The Initial Insult - Mindy McGinnis Page 0,65

defensive posture.

Taking away Tress’s harder touches gives me Annabelle, tall and dark, graceful. There’s a smile, I know that face. She’s offering me a Popsicle, pressing the cool wrapper against the scrape on my knee before unwrapping it.

“There you go,” she says. “Edible Band-Aid.”

I laugh in the memory, and I realize Tress isn’t the only one who’s changed. It comes out light and airy. I’m not checking to make sure I’m supposed to be laughing. Not doing a quick assessment of Gretchen’s or David’s or Hugh’s faces to make sure it’s okay.

But then Annabelle’s face does change, becomes more like the Tress I know today, that line of worry between her eyebrows, the edges of her mouth down-turned. There’s a light touch on my forehead, and I lean into it, the fingers cool and deft. At my side, Goldie-Dog whines, her cold nose going into my palm. Something is wrong. She knows. She knows something is not right with me, and soon I’ll pee my pants and Annabelle and Tress will know and everyone will know that Felicity Turnado pees her pants sometimes and froths at the mouth and rolls on the floor and no one will ever want to marry me.

“You don’t have a fever,” Annabelle says. “Could it be something you ate?”

I shake my head in the memory, but also here in the basement of the Allan house.

“I don’t feel good,” I say, and my eyes flick to Tress, standing at the top of the stairs, a teddy bear clutched against her side, looking down at us with a frown to match her mother’s.

“Okay.” Annabelle runs her hands down my arms, and I shiver, goose bumps popping under my nightgown.

“I want to go home.” My voice cracks as I say it, a pathetic whimper that Annabelle Montor can’t ignore. It was the one place I didn’t want to be, earlier. The place I ran from after I heard the sound—louder than a smack—while my parents were fighting. I ran from home and came to the Montors’, and Annabelle had called my mom, said I was staying here tonight. Said it in a way that my mom couldn’t argue with, and wouldn’t anyway because

Montor > Turnado.

But that tone is gone from Annabelle’s voice now, and I wish she hadn’t used it then. Wish she hadn’t agreed that I could stay. Wish that I hadn’t run in the first place.

“I need to go home,” I say again, insistent.

“Honey, it’s . . .” She glances at her phone. “It’s past midnight.”

I shake my head, real tears coming now. Tears of frustration. I don’t only want to go home, but I need to. It started up in Tress’s room, a halo of light around her lamp, a pressure in the back of my head. Her voice got loud and her teeth terribly bright, and I know, without a doubt, that I’m going to seize, and soon. And that means I’ll fall down and roll around, go stiff like a board and maybe even pee myself right in front of Tress.

Girls with monogrammed towels don’t pee themselves.

I gulp a deep breath, bunch my nightgown into my fists, and focus hard on Annabelle. “I want to go home.”

In the basement, my cracked lips barely moving, I say it again. “I want to go home.”

Chapter 49

Tress

My first reaction when the cat smacks me is to feel hurt—not actually pain, just hurt. Rule number one of wild animals: don’t forget they’re wild animals. I forgot. I sat here and I cried and I told a panther all my problems and then, like an idiot, I tried to pet him, because I made the mistake of thinking that he understood me, that he was my friend.

Apparently I am very bad at picking friends.

Either I try to kill them, or they try to kill me.

Deep wounds take a second to start bleeding. I know this, having suffered more than a few. The cat was only warning me, but it was enough. There are three slashes on my arm, dark and black, like three mouths opening into a part of me not meant to see light. Subcutaneous fat rolls from the edges, a yellow layer peeking out above the deeper pink of skin. Past that there’s a glimpse of bone, securely fastened to gray tendon and fleshy muscle, which I see flickering for a moment before the blood flows.

Then everything is just red.

Chapter 50

Cat

There are lives outside me

present and past that I

can see

when I am still and quiet.

Go beyond