Page 15 of Virago

That explosion hadn’t come. Oh, Gia and Hilary had bickered and sniped, they’d glared and made faces, they’d ignored each other, but eventually, they’d worked together. Gia had dragged Hilary through every grade from there forward, all the way to graduation. She’d kept it up mainly to spite Mr. Fucking Brake.

Yeah, when she had a good grudge in her teeth, she didn’t let it go.

In return, Hilary was the one who’d spread the nickname ‘Joan Wick’ around school, where it had stuck like Gorilla Glue, and she’d also spread it on social media so Gia had been stuck with it until she’d left the entire state.

That was particularly annoying because Gia was the first one to use that name—in reference to her mother, not herself. She’d gotten caught in her own crossfire.

In short, Gia didn’t like Hilary or her older sister Mindy very much, and vice versa, but they had a long history together, and there wasn’t really anybody else. Even in the Horde family, she and Bo were the oldest of their generation, and the couple who were close enough in age to have friend potential—Lexi and Loki—were still underage, and also weren’t back from college for the summer yet.

She sighed at Hilary’s message.

GRRRRRRL! YOU’RE BACK!!

WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY??

Hilary loved her caps. It was a pretty good representation of her comportment in person as well. Gia was not an all-caps type unless she was angry. Even then, she used them for emphasis only.

Since Gia had left the area for college (going a whole hundred miles away, to Mizzou, for undergrad), her relationship with the Jasper girls had been pleasant enough. They’d mostly outgrown the petty concerns of adolescence, and Gia was gone so much, they didn’t have time to build up the kind of resentments that flipped them to the second half of the portmanteau ‘frenemy.’ Thus, Gia responded like a casual friend.

Hey, Hil. Just got back today.

Not feeling like she owed Hilary more than that, she hit send. And got a reply immediately.

WELL, YOU GOTTA COME OUT TONIGHT!

WE’RE STARTING AT NO PLACE, THEN WE’LL

SEE WHERE THE NIGHT TAKES US!

No Place, a Signal Bend institution for far longer than Gia or Hilary had been around, was a typical country bar. Being the progeny of a biker, Gia had spent a fair amount of time in country bars all through the Midwest (you’d be surprised how many roadside taverns are pretty kid-friendly, with games and snacks and other shit to entertain ride-along urchins), so she could say that definitively. It was a honky-tonk, roughhewn and beer-soaked, and she didn’t think it had ever changed much.

The sign on the building had always said No Place, as far as she knew, but it used to be called Tuck’s by the locals, for the previous owner. Some older locals still called it that. But Tuck and his wife, Rose, were both dead and buried, and the new owner was a hospitality company. The manager was merely an employee, and the bar was simply No Place now.

Still, the owning company was hands-off, happy to let it be run however, so long as the receipts came in and trouble did not. By all accounts, the vibe of the place was as it always had been: both rowdy and neighborly.

It was Saturday. That meant live music and dancing, lots of drinking and lots of drunks, and, very likely, some kind of hooliganism. People who hung out at No Place picked fights for the entertainment value. It was like a tradition.

Gia wasn’t really in the mood for any of that, nor did she care to know what Hilary meant by seeing ‘where the night takes us,’ but she decided she was less in the mood for staying home trying to make herself love a gift she shouldn’t have to work to love. And wondering whether she could go over to the main house and hang out with her family. Would that be like inviting herself over? Would she be a guest there now? Did she have to knock now?

Sounds great. What time?

~oOo~

Gia texted her mom—she would have simply gone downstairs and told her if she still had a bedroom in the main house—that she was meeting friends at No Place and would get dinner there. Mom read the text right away, and started to reply. The dots danced for at least a whole minute before a response came through, and it was Okay.

So Mom knew what ‘friends’ meant, and she’d had a whole internal discussion with herself, or maybe an external one with Dad, regarding her feelings about Gia’s association with ‘those Jasper girls.’ But the result of the discussion, whether internal or external, was that Gia was a grownup and Mom had no say. The single word, complete with period, conveyed Mom’s attitude about it, but the answer was the correct one.

Deciding that she needed to feel on top of something today and Hilary and Mindy would do, Gia dressed to outshine them. She knew she was beautiful; she’d been likened to her mother most of her life, and Mom looked like Kate Beckinsale at her badass-est, so it was hard to have a lot of self-doubt about her looks. She was also five-eleven, even taller than Mom, and fit and strong.

When Hilary and Mindy dressed up for a Saturday night, they went sparkly and bright. Gia went dark. Since it was early May and still cool enough that she wouldn’t be miserable in them, she selected her black leather pants, a plain white camisole, contoured but not skin-tight, and her trusty leather biker jacket. She did her makeup in her version of date-night bold (noticeable and dark, but not slathered on), with black mascara and a bit of wing to her eyeliner. Silver jewelry. The black Prada booties she’d splurged on in Chicago (50% off!). She brushed her hair out and left it loose.

Then she went down the little staircase of her tiny house and walked out the front door, off the cute porch, across her family’s yard, past the house she’d grown up in, to the garage, where the Lunden Armada of vehicles sat clustered together, within and outside.

Seeing Cammy nestled between Dad’s Jeep and Bo’s Ford, rolling up the garage door and seeing her own Harley parked beside Mom’s—uncovered and gleaming like somebody had washed it and prepped it after nearly a year sitting idle, knowing she’d want to ride when she got home—Gia felt a deep warmth that had slipped away after she’d been welcomed home in this very spot.

Why did the tiny house push that feeling away? Something in her mind loosened and broke free, some piece of understanding. She almost caught it, but it floated away before she could.

She went into the garage, grabbed her helmet off its hook, and walked her bike outside, wending it through the maze of vehicles. When she mounted and fired the Sportster up, the familiar vibration surged up her arms, down her legs, through her torso, and Gia released a breath straight from her soul. She might have been holding it for a year.

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