I feel like I’ve always been here, aching arms overhead, burning circles around my wrists, a starburst of pain in my ankle, a dull thudding in the back of my head, and a constant churn in my stomach. There are other concerns, too, more mundane but no less critical.
I have to pee. Like, bad.
The pressure started building right around the time Tress was laying the second row of bricks, a small tickle, the first indication that yes, I had to pee. Now, my bladder is a bomb and my feet are going to be the target if I don’t get out of here. My feet, and whatever just ran across them. I shudder, but the movement doesn’t stop when I tell it to, and pretty soon I’m shaking all over.
“Not now,” I say, like if I give my body verbal commands rather than just think them, it might actually listen. But this isn’t a seizure; I realize that after the initial spasm passes and a new sensation starts . . . a hot jet deep inside my belly, working its way upward.
“Oh, wait . . . no.”
I’m saying things to nothing and no one, alone in a dark corner, trapped and desperate as I vomit all over myself. Once I start it’s hard to stop, and the tight clench of my stomach muscles is too much for my bladder. It lets go, and in a very short time, I am completely empty.
I hang, useless, a stinking sack of skin. I can feel my heart beating, small, tired, scared, moving timidly, as if asking the question Should I keep doing this?
At my feet, my companion stirs, running back and forth in the small space, frightened. It leaves tiny pinpoints of wet spots on my skin as it goes, which cool in seconds. A tail whips across my shins, and I know it’s a rat, one that’s covered in my own mess and tracking it back and forth across my feet. But I can’t feel disgust.
All I feel is complete and utter solidarity.
“You better get out of here,” I tell it. “She’s not going to back down.”
There’s a moment, like it’s considering my words, and then the rat is gone, shuffling over the knee-high wall Tress has built and disappearing with the flick of a tail.
I thought I was empty; I thought I had nothing left inside me.
But I do. More tears.
Chapter 43
Tress
Gretchen’s announcement that something ate her dog is followed by a panic.
Everyone reacts differently, some with screams, a few mutters of disbelief, and more than a little nervous laughter, gasping noises meant to convey hilarity, but really they’re saying, I don’t know what to do.
It’s been that way for a while now, the truly amused laughter at Ribbit’s admission of wanting to screw the principal devolving into something more primitive, a confused sound that admits the person making it thinks they are supposed to be laughing but doesn’t know if something funny is happening or not. Like maybe what used to be funny is now something else. Something darker.
Regardless, the discovery of William Wilson’s demise presents the perfect opportunity. Anyone streaming has swiveled to Gretchen, all phones capturing the moment when the queen bee is surrounded by her drones, all of them soothing, touching, hugging, although I do spot a few not-so-hidden smiles. Someone tries to take the dog’s tail out of Gretchen’s hand, but she resists at the last moment, clutching tight to the vertebrae.
I make my move, following the cat’s prints toward a bedroom on the second floor. I glance over the banister. Below me, Hugh still faces off with Ribbit, both bemused now that the attention has moved from them to Gretchen. I back away, toward the wall, but Hugh has caught the movement, and our eyes lock for a second before I duck into the bedroom.
The door clicks shut behind me, and I slide to the ground, flicking on the flashlight.
There, sitting on the bed, tail curled around front paws, the cat waits for me.
Chapter 44
Felicity
My mother was thrilled when I came home from kindergarten and announced that I had a friend.
It had been something of a concern, apparently. Mom and Dad had done everything they could for me up to that point. I’d had playdates with their friends’ kids, gone to preschool, taken dance lessons, and spent summer afternoons at the pool. I realize now they were doing their best to get me entrenched with the right people. The right people with the right last names, but I wasn’t doing my part. Maddie Anho got mad at me when I won a coloring contest, and she felt she stayed in the lines better than I did and that my “creativity” of color use was really just a mess. I was more interested in picking at my toes during dance class than learning how to stand on them, like Gretchen Astor.
So my social outlook was somewhat sketchy when I got on the bus with my new backpack full of freshly sharpened pencils. I remember Mom waving at me from the front porch, a smile that didn’t match the rest of her face stamped securely in place, like if she let it slip I might remain perfectly unaware that everything wasn’t, in fact, perfect.
I knew it wasn’t.
And so did Tress Montor.
Tress had walked into kindergarten, glanced around, sat down next to me, and pulled a magnifying glass out of her backpack, along with a dead roach, encased in plastic.
“Check this out,” she said. “You can see its butthole.”
I was entranced.
So were Hugh and David, as well as Brynn and a couple of other girls. I remember Ribbit standing on the edge of the circle that surrounded us, not quite a part, more like a satellite, proudly announcing to anyone who would listen, “That’s my cousin. Tress is my cousin.”
In all the first-day-of-school splash, clothes still stiff from the hangers they’d been torn from, new sneakers getting their first bits of gravel stuck in the treads, sharp-tipped packs of crayons spilling across freshly cleaned tabletops, Tress Montor had me looking at a cockroach’s ass.
When I came home and made my announcement of a new friend, there was the inevitable question to follow, Mom’s smile still in the same place—hopeful, but expecting to fall.
“Who is it?”
I was five, but I knew the drill. I took an actual beach towel to the pool—long enough to stretch out on—and so did every one of the girls I was supposed to be hanging out with. Other kids skipped the towel entirely or brought something from home, meant for the shower, usually threadbare or with outright holes. I was five, but I knew that my towel was better and that the better towels and the people attached to them belonged together, our monogrammed initials on them setting us apart from the others.
I knew this because Mom patiently led me away every time I sat with Jessica Stanhope on her towel, a spread of melting Skittles between us. Mom would draw me back to the right group of people with a promise of ten minutes of screen time with the game I’d downloaded to her phone. Mom was careful; Mom was cautious. Mom was not going to let me have a new friend if that new friend didn’t fit certain criteria.
And back then, Tress did.
The backpack that she produced the cockroach from was brand-new, and the magnifying glass wasn’t some hokey toy for kids. It was heavy, the real deal, and the cockroach was part of an entire set. Tress had a dozen bugs of all kinds sealed in these plastic cubes, clear as glass. I knew because of the bugs that Tress was different from me; I knew by the quality of them that she was the same. So when Mom asked who my new friend was, the smile ready to fall from her face at a moment’s notice, I said with confidence, “Tress Montor.”