Page 11

She stands in front of the row of doomed upper cabinets, the ones water-swollen and sagging off their rails, and she flips a switch inside herself. Her spine straightens. Her chin lifts. That bright, buzzing energy pours out of her like she plugged straight into the grid.

"Hey besties!" She waves at the little glass eye. "Welcome back to the barndo build. Today we are tackling something SO satisfying. We are removing these vintage cabinets, and I am going to walk you through the gentle, mindful way to salvage the hardware so you can upcycle those gorgeous brass pulls."

She picks up a screwdriver. She holds it like a magic wand.

"So first, we want to locate our mounting screws, and we just very carefully..."

The screwdriver slips. The screw head strips. She keeps smiling.

"...very carefully find our groove and apply nice, even pressure. Mindfulness is key here, besties. Slow and steady wins."

Ten minutes crawl by. She has removed exactly one screw. There are forty. The cabinet leans off the wall at an angle that means the anchors already gave up inside the studs, which means the whole run sits one good bump from crushing her foot.

My hands twitch at my sides.

"Okay," she chirps, wiping her forehead, "so this next one is being a LITTLE stubborn, but that is totally normal, we are just going to..."

The cabinet groans. Wood cracks somewhere behind the face frame. The whole run shifts a quarter inch and dumps a shower of grit onto her perfect hair.

She flinches. She keeps talking.

That does it.

I step forward, straight into her precious frame, and I get one hand under the sagging cabinet run before it can come down on her ankles.

"Move," I say.

She moves.

I plant my boots. I get both hands under the face frame, thumbs hooked into the shelf lip, and I pull. The anchors scream. The rotted mounting rail lets go all at once, and the entire cabinet run tears free of the wall with a wet, splintering crunch. Dust plumes. A cloud of it, gray and thick, rolls over both of us.

I lower the whole thing to the plywood floor. Slow. It is dead now, but it does not need to shatter and throw shards across a room she has to work in.

Then I straighten, and I turn, and Jilly stares at me with her mouth open and both hands clapped over it.

The little glass eye is still running. The red light blinks.

I have just wrecked her mindful, gentle, brass-pull salvage tutorial in nine seconds flat, and I do not care even a little.

"Rot in the rail," I tell her, plain. "Anchors were pulling loose. Another minute, it comes down on your feet." I brush drywall dust off my forearms. "You cannot salvage garbage. You throw it out and build better."

She lowers her hands.

I brace for the meltdown. The wailing about her ruined shot, her wasted setup, her sponsors. I have known humans like her. Everything becomes a crisis when your whole life fits inside a rectangle of glass.

Instead she makes a sound.

A small, cracked laugh. Then a bigger one. Then she is bent double, wheezing, clutching her stomach, dust raining off her shoulders, howling in the ruins of her kitchen.

"Oh my GOD," she gasps. "You just... you just RIPPED it off the wall. With your HANDS. I have a whole crowbar. I bought a special ergonomic crowbar. It has a little grip. And you just..."

She loses it again.

I stand there, enormous and confused, tool belt sagging, and I do the thing I never do around new people. My mouth twitches. The corner of it. Up.

"Crowbars are for men who are tired," I say.

She wipes her eyes, smearing dust into war paint across her cheeks. "Are you flexing on crowbars right now? Is that a flex?"