“It’s nothing important,” she quickly assured him. Her voice was slightly muffled as she pulled the blanket back up to her lips.
“Tell me.”
Fighting the urge to take it all back and tell him to forget about it, she forced herself to explain, “So, the first day of my apprenticeship is Monday and… I was wondering if you could drive me there. And— and there’s a welcome breakfast for family if you wanted to maybe stay for a bit.”
Alric’s dark brows furrowed as he digested her request. “Isn’t Sophie going to drive you? Or Tula?”
“Noni’s flying out to visit her family that day, and Grandma…” Margot trailed off, something in her seizing. When she continued, her voice was soft and small. “I don’t want her to see how nervous I am.”
“Oh.” He was quiet for a long moment, his expression contemplative. “And you wantmeat this breakfast thing?”
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she rushed to assure him. “It’s just a stupid welcome party. There’ll be some speeches and all the other apprentices there with their families and?—”
And they’ll all be ten years older than me at a minimum. And they’ll have their loved ones there to really celebrate them rather than worry about them. And I really, really don’t want to sit through it all alone.
“—it’s really not important,” she finished, looking anywhere but at him.
Alric crossed his ankles in front of him. Offering her the cider once again, he quietly replied, “Well, if it’s not important then I shoulddefinitelygo. If we don’t show up for the stupid shit, then what’s the point of family?”
Margot swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure when her throat started hurting, but it smarted something terrible just then.
Delicately extracting the cup from his fingers, she used the need for another drink as an excuse to hide just how much his casual acceptance meant to her. Looking down at the snow whispering across the frozen water in little white swirls, she mumbled into the paper lip, “Cool. Right. Yeah.”
Beside her, Alric tilted his head back onto the folding chair. They were quiet for a while as they listened to the creak and pop of the ice below the jubilant party sounds.
In a quiet, content voice, her cousin noted, “Really is a nice night, huh?”
“Yeah,” she answered, hugging the cup close. “It really is.”
Back home in the Holler
The rumorin town was that cousin Silas was crazy, but Annie Dupont knew better. He was crazyandhe was right.
Technically speaking, they weren’t really cousins. Her parents weren’t officially Cuttcombes, but they’d been neighbors with the rowdy clan for so long that no one paid much mind to things like that. She’d grown up as a member of the clan, and that meant she knew a thing or two about Silas. She also knew what people whispered at school.
He talked to imaginary friends.
He liked to set things on fire.
He shouldn’t be left alone with anyone, even the older boys, because you never knew what he’d do.
All of these things were, in fact, true. But they didn’t mean what folks thought they did.
“Why are you crying?” Amber on black eyes stared down at her with the same curiosity she imagined scientists showed when they picked apart a bug to see how its insides worked.
Silas, dressed in overalls and leather boots with his book bag slung over his shoulder, stood over her as she frantically attempted to stuff wrapped parcels back into the brown paper bags her mother had given her to deliver.
While she was bundled up all the way to her horn nubs, he dressed much the same as he did all year. The only difference was that he wore a light sweater beneath his patched overalls rather than the starched linen his mama made him wear in the summer.
Annie swiped her running nose over her wool sleeve. Her knees were getting cold. They hadn’t gotten much more than a dusting of snow yet, but that was enough to soak through her stockings as she scrambled to save her mother’s hard work.
“Ed tripped me,” she muttered. “He saw me walking with my arms full of orders and…”
Her chin wobbled. Embarrassed by her tears, she looked away. Ten was far too old to be a baby, especially in front of cousin Silas.
Her cousin didn’t stoop to help her, but he didn’t grunt and walk away like most boys would’ve, either. Instead, he asked, “Does he do that a lot?”
Annie shrugged. Truth be told, Eddiddo that a lot. She was normally better about not letting the teasing or poking or hair-pulling get to her, but today was different. The holiday was only a few days away, and her mother worked herself to the bone in the bakery every year to fulfill all the orders for Moonrise treats.
