The Twin They Erased novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Sixty-Forty

Eamon lays down his rules and Willa fights the barn's reigning champion for her first purse, then walks back through the school gate to find Principal Ansel waiting for half.

"Forty thousand," I said. "Why would a principal owe you that?"

"Because she plays poker like she's already won," the man said.

His name was Eamon Bannon, and it was on the sign over the barn door.

He leaned on the rope and the girl in the grey skirt landed on her back in the ring.

The crowd roared.

"She lost it at my table two winters ago," he said. "She can't pay it. So her girls fight on the first Saturday, and the house takes forty percent of their purse, and every dollar of mine goes against her debt."

"Forty thousand," I said again.

"Down from sixty." He didn't smile. "It's slow."

I looked at the girl in the ring, who was crawling to her corner with blood on her lip.

"Do the girls keep the other sixty?"

"They do. I count it into their hands myself." He looked at me hard. "You want in, you hear my rules first."

I said I did.

He held up three fingers, and the knuckle of each was taped.

"One. Sixty-forty on every purse, no argument. Two. Nobody touches a fighter outside the ring, not me, not the crowd, not you. Three. Nobody asks a fighter where she sleeps."

"Why three?"

"Because every girl I've had up there is hiding something. I don't want to know it."

The bell rang, and the girl in the grey skirt got up, shook her head and went back in.

"You've got a pass," he said. "How long?"

"Until two."

"It's after noon." He tilted his head at the far corner. "The champion is a miller's daughter from town. She's twenty-three and she's put down every first-timer I've sent at her in two years."

The champion was sitting on a hay bale with her hands in a bucket of water.

She was a head shorter than me and twice as wide through the shoulders.

"Purse is five hundred," Eamon said. "Three hundred of it yours if you win. Nothing if you lose."

"And if I'm hurt?"

"Then you're hurt." His eyes went over my arms, my shoulders and my hands. "You've got a grip on you. Where from?"

"Rule three," I said.

For the first time he almost laughed.

"Fine. Wrap them."

He gave me a roll of tape and I wrapped my own hands, the way I'd seen the girl in the corner do it.

The ring was only rope and straw, and the floor under it was boards.

The champion stepped through the ropes without looking at me.

"Marrow Hill," she said. "Stay down quick. It saves us both the trouble."

The bell rang, and she hit me twice before I got my hands up.

I tasted blood.

She hit me again, a short one to the ribs, and the crowd shouted for her.

I had never hit anyone in my life.

For three years I had done one thing every day, which was pull myself up the beam in the bell tower and hang from it until my arms shook.

I'd done it to feel something that was mine.

When she came in a fourth time, I did not hit her.

I grabbed.

I caught her wrist in both hands and locked on, and I did not let go, whatever she did.

She hit my ribs and my face, and I held on.

I held on the way I held the beam.

By the second round she was breathing hard.

By the third she had slowed down, and she hadn't yet understood that I would not.

I pulled her in, turned my hip, and put her on the boards.

The crowd went quiet, and then loud again.

She tried to get up and I had her arm, and she slapped the floor twice.

Eamon pulled me back by the elbow, then let go fast.

"Rule two," he said.

"You touched me."

"I know." He held up my hand and the barn shouted.

The champion sat on the floor with her mouth open.

"Nobody has done that to her," he said quietly. "Not in two years."

He counted five hundred dollars into his hand, then three hundred of it into mine.

I put it in my sock beside the pass, where my birthday card was.

"Come back next month," he said.

"I'll come back before that."

"The next card is the first Saturday of next month."

"Then I'll find another night."

He looked at me for a second too long.

"Go," he said. "It's a mile to your gate and you've got until two."

I ran.

The road down the ridge was dirt and then gravel, and my ribs hurt every time I breathed.

At the school gate the matron stood with her arms folded and a watch in her hand.

She did not say a word.

She searched me where I stood, pocket by pocket, and found the sock, and took out the three hundred dollars, the pass and the card.

She walked me up to the main hall and into the office, where Principal Ansel sat behind her desk with her tea.

She was smiling.

"Bannon's barn," she said. "I thought you might."

I said nothing.

She counted the bills into two piles and slid one into the drawer.

"Half of every purse is mine, dear," she said. "That's how the girls earn their passes. It goes to the roof fund."

She pushed the other pile back across the desk.

"There," she said. "Isn't this nicer than the tower?"

I looked at her keys and at the hundred and fifty dollars I'd bled for.

I did not pick it up.

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