An excerpt of a new scene for my bad side, with Dee and Crystal as kids:

“You have to help me, okay?” Crystal pulled her shirt over her head and twisted her back to me. “You see that?”

“What?”

“That.” She pulled at the side of her ribs where there was a red smudge, scabbed and raw. “You see it?” “Your mole thing?”

“You have to cut it off.”

“Like…cut it?”

She handed me an X-Acto knife from the table. “Cut it off.” “No way. I can’t do that.”

“You have to, Dee. I think’s cancer.”

“You should go to a doctor.”

“I’m not going to a doctor. I’m not.” She pressed the knife into my hand. “You owe me. I saved your life, right? Didn’t I?”

“Crystal, you have to go to a hospital or something.”

“I can’t reach it.” She looked crazy in the light coming from the floor, the shadow of her nose going up on her cheek into her eye. “I need you to do it.”“But I don’t know how.”

“Look.” She grabbed my fist in her hand and twisted it to her back. “You just cut around it. Make a cut down one side and then the other and then cut it from underneath, okay? It should take like a minute.”

I hunched over and stared, frozen. “I can’t.”