Pruning

This is the second post in my weekly feature where I post unused material from my forthcoming novel Leave Society . I've been working on its third draft. My editor had some small suggestions on the second draft, including to prune the second and third parts, Year of Pain and Year of Mountains, by around 1000 and 2000 words. Today and yesterday I pruned these sentences and fragments from Year of Pain:
-I wouldn’t have tested them like that. -That won’t help-“Maybe if you’re nicer to her, she’ll let...