The Initial Insult - Mindy McGinnis Page 0,2

wonder everybody calls him “Huge,” although the girls are always asking me if there’s another reason, eager to know.

“You okay?” he asks.

I don’t have words, am past that point, but I do manage to nod. From the house comes another yell, someone emptying a beer over somebody else’s head, a splash as yet another person is pushed into the pool—a joke that never gets old . . . to them, anyway. They think he’s out here pounding me into the ground, taking advantage of the pretty drunk girl, dragging her into the dark. They think he’s the danger. The truth is, I’m safer with Hugh Broward than anyone else on earth.

I’ve always loved to be carried, and begged my father often when I was little. Arms up and open, trusting. Nobody ever tells me no. Not Dad. Not Huge. Not whoever carried me away from Tress Montor’s parents so many years ago. I don’t know who that was, just that my arms were too weak to wrap around them, my vision blurry, the blood running down the side of my head hot and sticky in the last of the late-fall heat, drawing mosquitoes.

One buzzes around me now, its call high and whiny. I smack at it, missing completely and hitting myself in the mouth, where there’s still a small, silver scar in the corner from my own teeth biting down when . . . when something. No one knows what happened the night the Montors disappeared, not even me—and I was the only one there. Me and whoever carried me.

“Your aim sucks,” Huge says, easily swatting the mosquito out of the air.

Everything sucks right now. My motor coordination. My limb control. My life. I start to slide again, slipping down past Hugh’s knees to the ground. He grabs my wrist, lowering me gently.

“Close?” he asks, and I nod.

He unbuttons my shorts, easing them down to my ankles, followed by my underwear. Then he walks away, far enough that I can’t see his silhouette, hear his steps crunching the dead leaves, or smell the faded scent of his cologne.

The whirling in my head slows, centers, focuses, like a cat that’s been circling prey, ready to pounce. It does, and the seizure comes, my hands clenching and unclenching in the dirt on either side of me, my feet grinding into the ground, pressing dirt into the silk underwear tangled around my sandals. Mom always details the seizures to me, after, even though I’ve told her that I am aware right before I have them, that I can see and feel and hear and taste every damn thing. Better than normal, even.

It’s during them that I can’t recall. A light turned off. A clipped reel from a film.

There are branches overhead, darkly black against the stars, the dead leaves rustling against my hair. I hear and see and feel everything tremendously right now, the world in high def until the focus fades to a pinprick and I’m going, I’m going, I’m going . . .

I’m gone.

The leaves will be in my hair when Hugh and I come back from the woods, that and the dirt on my back causing snide smiles. I usually come around with a burning taste in my mouth, the memory of my last sounds—guttural, helpless—sending a spike of embarrassment to chase all the misfiring in my brain. Sometimes the worst happens; this was one of those times. There’s warm urine between my legs, harsh and acidic, soaking into the forest floor.

I sit up, easing myself, shakily, onto the rock, pulling my underwear back into place, followed by my shorts. The first time Hugh was too mortified to take them down all the way, but he’s learned over the years. He comes when I call, settling beside me. I lean into him.

“You know . . . ,” he says slowly, a conversation we’ve had more than once starting all over again.

“There are medications,” I finish for him. “Yes, I know. I take them.”

“But they don’t mix well with drinking.” It’s his turn to finish my sentence. “Or with that other shit you do,” he adds.

“I do lots of shit,” I say. And it’s true. I’m a shitty person.

“So maybe cut it out,” Hugh says, an edge in his tone he’s not used with me before. One that cuts, sharp, like the smell of my urine, only just beginning to fade as a few cold, fat drops of rain start to fall.

“I don’t want to,” I tell him, taking him by