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“Have you thought about it? Actually, truly, really thought about it? Yeah, I could go to jail, Felicity. But there are spaces between the bars of my cell. Things like light and oxygen can get in. You”—she taps her trowel against the brick—“you won’t have that.”

“Light,” she says, tapping the brick again.

“Oxygen.” She adds one last tap. “So have you thought about it? Jail is another word for punishment. I’ll take it, because I’ll deserve it.”

She comes to her feet, leans in. I pull back, my skull grating against stone.

“What do you deserve, Felicity Turnado? And have you been punished?”

“Yes,” I tell her, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve said yet. “Yes, I have.”

Tress thinks about that for a second, her eyes boring into mine and finding some truth there. “Maybe you have,” she half agrees. “But not by me.”

That part I can’t argue with her about. The problem with Tress is that a lot of what she says also doesn’t make me look very good. The other problem is a lot of what she says is true. I shift in my manacles, and my jester cap flops forward again, a shank of my hair, matted with blood, coming with it. I blow at it half-heartedly to get it out of my face, but it’s too heavy with gore to move much.

“I’ve got it,” Tress says, once more tucking my hair back, pinning it down. This time the bobby pins scrape across the swelling where she hit me with the brick, and I wince. She holds a shock of my hair for second, one perfect curl that has somehow managed to hold its shape in the damp, and avoid any blood splatter.

She raises her eyes to mine and says, “Let’s talk about lice.”

Shit.

Chapter 36

Tress

Sixth Grade

Rue is peeling a banana when a truck pulls into our drive. She yells to get my attention, but she doesn’t need to; I was trying to pull some of the larger mats out of Goldie’s tail, and she bolted out from underneath my hands at the sight of the truck to happily greet it, like maybe whoever is here might be coming to take her away, take her somewhere better.

I do what I’ve been told—run and get Cecil. Cecil told me early on that he didn’t much care what kind of grades I got in school, or if I acted up there, either. His only rules were (1) help him take care of the animals, (2) stay out of his way when I’m not, (3) come get him if anybody shows up at the house, (4) don’t come down to the lower acre, and (5) don’t be weird, which I figured out meant sex by the way his eyebrows came together when he said it.

I prefer the animals to him, so rules one and two are not a problem. Rule five I’m not worried about, either, for lots of reasons. Rule three I messed up the first couple times because, if I’m being honest, I’m a little bit proud of the animals—especially Zee, once I got her cleaned up nice. The first time a car pulled in, slowing down after spotting the “Amontillado Animal Attractions” sign, I’d run out to greet them, waving like a kid with a lemonade stand.

Cecil had laid into me for that, said he needed to be the first one to see any visitors because he was the one who had to size them up. Amontillado Animal Attractions doesn’t have any prices posted—that’s because Cecil makes them up on the spot, after evaluating what they’re driving and wearing, their last name, how many kids they’ve got, and—in his words—the cut of their jib.

What that actually means is that he charges more to people he doesn’t like.

I’ve seen him let a minivan full of kids with no shoes come in for five bucks and charge fifty to a curious lady on her own, driving a shiny car. I told him after the family left that it was nice of him to let them in for so little, to which he’d told me that nice didn’t come into it.

“They only had five bucks, kid,” he said, rubbing the top of my head—the only sign of affection he ever allows. “And I wanted it.”

I can say a lot about Cecil, but I can’t say he never taught me anything.

Today, though, there’s something different about the vehicle that pulls in. It’s not a minivan with no hubcaps full of screaming kids, and it’s not a bored soccer mom with an afternoon on her hands. It’s a small truck with a big cage in the back, axles doing their best to keep up with the payload.

I light out for the back acre. There’s a point past where I’m not supposed to go. I’ve been told to just stand and give a yell for Cecil. I’ve caught a whiff of skunk down there once or twice, so I’ve always assumed he’s got some critters down there that he doesn’t want me around. But today the standing and shouting doesn’t work, and there’s an impatient honk from whoever’s behind the wheel of that truck.

So now I’ve got to decide which rule I break—the one about coming to get him when someone’s in the driveway, or the one about not going down to the lower acre? I hear the truck’s engine cut out and the man say something. Whatever is in that cage lets out a shriek, getting one in return from the driver. Goldie comes running in my direction, her tail between her legs and pure fear in her eyes. Which makes my decision for me. I’d rather deal with Cecil and skunks than whatever is in the back of that truck.

I jog down the path, Goldie on my heels, keeping the stream on my left, a field full of ragweed higher than my head on the right. Cecil says there’s no point tilling the back acre, that the soil is shit and that the ragweed keeps pussies with allergies away. I climb a little fence that goes across the path, getting a decent shock at the top that makes me fall to the ground.

“Shit!” I yell, and Goldie goes nuts on the other side of the fence. She’s pacing, panicked, trying to reach me and barking her head off.

“Tress?” Cecil’s voice comes from the field, and he rises from the green rows, pruning shears in his hand. “What the hell you doing back here?”

“There’s someone up at the house,” I tell him, inspecting the burn across my ankle from the electrified wire. I glance up at the fence I fell from to see yellow clips running across the top wire, attached to an electrical box, a trail camera strung up in the tree beside it.

Nice. I’m sure Cecil got a great shot of my face as I fell.