy McGinnis Page 0,20

you get this hat out of my face?”

It’s ridiculous. And it works.

“Sure.” She comes over, gently disentangling pins from my hair. Her face is inches from mine, and I could headbutt her or bite her, but it wouldn’t buy me anything. She’d just be pissed, and I’d still be chained to a wall. I need to take a different route, try instead to remind her that we used to be friends. That once, we really loved each other.

“There you go,” she says, putting my cap back into place, pinning it neatly. The bobby pins slide across my scalp, tickling and bringing back a hundred memories of Tress braiding my hair or combing it out, me showing her how to put on mascara, and the one time we got into her mom’s dye and ruined their new bathroom tiling.

I’ve got tears in my eyes as she steps back, and Tress is upset, too, her brows drawn tightly together, her mouth a thin line as she inspects a few of my loose hairs that stuck to her fingers.

“Shit,” she says. “I forgot to put salve on Rue.”

“Rue?” I ask. “Who’s Rue?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Tress shakes the strands loose, then turns her back to me. She’s shaking. Not as much as I am, but it’s there, a small tremor running under her skin.

“Tress,” I whisper. “I don’t know what happened to your parents.”

She sighs, shoulders falling . . . and reaches for a brick.

“You’re going to want to be more careful about what you say, Felicity.”

I take a kick at her as she picks up the first brick, but she only backs out of the way, my second slipper flying off and over her shoulder.

“Quit,” she says, as calmly as she informed me about the loose panther.

“Or what?” I snap at her, all hints of a whisper gone from my voice. “You’ll hold me against my will? Brick me up in a wall because you’re a fucking insane person?”

“I can always knock you out again,” she tells me. “You’ll wake up in total darkness.”

Tress lets that sit a second, then continues. “At least if you’re awake you’ve got a chance in hell of talking me out of this.”

I’m quiet while she lays the first brick but can’t help it when she reaches for another. “Two?” I ask, dropping my voice low, using the tone that I used on Ribbit earlier, when he literally ran to get me a beer. But Tress is not her cousin, and she sees right through my shit.

“That’s for kicking at the first one,” she says.

I’m dying to take a shot at Tress while she kneels in front of me. I could do some damage, too; maybe knock some of her teeth out, or at least break her nose. But I won’t, and she knows it. I won’t because I need to keep her happy. She lays an entire first row; four bricks across, like she’s testing me. I don’t say anything, as instructed.

“All right,” she finally says, rocking back on her heels and dropping the spade into the mortar bucket. “We need to talk about freshman year.”

Upstairs, a clock chimes.

Chapter 16

Tress

Freshman Year

Shit. That’s what I wake up to—actual shit.

There’s a raccoon at the foot of my bed, pawing through the clothes I had carefully laid out to wear to school today. I yelp when I see it, and it reactively shits, erasing any chance I had of maybe spot-cleaning its grubby little pawprints from the shirt I’d managed to snag from Goodwill, tags still on.

“Cecil!” I yell as the raccoon scurries out of my room, down the hallway, and out the trailer door . . . which is standing open.

“Huh?” Cecil stirs from his spot on the couch, bumping the rickety coffee table and sending a cascade of beer bottles onto the floor, not all of them empty. A flood of beer follows the raccoon toward the door, because this place isn’t exactly level.

“You left the front door open,” I tell him, to which he gives a laugh, waves his hand at it, and goes back to sleep, rolling over to show me his back. You work with animals long enough, you learn body language thoroughly. I’m dismissed.

I rifle through my laundry basket, hoping there’s something salvageable I can wear. But we haven’t had the cash for the laundromat this week, which is why I’d lifted a few things from Goodwill. It wasn’t the first time, and I never feel great about it, but Cecil says the Goodwill is