The Initial Insult - Mindy McGinnis Page 0,6

or square our shoulders when someone walks up to us too quick for comfort. Maybe I learned it from watching him, but I don’t think so. I think there’s a steel streak in me that comes from Cecil, and I think that same bit of steel is partly what’s held up the Allan house for all these years, not the brick and mortar. I’ve felt it every time I’ve walked into a party, something calling to me, something saying I belong there.

I know that house, and not just because I’ve scouted out the best places to do my business dealings at parties. I know that house because it knows me, and we’ve both been abandoned. There are dark corners inside of it, as there are in me. And if it’s going to be destroyed, I’ve got someone in mind to go down with it.

I shake off my feet, pull my sandals back on. “Everybody’s going?”

Ribbit nods quickly, sensing that I’m about to cave.

“All right,” I agree. “I’ll come.”

The fish flash away as I move, my shadow crossing the water, their world changing again, light to dark, in a moment. Like mine. At least theirs changes back quick, the sun returning to warm them.

My world can’t be fixed. But maybe it can be put right.

Chapter 5

Felicity

In Amontillado, calling someone rich is an insult. Everybody knows who has money and who doesn’t, so you don’t need to go around showing it off, especially if you’re new blood, like we are. Of course, new blood means your family hasn’t been around for at least five generations. Time carries more weight than money in Amontillado, something Gretchen Astor enjoys reminding me of every time we pass the stone pillar in the center of town with the founding fathers’ names inscribed: Allan. Astor. Montor. Usher.

I’d like to think she’s not doing it on purpose, that maybe running her fingers over her last name as we walk by is an unconscious movement, something she’s learned from watching her parents, who worship at the altar of their surname and expect the rest of us to as well. But everything I know of Gretchen is careful and calculated, and despite my money—and we do have it—this is her silently reminding me that Turnado isn’t up there and never will be.

That little snub isn’t the only thing that bothers me about that pillar, though. The Allans are gone. The Ushers are still here, struggling along, clinging to the power embedded in the history of their last name. It’s sad enough, knowing how the Allan and Usher lines of Amontillado ended up. It’s the other name—Montor—that gives me goose bumps, and for the opposite reason. Nobody knows what happened to Lee Montor, the last male survivor of his name.

And Tress . . . She turned her back on the town—literally—when she went to live in the hills with her grandfather, and metaphorically by refusing help from everyone who tried to give it. And people did try—I know, because I was one of them—to do what they could for the last Montor. But Tress is Tress, and Mom says that pride always was a Montor trait. That and thinking they’re better than everyone else, she had told me once, with a sniff. That’s how I know Mom wishes Turnado was up on that pillar, too.

But it’s not.

New money might spend the same as old, but it still isn’t worth as much to the people of Amontillado. So Mom and Dad were careful, putting a deck on the back of the house first, waiting a few years to add the porch on the front. Mom says nobody’s better than anybody else, and we don’t want people thinking the Turnados got too big for their britches all the sudden. The gas pocket the company hit on our land wasn’t exactly a secret—you can’t hide a long line of white company trucks. But Dad says every landowner in Amontillado has some money from gas, it’s just that nobody needs to know exactly how much.

I don’t even know how much, just that they stopped talking about community college a few years back, then told me if I wanted my own car I could pick something out . . . just nothing flashy. They didn’t have to clarify. Gretchen Astor’s dad had bought himself a BMW when we were in junior high. Somebody spray-painted ASStor across the hood two days later. He took the hit and traded it in for a Civic. That car had all