Maddie faces Ribbit at the top of the stairs, her body outlined by the massive clock. The pendulum is swinging, flashing on either side of her as it does, playing peekaboo with the crowd. Those guys must have managed to fix it. It chimes quietly, an abbreviated song for the quarter hour. I rise on tiptoes, squinting to get a good look.
“Well, they kind of fixed it,” I say to myself.
“Go ahead, ask him anything,” Hugh encourages Maddie.
“Huh?” the girl next to me asks, her jaws chewing away on a wad of gum. Underneath the peppermint, I can smell the faint stench of puke.
“The clock,” I tell her, my eyes following the smaller hand as it slides upward from the large, embossed number three. “It’s running backward.” It goes on like that for a full minute, then seems to change its mind and run forward again.
“Scale of one to five, how hot am I?” Maddie asks Ribbit, posing with her hands on her hips for optimum illustration of her curves and the princess costume she’s wearing.
More phones come out.
Ribbit doesn’t seem impressed. He holds his hand out flat, then wiggles it. Maddie’s face falls, and everyone bursts out laughing. I relax a little; at least it’s directed at her and not him.
“I mean, I’d bang you,” Ribbit says quickly. “But you’re not really my type. Your mom, however . . . I would totally do your mom.”
Everyone dies. Almost literally. A kid sitting next to my feet is laughing so hard that he chokes, a spurt of vomit coming out one side of his mouth as he collapses, still giggling as he passes out, warm and heavy against my shins.
“Oh my God.” The girl next to me turns to her friend. “Did you get that? He just said he wants to bang the principal.”
The other freshman nods, her focus still tight on her phone, her arm high above the crowd as she zooms in on Ribbit’s face. She pulls up Instagram and starts a new story, using hashtags #HonestUsher and #TrueLoser. I’m about to stop her, my hand frozen in midair, when Ribbit adds:
“I’d bang the history teacher, too.”
The noise rises again, loud with fresh laughter. Everyone is here. Everyone is invested. No one is looking for Felicity Turnado.
I turn, and go back down to the basement.
Chapter 20
Cat
The smell of sick, strong,
humans made weak.
I circle after I eat, small hairs on my tongue.
A cousin comes, prowling. I show her my teeth,
spots of blood.
She cleans my whiskers, pushes under my chin, searching
for warmth.
Heat from the house, bricks on my back.
She curls, between my paws, a small hum rising.
Her contentment flows, touching my own.
She pulls a story from me, our blood speaking.
Another time. Another place.
Before the bars and the man. Before the old meat
and the Almost Human.
I tell her of baking sun, faraway plains.
She shows me a blade, the stub of her tail.
I rest, my skull sheltering her body.
Humans, we say.
And together, shudder.
Chapter 21
Felicity
Twenty-two rows. That’s the number I came up with when Tress walked away from me. Twenty-two rows, four bricks in each row, eighty-eight bricks until I’m not Felicity Turnado anymore but just a part of the foundation of the Allan house. A house that’s about to be torn down. I shiver, my bells creating a joyful soundtrack for my fear.
I hear the cellar door, but I don’t bother crying out. I know it’s Tress. I can tell by her footsteps, a tread I memorized as a child from all the overnights at our houses—before I began having seizures. Tress was always the brave one, the one who would sneak downstairs for snacks in the middle of the night, come back up to my room with Skittles and Twizzlers swiped from the cupboard, our mouths multicolored and sticky as the night wore on and we talked and talked and talked.
Words came easily then. We’d chat about parents and pets, whatever show we were watching. We’d reenact the latest memes and take pictures of each other, laughing as Tress tried to do the splits, one foot balanced on my bed, the other on my dresser.
“When did it change?”
I say it aloud, and Tress glances up from her phone, where she’s thumbing through Instagram.
“Seriously? You’re asking me?”
“No . . .” I shake my head, searching for the words. “I mean, I know—okay? I know when it changed. I’m not . . . I’m not stupid.”
I’m defending myself with the last statement a little bit. Enough so that she knows I’m not going to just be a piece of meat hanging here but not enough to piss her off.
“I know you’re not,” Tress says. “You never were.”
I remember leaning over a math book, working out a problem while Tress looked on, brow furrowed in concentration.
“You told me not to pretend I was,” I say quietly. “Remember that?”
“Yep.” She nods. “Story problems.”
“Story problems,” I agree, rolling my eyes, and we both laugh.
It’s a sound I know well, and have missed. My higher giggle mixing with her low tones, the music of my childhood, now accentuated by the rattle of chains.
Tress shakes her head. “I don’t care how many apples Lucy bought at the store and how many people she needs to feed with them, and how much money she has and how much they cost, and how much change she’ll get. The stories were always so stupid, you know?”
She sits on the chair, and I hear her phone buzz in her back pocket.
The average brick is two inches tall. Felicity is five foot five. How many bricks will it take for her former best friend to seal her into a wall?
I shake my head, dispelling the thought. I already know the answer, anyway. “You said I shouldn’t pretend to be stupid, because I never wanted to raise my hand in class.”
“You didn’t want the boys to think you were too smart,” Tress says, making air quotes around the last words.
“You said I can be smart and pretty,” I go on. “I can be both.”
“You are both,” Tress says.
“Right,” I agree. “So . . . if I’m not stupid, Tress, why would I stand here and insist that I don’t know what happened that night, if I really did? Why would I let this continue if I could stop it just by being honest?”
Tress is nodding along with me, like she knew I would say this, and a pit of fear opens in my stomach, my heart falling into it. I thought I was being clever, reconnecting with her and leading her through a logical chain that would undo the ones she’s got me in. But instead she’s just agreeing, like I’m following a script she already had laid out. Like she knew exactly what I was doing.
Tress stands up, selects a brick. “You wouldn’t tell me, because you’re not scared enough yet,” she says, reaching for the mortar pail. “You wouldn’t tell me because fear is a powerful motivator. But you know what’s stronger?”
She comes closer, toes touching the bricks she’s already laid, face close to mine. “Shame,” she says.
And she’s got me there. She’s got me dead to rights.