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I heard her stop.
“I don’t do snakes.”
I turned. “Finally found the one thing you can’t deal with?”
“They’re unnatural,” I said. “They slither and have weird tongues.”
“They’re not that much different than worms.”
“Worms aren’t venomous!”
“Most of the snakes in here aren’t.”
“Sure, until a damn cottonmouth is hiding. I did a research project on them in school. They’re killers!”
I rolled my eyes and opened the doors. “Princess, I’ve been here a decade and a half, and I’ve never seen one.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
“Are you too scared to go in here?”
“I-I’m not too scared.”
“Seems like you are.”
“Now that sounds like a challenge.”
I shrugged. “Could be.”
She narrowed her eyes. “YouknowI can’t back down when you challenge me.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
“I hate you,” she said, but she stomped ahead of me and into the darkness of the barn.
Well. She won that round.
Luckily for both of us, the coast seemed clear.
“You have keys, right?” she asked as she got close to the massive green tractor.
“I keep them all on me,” I replied, tossing them to her. “I’ll get the tiller.”
I dragged it out of the back and hooked it up. “Now to see if this works.”
“Hang on,” she said. “I wanna go through some of this. I had no idea there was so much.”
“We can do that later.”
“But what if the lines work? That’ll save so much money.” She walked to where they were sitting on a shelf and reached for them.
But one looked very off.
I reached out to grab her. “You shouldn’t?—”
It moved before she could touch it, and it fell to the floor.
“Snake!” she screamed. She jumped back and darted away, her feet barely touching the ground. I had no idea where she was going until she was behind me, her tight hands on my shoulders.