Febrezio calls for a vote, and it’s actually close. Maddie wins, but it’s not the landslide Gretchen was looking for. Beside me, she’s texting furiously, promising people free prom tickets and open-campus lunch for upperclassmen if they vote for her candidate for secretary.
“Secretary?” Febrezio calls, and Gretchen jumps up. I reach out to grab her arm at the last second and manage to snag her, pulling her back down.
“Ouch! The fuck?” she says to me, too angry to notice the people around us covering their smiles.
Lisa stands and nominates Meg.
“I don’t want to,” I tell Gretchen.
“What do you mean you don’t want to?” she repeats back to me, like I spoke another language or something.
Meg stands and nominates Lisa.
“I . . . just don’t want to,” I say, my tongue heavy in my mouth, my brain too slow to process words as the Oxy keeps its promise.
Gretchen’s eyes narrow at me, and suddenly Hugh is standing, taking everyone by surprise when he says, “I nominate Tress Montor.”
It gets super quiet then, and all eyes go to Tress. She’s sitting by herself in the back, her gaze bouncing off everyone else’s. She won’t hang her head, but she doesn’t know what to do with all that attention, either.
“What the fuck is he doing?” Gretchen asks me, like I’m supposed to know. “Great. Now we’re going to have a safari-themed prom, and that crocodile is going to eat somebody.”
“It’s an alligator,” I say, but Gretchen slips my grasp and jumps up right before Febrezio closes the nominations.
“I nominate Felicity Turnado,” she shouts, and some of the tension leaves the room. Everybody knows what Gretchen wants now. They know who they’re supposed to vote for.
I win.
Of course I do.
I always win.
Chapter 30
Tress
“I needed that,” I tell her, tapping the edge of the mortar knife against the pail.
“I didn’t want it,” Felicity says.
“That’s not the point.”
I get up as another wave of laughter comes from above us, a few shocked gasps for punctuation. Dear Lord, what did Ribbit say this time?
“I didn’t want it,” Felicity says again, more force behind her words. “Gretchen—”
“But you got it,” I say, cutting her off. “Something I would have had to fight for, barely had the guts to want . . . and you just walk into it.”
We’re quiet, watching each other for a minute; the silence stretches upstairs, and I fight the urge to check my phone, follow the hashtags, see what Hugh has Ribbit doing now.
Felicity takes a deep breath, and I notice that her skin is a chalky gray under her makeup, the smeared foundation and bright fever spots the only color to her face.
“Would it have mattered?” she says quietly.
“What?” I refocus, back on her eyes, sharp and glittery.
“You wanted honesty, right? That’s the whole goal? So, let’s be honest, Tress,” she practically hisses, coming alive.
“Let’s pretend for one second that you got class secretary—what then? How does this scenario play out, in your mind? One extracurricular and colleges are falling all over you? Maybe you give a good interview and borrow Brynn’s clothes—because you’re besties now, right? And the admissions committee looks at your application and says, wait, everyone! Kick out the valedictorians and varsity athletes—make room for this girl! She’s the junior-class secretary!
“Hooooooooraaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!” Felicity does a bizarre shimmy inside her chains, costume bells jingling in a frenzy.
“Fuck you,” I say, the words tight and flat, barely inching out past my teeth.
“No, fuck you,” Felicity says, swaying from her wrists as her knees give out underneath her. “That is not on me, Tress Montor. High school sucks, and life is unfair, but you’re not pinning the fact that you’re not going to college on me. That one is not my fault.”
My anger is a steel bar inside me, supporting my spine. We were always like this, even when we were little, burning hot and cold. You should worry when Felicity Turnado starts screaming . . . and you should be scared when I stop talking.
Heat can’t sustain itself. A hot day will build into a summer storm, washing out the air and bringing relief. But breaking a cold snap requires an entire shift in the atmosphere, a change in the environment. Felicity is fire and I am ice, and she burns out before I’m halfway through the fifth row of bricks, adding some extra mortar every time she mutters fuck you under her breath. I slap the side of her ankle with the trowel when she kicks out at me. It hits right on the bone, and I feel the reverberation down in the handle. Her ankle blackens immediately, a dark bruise spreading as I set another brick.
Chapter 31
Felicity
Fuck you is all I can hear in my head, and it’s coming out of my mouth. That is not smart, but I can’t stop it. My therapist said a lot about accepting the things I can’t change, and one of those is that Tress’s parents are gone. She also said I should stop beating myself up for everything—the things I did do, but also things I didn’t do. There are a thousand reasons Tress isn’t going to college, and she can’t hang any of them on me.
So I did what my therapist told me to do. I stood up for myself.
Now I’m so exhausted I can’t even do that. Instead, I’m hanging from manacles after screaming obscenities at the person who has me entirely at her disposal and just added three more inches to my rapidly closing tomb.
I need to fire my therapist.
Tress has got the look on her face that I know means trouble. My explosion is over. Maybe forty-five seconds of anger—righteous anger, I will give myself that—is gone now. And for my troubles I’ve put Tress into a mood that will take me hours to talk her out of . . . if I can stay conscious for that long.
It’s become a question.
She didn’t exactly give me a love tap with that brick, and the few beers I’d downed with no food aren’t doing me any favors, either. Whatever is going on with my gut is not improving, and my arms are beginning to cramp from being over my head for . . . how long? An hour? Three? I raise my head, spots of light exploding in my vision as I search for her among them, my head swimming.
I find her, focus hard on her face, pale and tight under the bare bulb. Her jaw is set and the little muscles along her jawline are flickering. Why am I trying to soften her up? It’s useless. Better to take a route she’ll respect, at least. Let’s get this over with. I spit. The glob, which tastes of blood, lands somewhere near my feet.
“Okay, so let’s just do this,” I say. “What do you want to talk about now? Somebody you had a crush on never noticed you, is that on me? How about that broken arm you had in eighth grade? Totally my fault, right? Obviously, anything that ever went wrong in your life comes back to me so what’s the next topic?”
Tress tosses the trowel into her mortar bucket, drops of liquid concrete flying out around her. “Walking in the rain,” she says.
And it’s not some poetic allusion. I know exactly what she’s talking about.