Page 127 of You've Got Hate Mail

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At my nipple hair and my stretch marks and my pubic hair and the tiny dimples of cellulite on my thighs.

I turn my camera back on and stare at my own face with it, not recording.

At my brown eyes that I’ve always loved. My hair that gives me personality. And I have good lips. A strong nose. Cheekbones too.

My eyes leak.

Underwater Brine Pools: Deadly Lakes Beneath the Sea and the Strange Life They Harbor

Rogue Waves: The Ocean’s Sudden Giants and the Science Behind Their Power

Black Smokers: Underwater Volcanoes That Create Life in the Deep Ocean

The Bermuda Triangle: Science, Myth, and Strange Disappearances Explained

“You’re beautiful, Cricket,” I whisper to myself. “You’re beautiful.Ithink so. And that’s what matters.”

My body sags, and I suddenly need to sit down.

All of the anger, all of the rage, all of the fury—it’s soaking into the barrels now.

No longer hiding inside of me.

I’ve set it free.

“I’mbeautiful,” I repeat to the barrel cellar.

The Cluckinator bagocks in agreement.

I can’t do a GrippaBeav channel.

I don’t have that inside of me.

And my friends here—myfamily, the family of my heart—they wouldn’t want me to.

“I’m beautiful, and I’m strong, I’m not alone, and I can help save this place,” I tell my chicken.

She waddles next to me, plops down, and clucks softly.

I don’t know how, butgod, I have to save this place.

PETTY IN PINK

Heath

The Habsburg Dynasty: European Superpower Through Marriage and War

The Rise and Fall of the Carolingian Empire: Charlemagne’s Legacy Lost

The Byzantine Empire: Thousand-Year Struggle of Survival and Collapse

The Umayyad Caliphate: Rapid Expansion, Imperial Power, and the Uprisings That Ended a Dynasty

I half expectCricket to bail on monitoring Lav and the cat the next morning, when I wish I didn’t need her but I do since I have to make up the job I missed yesterday, but I find her in the kitchen with her head high and a spring in her step, wearing jeans and a soft pink T-shirt and smiling like she wasn’t recording herself naked and yelling in the barrel cellar yesterday.

“Morning,” she says brightly. “Thank you for understanding where I was at mentally yesterday. I won’t yell at you again.”

I liked it.

I liked her yelling at me.

I liked knowing she felt comfortable enough with me to let it all out.

“Sure.” I can barely look her in the eye.

And not because I jacked off in the shower while imagining her in there with me, wet and warm and lush and gasping my name and all of the words I don’t say around my daughter.

Okay, fine.

That’s a massive part of why I can’t look her in the eye.

The other part—the other part’s because I’m terrified.