AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Opossums are clean, quiet, and generally shy marsupials. Despite their appearance, opossums are more closely related to kangaroos than rats!
Polly’s bark is worse than her bite. She loves pink!
“Bite?You’d better not, all right?” I told Polly. “We don’t have much time, and I really don’t want to waste any of it bleeding everywhere.”
Polly hissed.
“Okay, I’m going to take that as understanding and not a threat.” I dumped the contents of my basket onto the table top to see what we had to work with.
“There’s nothing I hate more than kittens,” Cheesebeard mumbled to himself.
Weirdo.
I cautiously slipped a measuring tape under Polly’s midsection, then slowly reached my hands around to read her circumference.
She hissed at me, but she didn’t bite.
I didn’t have time to tiptoe around, not with the clock ticking, so I just went for it—riding the wave of wild energy in the room, crafting like my life depended on it. I grabbed the tulle—apparently my only fabric—and the pink crafting paper from the spread of materials, and got to work.
I cut. I hot glued. I hand stitched.
Polly eventually stopped hissing, or at least I stopped noticing.
I dressed that opossum like a fairy princess. As I slipped the final touches onto Polly’s killer threads, I found myself wondering if Tristan was watching, and what he would have to say.
TWENTY-TWO
TRISTAN
I stared at the computer screen at another chart filled with indecipherable numbers. The coded entries jumbled together in my brain. None of it made any sense.
It didn’t help that Morgan had been in my head all day, either.
As soon as the clock struck five thirty, I put on a borrowed set of headphones and switched from detective to reality television fanatic. I was able to streamWhat the What?without leaving my seat. Due to my uncharacteristic zeal, I wondered if this obsession was a part of who I’d been in my past life. Had I devoured every competition show as I did this one?
I gritted my teeth on Morgan’s behalf as they assigned her a garbage animal. I gritted them harder when the creature hissed at her.
My annoyance intensified every time I was forced to watch someone other than Morgan, which led me to believe my enthusiasm had nothing to do with the type of programming I was watching, and everything to do with her.
And now I watched as the show switched to a confessional. This one was Morgan’s. Immediately I knew something was off.
She held her shoulders square and her jaw tight.
She said, “I don’t know why Kevin was allowed on the show in the first place. What kind of person chooses the unfortunate spawn of a porcupine and an acid trip with a side of rusty nails to express themselves? Is he trying to tell us he has no taste or simply no talent? Either way, I’m glad he’s gone.”
I could see her face, hear the words coming out of her mouth, but none of this was Morgan. She was kind to a fault. There was no way she’d attack a person like that. She lifted people up, not put them down.
“One down. Eleven to go,” Morgan said.
The scene left a bad taste in my mouth. They’d forced her to say those things, I was certain of it.
The final results were announced.
Morgan was in the top three.
She’d deserved to win the last challenge, this one even more so. No one else had been forced to work with a snarling garbage animal. No one else had produced anything remotely on Morgan’s level.
“And the winner is…Morgan!” Waylen said.
