want to keep me without a fight. My lips firm—
“Let’s get on with it then!” a portly man says loudly, and the crowd cheers raucously. Brigit motions for me to rise; I back up toward her, but Bracelets and Dreadlocks are once again blocking any escape route I might have taken. Boys from around the fire step out, tossing down their coats and hats. A dozen or so total, with a few stragglers opting in at the last moment, pushed by their mothers, who eye me greedily. The boys size one another up, rock back and forth on their heels. I see money being dug from pockets, exchanged between the crowd; small children push through the legs of adults to get a front-row seat.
Someone grips my arm, and I turn to see that it’s Bracelets. “You’ll want to step back,” he says. “These things take up a lot of space.”
“Ready!” Brigit shouts, voice ringing through the clearing. The boys vying for me tense. “Fight!”
They explode into motion, a flurry of hands and fists. The thick,
I look over to Brigit—she’s watching patiently, as if this bores her, even as a pair of wrestlers tumble forward and narrowly miss knocking her over. A few boys are staying down now, heaving into the ground with bloody noses and mouths red from busted lips. The crowd changes pitch, from cheers to gasps and laughter. I snap my head around, hearing Bracelets chuckle behind me. I can’t see what’s happening through the fire, and my eyes start to water from trying to stare through the flames. Finally I see something—I don’t know what, but something—someone moving fast, darting around the boys’ arms, ducking under their swings.
“Who is that?” I ask Bracelets.
“That,” he answers, looking smug, “is Princess Flannery.”
My eyes widen; I look to Brigit, who, though still, I can tell is seething from the stiff, hard angle her jaw has taken. The men are booing, yelling at Brigit, throwing their arms into the air in frustration. She ignores them, her eyes narrowed and trained on the fight—on her daughter.
I rise to my toes and finally see some of what’s happening on the far side of the fire. Flannery moves fast, flickering around the boys as they wail on one another like clumsy giants. She ducks under a boy’s arm, black hair flowing behind her, then rises up behind him to bring her elbow down hard on his head. He falls, and she sprints to another boy, sliding into the mud and taking a knee to her nose. It bloodies instantly, but she doesn’t seem to notice, moving around the fire as she stoops and causes one of the boys to trip over her.
There’re only a few boys left now—most are stumbling back into the crowd, enveloped in a sea of men slapping their backs and offering them flasks. Flannery dives toward the two boys closest to Brigit; they turn and see her, alarmed, and duck out of the way as she swings a fist at them. One of the boys grins, catches her hand, and flips her to the ground. Bracelets makes a growling sound that ends when she springs back up, leaps onto the boy’s back, and wraps her arms around his thick neck. He flails and punches at her legs awkwardly, trying to shake her off, but she grits her teeth and holds tight.
The other boy runs at them both, hand clenched into a fist. He strikes the boy Flannery’s holding on to, forcing him to stop fighting off Flannery and focus on his male opponent. The two exchange fruitless blows—one, two, three punches that sail through the air. Finally, Flannery’s boy succumbs to the pressure she’s putting on his neck and drops to his knees, red-faced and wheezing. Flannery releases him and looks up at the other boy, and I can tell he’s thrown—he doesn’t want to be the one to hit her, the princess.
She clearly has no such hesitation; she punches him, so fast he doesn’t have time to flinch. He stumbles backward, rubbing his jaw, but before he can recover she’s landed a solid kick to his stomach, then another, then a stomp to his instep. The boy falls to the ground and holds up his hands in surrender as she runs at him, foot drawn back, ready to strike again. She freezes just before making contact—there’s no need. It’s over.
The crowd erupts in a chorus of cheers, of boos, of conversation and dog howls. People are milling around; men are shouting over the wagers they placed. No one seems to understand what just happened, what this means—least of all me. Finally, an older man lifts his hands into the air in celebration and laughter.
“Take that,
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I have no idea what this means, and am a little relieved to see no one else does, either.
Flannery, for her part, is grinning through the blood running down her nose. I’m finally able to get a good look at her face. She resembles Brigit, at least in her eyes, though her body is both curvier and shorter, something like a gymnast’s. She runs past the crowd, encouraging them to cheer for her, but the people seemed mixed—the younger members are ecstatic and the older ones are scowling.
Brigit is talking furiously to an ever-growing mob of men, all yelling over one another. People start to take notice, quieting down so they can eavesdrop. Flannery, now on the other side of the fire and high-fiving a group of children, turns and cocks her head, listening.
“You’d better get control of your girl, Brigit. No man is gonna put up with this,” one man growls.
“We’ll handle it—”
“And what about my boy?” a man I recognize from Brigit’s tent shouts. “God help me if his nose doesn’t set right, Brigit. And besides, who gets the buffer now?”
“
“Flannery,” Brigit warns under her breath.
“What’re you gonna do, add her to your damn menagerie?” an old man asks.
“You’ll watch the way you speak to your princess,” Brigit snaps.
“Maybe someone should’ve spoke to
The crowd gasps, a murmur of threat, of indignation ruffling through them. Brigit purses her lips together and makes herself look taller, more regal than the man who last spoke. He seems to know he’s said the wrong thing, shrinking back a little, casting his eyes downward.
“Flannery?” Brigit says, voice steely. Flannery steps closer, cowed by her mother’s intensity. “Find Ginny a place to sleep. We’ll figure out a way to handle this when Jameson apologizes. Make sure you watch her—she’ll try to run.” Flannery walks over to me, her gait bold, confident. Bracelets pushes me toward her, and Flannery grabs hold of my wrist tightly. She leads me away, out of the crowd; I look over my shoulder to see Brigit walking back to her tent, proud, as if she’s uninterested in whatever squabbles the crowd of men might have.
“Where are we going?” I ask. Flannery doesn’t answer. “Hey,” I say again, more forcefully. “What are we doing?” She doesn’t answer, so I repeat the question again and again as we weave around RVs, generators, and charcoal grills.
“God, you don’t shut up, do you?” Flannery finally says. We reach an RV close to Brigit’s tent, a big, impressive one. Flannery walks up the steps, shoulders the door open, and leads me inside.
“I’m not… look, I’m not, like… yours or… I’m not going to be your…” I stumble across the words, embarrassed and confused.
“My own personal buffer?” Flannery asks, grinning wickedly. She laughs, loud and strong and a little lewd. “You are. I dunno what you’ll do. Maybe you can help me—nah. Never mind. You’d just mess that up.”
“I don’t… I don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand?” she asks, opening a cabinet and pulling out a bag of crackers, the fancy, name- brand kind speckled with seeds. “I fought, I won, so you’re with me.” She continues to mutter under her breath, in the language I don’t understand. She tucks the bag of crackers under her arm and walks down the RV steps. I consider standing my ground, refusing to follow, but I reason that the more we walk around, the more of the camp I see—and the more likely I am to discover a way to escape.
People are heading back to their RVs and tents; fires are reduced to embers, and a haze of smoke covers the area. A few people congratulate Flannery, and a few others cuss at her; she unleashes a string of expletives
