The Initial Insult - Mindy McGinnis Page 0,50

her. I’m pissed, but it’s lacking the sharp edges of earlier, and not just because before when I got rowdy I think she might have broken my ankle. No, I’m not kicking and screaming because this time . . . I think she might have me.

That day that we drove past Tress in the rain is something that never stuck well with me, watching my former best friend flipping us off in the rearview mirror, dirty water running down her face. It’s a moment that might have come up in truth or dare, if someone asked me what I’m most ashamed of in my life. Or, at least, in seventh grade. But we stopped playing truth or dare a long time ago, moved on to spin the bottle and strip poker.

I never was very good at cards.

Driving past Tress that day was a shitty thing to do, and I know it, deep down. I told Brynn about it once, when I’d had too much to drink and we were both taking a time-out at one of Gretchen’s parties, just kind of chilling in lawn chairs and staring up at the stars.

“Well,” Brynn had said, brow furrowed and thinking hard. “If it was a dog, would you have stopped and picked it up?”

The truth is that yes, I would have. The truth is, that I would treat a dog better than I treated Tress Montor that day.

But it’s also true that I wasn’t the one driving. I remember my mom flicking on the windshield wipers, Tress’s figure disappearing in the rain. Mom left her there on purpose, leaving a not-so-subtle message in her wake. Did she do the same with the cops? Let them know that if the Montor disappearance was not-so-thoroughly investigated, the Turnados would appreciate that . . . possibly in the form of a donation that made it possible for them to buy a new fleet of police cruisers that year?

Whatever is left in my stomach rolls at the thought, and my mind revolts along with it. If that happened, it wasn’t my fault.

“I couldn’t just force my mom to pull over, you know,” I say, adding a brick to my defense, just as Tress reaches for one of her own. A more solid one to trump my metaphor, because another truth is that I can construct quite the wall of self-righteous, blustering excuses to defend myself, but the one Tress is building is very real, and growing rapidly.

22 rows of bricks / 3 = 7.333

I’m nearly a third of the way toward being dead. I don’t like math anymore.

It’s like the boa constrictor song we sang as kids, with the snake slowly swallowing us up, except I’m not sliding down a snake’s throat. The bricks are rising like the tide, and once they close over my head—

“Tress,” I say madly, hoping to distract her as she lays some mortar, sliding the first brick of the sixth row into place. “Have you really thought about this? Like actually, truly, really sat down and thought about this?”

“Yep,” she says, tapping the brick into place.

“And you thought about the fact that you could go to jail?”

She’s on her knees, fitting the last one with precision, when she leans back and gives me a long, cold stare.

“Have you thought about it? Actually, truly, really thought about it? Yeah, I could go to jail, Felicity. But there are spaces between the bars of my cell. Things like light and oxygen can get in. You”—she taps her trowel against the brick—“you won’t have that.”

“Light,” she says, tapping the brick again.

“Oxygen.” She adds one last tap. “So have you thought about it? Jail is another word for punishment. I’ll take it, because I’ll deserve it.”

She comes to her feet, leans in. I pull back, my skull grating against stone.

“What do you deserve, Felicity Turnado? And have you been punished?”

“Yes,” I tell her, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve said yet. “Yes, I have.”

Tress thinks about that for a second, her eyes boring into mine and finding some truth there. “Maybe you have,” she half agrees. “But not by me.”

That part I can’t argue with her about. The problem with Tress is that a lot of what she says also doesn’t make me look very good. The other problem is a lot of what she says is true. I shift in my manacles, and my jester cap flops forward again, a shank of my hair, matted with blood, coming with it. I blow at