And Then She Fell: A Novel

by Alicia Elliott, Jenna Clause

Genres: Native American & Aboriginal; Horror

Synopsis

A Most Anticipated Book Pick by Good Morning America, Bustle, CrimeReads, Electric Literature, Debutiful, Ms. Magazine, The Nerd Daily, and Paste

A mind-bending, razor-sharp look at motherhood and mental health that follows a young Indigenous woman who discovers the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences

On the surface, Alice is exactly where she thinks she should be: She’s just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve—a white academic whose area of study is conveniently her own Mohawk culture—is nothing but supportive; and they’ve moved into a new home in a posh Toronto neighborhood. But Alice could not feel like more of an impostor. She isn’t connecting with her daughter, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her own mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from Steve and their ever-watchful neighbors, among whom she’s the sole Indigenous resident. Even when she does have a minute to herself, her perpetual self-doubt hinders the one vestige of her old life she has left: her goal of writing a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.

Then, as if all that wasn’t enough, strange things start to happen. She finds herself losing bits of time and hearing voices she can’t explain, all while her neighbors’ passive-aggressive behavior begins to morph into something far more threatening. Though Steve assures her this is all in her head, Alice cannot fight the feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that in her creation story lies the key to her and Dawn’s survival.... She just has to finish it before it’s too late.

Told in Alice’s raw and darkly funny voice, And Then She Fell is an urgent and unflinching exploration of inherited trauma, womanhood, denial, and false allyship, which speeds to an unpredictable—and surreal—climax.

 

Read more

Release date: September 26, 2023

Publisher: Dutton

Print pages: 363

Sample

prologue

AROUND THE RIVERBEND, MOSTLY

Alice never seemed to hear the microwave beeping—not even when she was three feet away from it, feet propped on the kitchen table as she painted her toenails neon green. It didn’t matter how loud or how insistent her ma was when she called her to dinner, either. She’d saunter into the kitchen whenever she felt like it, even if it meant her food was cold and congealed on her plate. At first, her aunt Rachel thought Alice’s hearing was to blame; she did sit alarmingly close to the speakers at pow-wows, after all, and her music pounded through her headphones so loud even the people she passed could hear each note. But a free hearing test confirmed her problem was not and had never been her ears. She could hear the microwave perfectly. She could hear everything perfectly.

Quite simply, Alice deliberately chose to ignore what she didn’t want to hear. Either the most teenage of all ailments, or the most human: for who wants to hear an incessant hammer banging down on one’s carefully constructed version of “real life”? Who wants to admit there was a moment where they saw disaster coming but chose to do nothing, only for the impending wave to crest and crash, forcing their carefully constructed version of “real life” to give way and collapse entirely?

This is probably why, despite the trail of girls Mason Jamieson left behind him like breadcrumbs in the forest of masculinity—girls with mascara rippling down their teenage cheeks, with heartbreak and hatred now trapped in their very marrow—Alice still desperately wanted to follow that trail straight to him. What choice did she have? She was months away from becoming a faceless freshman and he was once the coolest boy at J.C. Hill Elementary. There was something very chic about the idea of holding hands through the halls and getting pulled against his chest while he smoked, even if she knew from other girls that he repeated the most boring stories and his cigarette ash got caught in their hair. It might not be fulfilling, but it’d be validating, the way male attention could be. That was good enough. Probably.

Before this year Alice had been mostly ignored. She’d watched each of her friends fall victim to the onslaught of puberty: entering grade six with sweatshirts and pudgy cheeks and emerging on the other side with breasts and blackheads and skin-tight leggings that shouted every dimple to the world. Alice’s chest remained stubbornly flat, her hips defiantly narrow. When she walked down the street in a pair of shorts it was unremarkable. When her friends walked down the street in shorts it was an event. There were hoots and hollers from windows or porches, beeps from rusted-out rez cars, deep frowns from disapproving elders. There was something almost insidious about puberty—the way it slammed shut the door to childhood, never to be reopened, and shoved you face-first into this strange, dangerous place called womanhood.

But on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, puberty came for Alice, too. It molded her chest into tits, her butt into an ass, carved cheekbones out of her face. She tried to stifle her body with oversized shirts and poor posture, but it was no use. Those rebellious curves were still there, pushing out from the fabric, demanding their due. Both her ma and Aunt Rachel had tried to explain to Alice how her period connected her to our mother, the earth; our grandmother, the moon; how she was one in a line of women who could

be traced all the way back to Sky Woman, the mother of our nations. They were trying to be nice, Alice knew, but it was too late. She saw the way men looked at her now. Women, too. As if she were land to claim, a rival to kill. She’d already resigned herself to the idea that her body was no longer hers: just flesh and bone on extended loan, bound to be collected by some man sooner or later. After that she would be his to own, his to decide what to do with, to sit on some pedestal or throw in some corner to cry.

That summer Alice got a job selling 50/50 tickets at the speedway with her cousin Melita. She didn’t need a résumé. The boss, Helen, looked her up and down and told her she started Friday.

“Just dress sexy,” Helen said. Alice immediately summoned up the most beautiful woman she could think of: Jennifer-Lopez-as-Selena, in sequined jumpsuits and glitter bustiers, smiling with bright red lips.

“Um, I don’t think I have anything—”

“Trust me, we’ll make it work.”

And they did. Apparently, anything could be made sexy when you were a thirteen-year-old girl. Helen would roll up Alice’s shorts if they were too long, or strategically tie up her shirts to show off her flat stomach. She even kept an emergency stash of lip gloss at the concession stand so Alice could do touch-ups whenever dirt careened from the racetrack onto her sticky lips, temporarily ruining the underage bombshell fantasy with ugly, inconvenient reality. It smelled like cotton candy.

The customers, mostly older white men, would stare at her long tan limbs and smile at her like they knew something she didn’t. It bothered Alice, but the other 50/50 girls seemed resigned to it. Even adapted to it. They knew how to divide into two selves: the one that smiled sweetly to the men’s faces and laughed at their bad jokes, and the one that grimaced as soon as their backs were turned, collecting the interactions like baseball cards to trade with the other girls at the food stand. It became a game for them: the girls would share their encounters with these desperate old men, and at the end of the night whoever had the grossest story—the one that made the other girls groan and squirm with unease—was the girl who won.

Most of the time the stories were pretty tame. A wink here, a sudden unsolicited hand grab there. But one time a regular named Chuck followed Alice into the porta potty, rushing in before she could lock it, his body pushing hard against her backside. He was so close she could smell the damp of his deodorant, which barely covered the harsh stink of his old, sweating man body. She turned fast and looked up at him. His eyes were entirely black. He looked like he was possessed.

Alice was too shocked to scream, to move. There was a long silence that stretched on, during which Alice could feel the walls of the porta potty vibrating with the race cars on the track. She closed her eyes, hoping that whatever came next would be quick.

Chuck laughed, the sharp honk of it forcing her watering eyes back open. “The look on your face!” he howled as he turned around and stumbled back to the stands.

Alice stayed in the porta potty until her breathing was normal again. She decided to hold her pee until she got home.

“What happened to you?” Melita asked her when she walked up, jittery. Alice told her.

“Ever gross! Oh my god, you gotta tell the girls. You’ll totally win tonight.”

“Should I tell Helen?”

“No point. As long as they’re spending money, she don’t care. Anyway, that’s the job, innit? Look cute so dirty old men buy tickets from us?”

Melita was right. That was the job. But after the races, after the eyes and the hands and “sweeties” and “dolls,” after Chuck and the porta potty, as she stared at the limp bills in her hand, she understood how little value they had. What’s more, she sensed that her own value was tied up in the whole transaction, only instead of watching it grow week by week like the small stash of bills she hid from her ma in her sock drawer, she felt it slowly diminishing, as if it were being pressed hard against a sieve.

Still, money was money, and Creator knows her mom didn’t have much to spare since her dad died in a car accident a couple years before. So Alice showed up promptly at seven every Friday night, shorts hiked up,

lips smeared shiny and pink.

---

“You’ll never guess who’s hanging around the food stand,” Melita said one night.

Alice was under the bleachers, tearing apart the strips of 50/50 tickets she and Melita had sold. The repetitive motion calmed her, so she offered to do it for her cousin, who was, it must be said, pretty lazy, at least when it came to work. Gossiping, on the other hand, Melita took very seriously. Alice stopped ripping tickets and looked at her cousin. Melita’s ears turned a red that rivaled her already blushed cheeks, the way they did when she knew something you didn’t.

“I don’t know. Nelly Furtado?”

“Don’t be stupid, Alice. What would a queen like that be doing in a place like this?”

“Watching the races?”

Melita ignored that and smiled. “Mason Jamieson,” she said, savoring the words as they rolled off her tongue, weighing the effect of every syllable.

Alice immediately felt light-headed. “No way. He’d never waste a Friday night here.”

“Go look for yourself.”

She peeked out from the bleachers and there he was, leaning against the food stand, smoking. Her breathing stopped as she croaked out two words: “Holy. Shit.”

Alice stared. She obviously remembered him—who wouldn’t?—puffing his chest on playgrounds and in parking lots, demanding and commanding eyes with every step of his nearly six-foot-tall frame. It’d been two years since he’d left J.C. Hill for Pauline Johnson Collegiate Vocational School. He was definitely taller now. His movements were smooth and confident, almost feline, as he lifted his cigarette to his lips. When she got older, she would realize how much of this was performance, how much was lifted from James Dean and early Marlon Brando movies, which, unbeknownst to all but his mother and sister, Mason studied fastidiously, even practicing the movements in front of the mirror, the way Alice herself practiced smiling in the perfect way to hide her snaggletooth. The self-consciousness that came with puberty pushed them both into odd shapes and awkward poses, but at thirteen, Alice didn’t notice the effort it took other people to look effortless, just her own, and so she only hated herself for it. Alice also had no way of knowing at the time that Mason’s stock had fallen considerably since he’d made the leap to high school, as happened with all Native kids once they stepped off the rez and into the mostly white high schools they were forced to attend in neighboring cities. Had she known all of this, it’s hard to say whether she would have proceeded in quite the way she did.

“He just broke up with Nancy, so I bet he’s looking for a new snag,” Melita said, needling.

“I don’t know…” she started.

“Well, I do. What are the odds your crush would end up here right after a breakup? It’s fate! You gotta go over there and ask him for a smoke. Now.” She grabbed Alice’s arm and dragged her toward the food stand. Alice tried to pry her fingers off but it was no use. The Creator himself couldn’t stop Melita once her mind was made up.

“But I don’t smoke,” Alice whispered. “Or snag.”

Melita cackled. “You do now, honey.” She pushed Alice toward Mason, who was, thankfully, staring down at his black Razr phone. Alice managed to catch herself on a big blue metal garbage can before running into him, making a terrific clang in the process. Mason looked up, saw Alice, then took another drag of his cigarette.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Alice said, her throat raspy and dry. “Got a smoke?”

“I’m down to my last one.”

“Oh.”

“But we Hauds are trading people, innit?”

Alice looked down at her shoes, her heart racing. “What do you want for it?”

“That depends. You busy tomorrow night?”

Everything was happening so fast. Alice couldn’t think. Was she busy? Probably not. She was never busy. But she couldn’t tell Mason that.

“I could make time.” That sounded pretty cool. Like something the sort of girl Mason wanted to hang out with would say.

“Then this is yours.” He pulled out a pack of Sago Menthols and handed her his last cigarette. His hands were so big they looked like they could crush her head between them. Stop thinking and just be cool, Alice told herself as she placed it between her lips and pursed them expectantly. Mason produced a lighter and flicked the head ablaze. Luckily, Alice remembered Melita once told her the secret to faking smoking: don’t inhale.

“Put your number in here.” Mason handed over his cell phone. He was saving her number under the name “hot racetrack girl.” She debated typing her actual name in, but decided against it at the last minute. She didn’t want to look pushy.

“See you tomorrow,” he said as he took his phone and backed away, smiling at her. She watched him spin around and continue toward the bleachers. God, she thought. Even the way he walks is sexy.

Melita was beside her almost immediately.

“So? What happened?”

“We’re gonna hang out tomorrow night.”

“Are you KIDDING ME? You’re hanging out with Mason Jamieson tomorrow night? The girls are never gonna believe this.”

At that exact moment Alice remembered she’d agreed to babysit for her Aunt Rachel.

“Fuck. I forgot. I’m babysitting Dana tomorrow.”

“I swear to fucking god, Al, if you throw away the chance to lose your virginity to Mason Jamieson for a babysitting gig I will kill you myself.”

“Do you really think we’ll have sex?”

“Of course! Guys like Mason basically need sex to live.”

Her friends had all lost their virginity back in elementary school—an event they felt compelled to share because tradition dictated they should, but which they described with little more than a shrug. It seemed to Alice that a woman’s virginity was a man’s trophy: they placed it on a shelf for all the other men to see, high-fiving each other as they celebrated how totally secure and super masculine they were. Women, on the other hand, threw their hymens to men like an old chicken bone to shut them up. There was nothing inherently valuable about virginity, or nothing she or her friends knew

how to name. Having sex was just checking off another box, and at this point, Alice just wanted it over with. But the idea of losing her virginity at Aunt Rachel’s house kind of weirded her out. What was she supposed to do with Dana? Send her outside?

“Can you babysit for me?”

“No way! I’ve got a date with Corey. Anyway, isn’t Dana, like, five? Just put her to bed before he gets there.”

“Will that work?”

Melita shrugged.

---

Aunt Rachel’s house was small and cluttered and looked like a pow-wow vendor threw up on the walls. There were at least thirty dreamcatchers, twenty medicine wheels, and a dozen posters that said native pride in a dozen different fonts. Seed beads of every color sat in plastic cups like hidden treasure around the house. Alice never knew when she’d step backward and knock a hundred tiny beads deep into the fibers of the carpet. It stressed her out.

But it was the one place where she felt like time hadn’t passed, might never pass. Her aunty and her little cousin’s love for her was eternal, unchanging. Her name even sounded different when they said it—precious, musical, like that one word was its own small ceremony. It sounded like that when Aunt Rachel was with Dana’s dad, even though her arms were bruised and her lips were swollen; it sounded like that when Aunt Rachel was pregnant and lived at Ganǫhkwásra, where she had to sign Alice and her ma in and out during visits, her eyes constantly trained on the door, as though Dana’s dad would barrel through at any moment; it sounded like that now, even though Alice’s period had started and wiry black hairs were sprouting everywhere faster than she could shave them. She needed that love without expectation. She needed it bad. Her ma had always referred to them as a “team”—which meant Alice was making dinner for herself by age nine, doing her and her ma’s laundry by age ten, and babysitting for extra cash by age eleven. And after her dad died, her mother expected her to pull more than her own weight. It was like she wasn’t allowed to be a kid at all anymore. Alice’s free time was always being judged, and so Alice herself was being judged. Strangely, she could feel the strain of her mother’s expectations even more strongly when she wasn’t around. But Aunt Rachel never judged her, never would.

That night, Alice and Dana were watching Pocahontas for what felt like the fiftieth time that month. Alice used to watch it obsessively when she was a child, too, wide-eyed with disbelief that someone who looked even remotely like her was the star of a Disney film. She made her mom buy her a Pocahontas costume for Halloween when she was six, only instead of a Native girl on the package modeling the cheap imitation buckskin, there was a little blond white girl. Her Pocahontas obsession waned significantly after that.

Alice was busy trying

to craft the perfect text to respond to Mason’s rather lackluster “k” after she sent him her aunt’s address. She settled on “c u soon,” then immediately reported back to each of her friends to get their reactions. She barely noticed when Dana sat up and cocked her head to the side, her parroting of every word silenced as she stared in confusion at the screen.

“That’s wrong,” she said.

“What?” Alice asked, distracted.

“Pocahontas sang the wrong thing.”

“You probably just heard it wrong.”

“No,” Dana said, her lower lip protruding. “She said it wrong. She’s supposed to sing, ‘Should I marry Kocoum?’ This time it was something…weird.”

Alice’s eyes were glued to her phone screen. There were happy texts congratulating her; there were snide texts pointing out Alice was last at everything, from getting boobs to losing her virginity; there were consoling texts warning her it wouldn’t hurt that bad, that even if it did, it probably wouldn’t last long anyway. There were some very exaggerated—and somehow very sexual—emoticons.

“Alice. Alice. ALICE! You’re not even listening.”

“Yes, I am.” She looked up to find her cousin standing in front of her, her tiny face scrunched in indignation. “Pocahontas sang the song wrong. What’s the big deal? She probably just forgot.” Alice liked making outrageous comments like that to her baby cousin. Even at her young age, Dana had surprisingly good bullshit radar, which made it even more funny when seemingly adult comments came out in her childish voice.

“Oh, for crying out loud. Now you’re being ridiculous,” Dana said in a perfect imitation of her mother, rolling her eyes and turning back to the screen. Alice stifled her laughter. She didn’t realize Dana knew how to roll her eyes. She made a mental note to tell her aunt about this development later.

Even with that little outburst, it didn’t take long until Dana was snoring, arching her small body across Alice’s lap, her belly swollen with sugar and soda. It was 8:00 p.m. and Mason was due to show up in an hour. Open bags of Cheetos and plates still thick with ketchup lined the floor like offerings to some prediabetic god. Alice didn’t eat any of it, she was too worried. What if she had bad breath when Mason kissed her? He’d tell all his friends, who’d tell all their friends, and it’d mark her as gross and undatable. She couldn’t risk it. She popped gum into her mouth instead and chewed with purpose.

She carried Dana to bed, cocooned her in her faded Mickey Mouse comforter, then gazed down at her, brushing a stray black hair from her face. She looked so serene, like she knew she was completely safe. Alice wondered when she’d last looked like that herself, if she’d ever look

like that again.

She kissed her cousin on the forehead. “Don’t grow up,” she whispered as she pulled the door closed.

In the living room, Alice gingerly picked up bags of chips and chewed cookies, half worried she’d contract their calories like a virus and become bloated and ugly. Her stomach groaned with each whiff of salty grease or baked sweets. It felt empty, wrung out, a hunger past pain. She chewed her gum, checked her phone.

“Put your phone down. We need to talk.”

Alice spun around, terrified.

No one was there. But from the sound of the voice, the speaker was close.

“Hello?” she called.

“You’re about to make a big mistake.”

The words were harsh, accusing; the voice familiar but strange. There was water on the TV screen, making the entire room glow blue. It was the part of the movie where John Smith first saw Pocahontas: a sexless silhouette in the fog, a target for his gun, another body to brag about to his shipmates once his trigger finger squeezed.

Slowly, Alice backed up toward the kitchen. She needed to get her hands on one of her aunt’s knives. They were all so dull they could barely peel a potato, but at least they looked menacing.

“Is someone there?” Alice asked, her heart beating fast.

“Of course someone’s here. I talked to you, didn’t I?”

At that, Alice ran to the knife drawer, yanked it open, pulled out the biggest one, then nervously walked back in the direction of the voice in the living room.

“I—I’ve got a knife, but if you leave right now, I won’t use it.” She wasn’t sure she’d be able to use it. She was a kid, not a killer. But if it came down to this weird person or her and Dana, she knew who she’d pick. Theoretically.

Just then, Pocahontas laughed and leaped toward her, stopping just short of the thirty-two-inch TV screen that held her in a hand-drawn prison. “And how, exactly, are you gonna use that big old thing on me?”

“What the fuuuuuuck!” Alice yelled as she ran back to the kitchen and dove under the table. Her breathing got short and fast, almost as quick as her heartbeat. “Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck. This isn’t real. This can’t be real.”

“Well, it is. Deal with it,” Pocahontas called back.

Alice screamed, dropped the knife, and started rubbing furiously at the tears pooling in her eyes. She rubbed until they hurt. If she could feel 

pain, that meant this wasn’t a dream. Right?

“Is he cute?” Pocahontas called, softer now, across the distance.

“What?” Alice asked as she poked her head out from under the table, too startled by the question and the sudden change in tone to realize she was taking the bait. “Who?”

“The boy you’re cleaning up for.”

Shit. Mason. What if he got here and this…whatever this was…was still happening? Alice looked out at the microwave clock. 8:32 p.m. Twenty-eight minutes before Mason got here. Twenty-eight minutes for her to deal with whatever was happening and get her shit together. She took a deep breath and stood up on shaky legs, then approached the TV.

“He’s okay, yeah.”

Pocahontas watched her approach curiously, something nearing a grin playing at the corner of her lips. Her voice like poisoned honey.

“Oh, come on. He must be better than ‘okay.’ I saw this place a few minutes ago. Total disaster. You don’t put in this kind of effort for a guy who’s just ‘okay.’ ”

“I mean, I wouldn’t betray everyone I’ve ever loved for him, but I’d really strongly consider it.” Alice was trying to play it cool, using her sarcasm like a mallet to flatten all other emotions. She found that once she accepted that the situation was happening, it became much less scary, almost normal, even. It didn’t cross her mind that what she should be scared of was how quickly she’d adjusted to something so strange and terrifying. It wouldn’t for some time.

“He’s not named John, is he? I’ve known two Johns. Both of them ruined my life.” Pocahontas delivered the words casually, dispassionately, as if she weren’t talking about herself at all but some hypothetical self in some hypothetical universe.

“Oh, please. I’ve seen this movie a million times. John Smith doesn’t ruin your life. You go your separate ways at the end, but he would have stayed if you asked him to. He loves you.”

Pocahontas chuckled. “The only thing John Smith loves is killing savages. Didn’t you watch the opening scene? He sings a whole song about it.”

“Well, yeah, but that was before. He doesn’t kill you.”

Pocahontas smiled bitterly. “There’s more than one way to kill a person.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Pocahontas opened her mouth, then closed it quick. As Alice watched, waiting for an explanation, she saw Pocahontas’s face twist and grow into an otherworldly mask, her eyes crooked and sliding down her cheeks like egg yolks. She squeezed her own eyes shut, shaking.

“Alice?”

How does she know my name? Alice wondered. She felt sick. All of this was wrong. Some sort of cruel game, maybe. Yes, her instincts told her, a game. And in this game she couldn’t let Pocahontas know the effect she was having on her.

“Who the hell are you? I know you’re not really Pocahontas,” Alice said defiantly, popping her eyes back open. She tried to make her face blank.

The princess’s laugh rang out in Dolby Digital surround sound—pitch-perfect, slightly manic. But then, as it went on one beat, two beats, three beats too long, it shifted. The sound became louder, shriller, and more supernatural, less a laugh and more a punishment.

“Shhhhhhhh!” begged Alice, worried the noise would wake Dana.

“That’s true,” she quietly replied in a calm though amused tone. “I’m definitely not Pocahontas.” She straightened her spine then, lengthened her neck. “Matoaka. That was what everyone in my village called me. This was back before John Smith and his stupid little stories. Don’t bother trying to pronounce it, by the way. Your clumsy English tongue will ruin the rhythm.”

There was a certain music to the princess’s real name, something that reminded Alice of oceans she’d never seen, waters she’d never swum. It was a peculiar feeling, one she instinctively knew no English word could replicate. But all things considered, she didn’t want to play nice. She preferred to make the princess wince.

“Pocahontas is better.”

“You would think that name’s better.” The princess rolled her eyes. “I remember you. Back from when you were that girl’s age.” She gestured in the general direction of Dana’s room. “You watched this perverted version of my story all the time. Just loved it. Knew the words to all the songs. Even ‘Savages.’ I’ll never understand why Native kids sing along to that one.”

“I didn’t know what the song meant back then,” Alice said defensively. “I was a little kid.”

“And I was a little kid when I met John Smith. All of ten years old. Did you know that?”

“No,” Alice replied, startled. “Does that mean he’s, like, a pedophile?”

“I don’t know about that. He’s a liar. I was never in love with him. I just played with the kids at his camp. But once I got famous in England he made up this dramatic story about me falling for him and saving his life. Really tired tragic romance stuff. Anyway, enough people believed it and now I’m stuck here,” she threw her arms wide, “painting with all the colors of the wind.”

Alice paused, considering.

“You said two Johns ruined your life. Who’s the second one?”

“John Rolfe. My second husband. I met him after the English kidnapped me.”

“Wait, they kidnapped you?”

“Sure did. It was awful. When John Rolfe came along proclaiming his love, it was the best protection I could get at the time, so when he proposed I said yes. Then I got baptized and had to change my name to Rebecca. Rebecca Rolfe.” She made a face. “Can you believe that alliteration? I prefer Pocahontas to that monstrosity. After that, my husband paraded me around England like a circus attraction for a few years. I gave birth to his brat and died of pneumonia in some ugly English town at twenty-one. The producers left all that out of the sequel, ...