Page 53 of Virago

Tommy swung onto his bike with a victorious flourish. “I want pancakes. You want pancakes, Z-man? I’ll buy you pancakes.” He fired up his hellbeast of a Harley before Zaxx could say that he’d rather go home.

So he followed Tommy and Dom to get some pancakes.

Chapter Fourteen

Gia picked up the last stack of books and slid them in place on the shelf. Then she cut open the bottom of the box, flattened it, and added it to the stack.

Now she was officially unpacked.

Sitting on the brightly colored, funkily patterned rug in the loft of her tiny house, she looked around the room. Most of the furniture from her childhood bedroom and all of the books. Lots of new touches, like the built-in bookshelves, her desk setup, the cool rug. Setting aside the stack of boxes and the pile of packing trash she needed to deal with, the room looked good. She would have decorated it pretty much as her parents had.

They really had done a shockingly great job building and fitting out this house to match her taste and style. It was more than an insanely expensive, time-intensive gift; it was also a thoughtful gift, one that showed explicitly how well her family knew her, understood her.

Except for the part where they’d kicked her out of the family home.

She had to get over that part. Because what was the alternative? Tell her parents that she hated the gift they must have spent six figures on and taken months of time and effort to put together? Tell them that she hated it because, although they’d gotten every detail right and built her a miniature dream house, what she really wanted was to be in her old bedroom, the ten-by-twelve shoebox with the drafty windows and the funky closet she practically needed a crowbar to get anything in or out of?

Obviously she couldn’t do that. Not only would it cause a huge issue—Mom would be pissed and Dad would be hurt, which would make Mom even more pissed, and then Bo would be confused and upset by the tension—it should cause a huge issue. She was being ridiculous and she knew it. Ungrateful, petulant, a prima donna, any or all of those applied. She saw it in herself, and she hated it.

But she could not shake it. She’d thought maybe unpacking her stuff from Evanston would help her feel more settled in, more present in this house, but so far, no.

Maybe she needed to do more than unpack. Maybe she needed to start living here. Settle in, take it day by day and let living in it make her tiny house a tiny home.

The next step, then, was removing all evidence of moving in and unpacking. Standing, she collected the packing trash and shoved it into a garbage bag. She set the bag on top of the stack of boxes, picked the whole thing up, and carried it down to the first floor and out to the porch. She’d take it to the burning barrel later.

Crackers lay on the seat of one of the bright-green metal chairs, soaking up a May sunbeam. He opened an eye at her, mewed softly, then tucked his face under his paws and resumed his nap. Gia glanced around, seeking Cheese, but he wasn’t in sight.

It was unusual for the brothers not to be in sight of each other, so Gia called for him.

He crawled out from under the porch with a recently deceased mouse in his mouth. Ah. It was not at all unusual for Crackers to be slacking off while Cheese was on the job.

“Sorry, Cheesebro. Carry on with your lunch.”

Cheese mewled with his mouth full; Gia got the idea he was asking if she wanted to share.

“Nah, I’ll pass today. Thanks, though.”

Cheese accepted her rejection and jumped up onto the porch, then onto Cracker’s chair.

Gia brushed both cats off the chair before they dug in right there. Crackers blinked sleepily but perked up when Cheese shoved the dead mouse at him.

She went back inside to start her own lunch before the Wild Kingdom version got started out here.

~oOo~

Maybe what she needed to really feel settled in here was to get to work—not merely unpack, not merely arrange things to her liking, but get her new desk area organized in the way she needed to do her work.

Deciding that idea had some promise (and she had to get started on her work anyway), after lunch Gia spent an hour or so laying out her notes, books, Post-Its and other necessities of her work. On the blank bulletin board above the desk, she pinned key quotations written on color-coded index cards.

All this stuff could be done digitally, of course, and Gia had gone through her whole undergrad study without ever taking notes in a spiral notebook or turning in a piece of paper to a professor. At Northwestern, however, her research load was exponentially greater, and she’d learned that having physical documents to move around, color-code, stack in order of importance, and to be able to see it all arranged before her in space helped organize her thinking and thus her writing. Like a three-dimensional outline.

As she pinned up a copy of the classic photograph of Sonny Barger, founder of the Hells Angels, sticking his tongue out at the photographer, Gia’s phone buzzed on the desk. She looked down and saw an alert from her ‘MizzouRAH ‘ friend chat: Jane had posted a photo.

Jane, Aura, and Kathie had been her suitemates when she’d started at Mizzou, and they’d become great friends—the first true friends Gia had ever really had.

Before those three (and, honestly, since), anything that resembled a friendship with someone who wasn’t family had been like Hilary and Mindy: situational, transactional, and mutually ambivalent. She’d thought herself incapable of forming a true friendship bond. But the connection to her Mizzou friends had begun to form the day they’d met, and now they were sisters.

Far-flung sisters these days. Aura, a poli-sci major who’d minored in French language and literature, had her MA in international relations and was now an aide to the US Ambassador to France. Jane was a photojournalist currently on assignment in Croatia. And Kathie was an associate designer at an up-and-coming New York fashion house.

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