Page 9 of Deadly North

5

GIGI

“How the hell did they know you were here?” Mack demands as soon as I finally emerge from my bus.

“How should I know?” My voice comes out as almost a wail. I cringe, hating myself for sounding so weak.

“Do you have a public schedule of where the bus will be somewhere where people can see it?”

“Of course, I do, for public events!” I say, sounding defensive even to myself. “There’s a form on my website that people can fill out if they want to book me, and schedule of events the Bus will be at. And I post on my social media accounts. It’s how I do business. How am I supposed to get customers if they don’t know where I am?”

“Dammit, Gigi, you can’t just tell them where you’re going to be located,” Mack growls. “You’re a sitting duck!”

Could those Bloody Scorpions guys actually have gone to the trouble of looking me up just to follow me? That just feels crazy. Why would they bother? But it seems even crazier that what just happened could have been a coincidence.

“Now do you see why Fury asked Magnus to assign you protection?” he continues, crossing his arms in front of his chest. His huge, muscled, T-shirt straining chest.Ugh.

“No, I don’t.” I do, of course. But the smug damn look on Mack’s face makes it impossible for me to admit it. “What I see is that my brother is jumping to conclusions and taking your club with him.”

Mack’s face turns from smug to incredulous. “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re a lot of things, Gizmo, but dumb is not one of them.”

“Don’t call me Gizmo, asshole,” I spit back. Ihateit when he calls me that. Always have. But even more when he’s trying to put me in my place, like right now. It’s a nickname that always makes me feel like a silly little child. And I know that’s exactly why Mack does it.

Mack started calling me Gizmo back when I was twelve years old. It came out of one of the rare times that he, Connor, and I hung out together when we were kids. Mack and Connor being older, and boys, they rarely condescended to even give me the time of day most of the time. But on that weekend, we were all hanging out at Mack’s house. His parents, Choppa and Reenie, were basically Connor’s surrogate parents growing up, since ours were so absent — our mom literally, and our dad, all but physically.

Our mother died giving birth to me. So of course, I never actually new her. But her presence — or rather, her absence — was a constant in our home growing up. People tell me I look like her. I didn’t see it when I was a kid, but now that I’m grown, I definitely can. In pictures of her, it’s clear I have the same green-blue eyes. Connor has them, too. But my face is shaped like hers as well, right down to our pointed chin and high cheekbones. Growing up, it seemed pretty clear to me that my father never forgave me for being the reason for my mother’s death. He never got over it. Instead, he coped by disappearing deeper and deeper into a bottle, rather than do any sort of parenting.

Connor and I mostly tried to stay out of his way, since he was mean when he was drunk. Connor was lucky enough to have Mack as a best friend, whose house he tended to escape to whenever things got bad at ours. I wasn’t so fortunate. I had few friends at school, and none that lived close enough to us that I could run to their houses in an emergency.

One weekend, my father went on a bender that was pretty extreme, even for him. I guess Connor must have had qualms about leaving me alone in the house with Dad. He told me he was going over to Mack’s house to watch movies, which wasn’t unusual. But what was unusual was that this time, he invited me along. I didn’t need to be asked twice.

An hour later, we were sitting in Mack’s living room, each of us with a giant bowl of popcorn in front of us, courtesy of Mack’s mom Reenie. We raided his parents’ DVD collection and decided to do an 80s movie marathon. The first movie on the list wasGremlins, which we had heard was a classic. The movie is about a kid who receives an unusual cute, cuddly pet as a gift. The pet comes with instructions never to expose it to sunlight, let it come into contact with water, or feed it after midnight. Of course, the kid screws up, and the creature spawns other creatures, who turn into tiny monsters that wreak havoc on the town.

Well, at some point during the movie, I got up to go to the bathroom. And when I came back, Mack had taken over my chair, as well as my bowl of popcorn.

“Get out of my chair,” I demanded.

“Make me,” he shot back casually, grabbing a huge fistful of my popcorn.

Well, of course, I was no match for my brother’s older, bigger, stronger best friend. But I sure did try. I did my best to wrestle the popcorn bowl out of his hands. Laughing, he stood up and held it up over his head, out of my reach. I climbed onto the chair to get it, but even then I was too short.

“Come on, Gizmo!” he taunted me. “Sorry, you heard the rules. Can’t feed the gremlins!”

“After midnight!” I protested, stupidly falling into his dumb game. “It’s only eight-thirty!”

And that, as far as my brother’s best friend was concerned, was me “admitting” to being a gremlin. And that was it. The name stuck. And throughout the rest of our childhood, he would call me Gizmo whenever he wanted to drive me nuts. And even though I should be too mature for that now, it still pisses me off when Mack calls me Gizmo. It always brings me back to how I felt that night: like I was being called ugly, and short, and ridiculous.

And right now, it feels even more ridiculous that the nickname can still get to me when it comes out of his mouth.

“Fuck off, Mack,” I hiss at him. “I didn’t ask for your damn club to decide they needed to treat me like a damn child. And I’m not about to change my business model to make it easier for you to watch over me. You can always just, you know,leave, and let me continue living my life.”

“You know I can’t do that, Cupcake,” he shoots back, switching to his other taunting name for me. “Look, I don’t like this gig any more than you like having me here. But it ain’t your choice, and it ain’t my choice.”

“Yeah, no one is giving me any choice in this at all. I’m not in your damn club. So why do I have to deal with your stupid shit? Do you not see how messed up that is?”

Mack shrugs. “Fucked up or not, that’s the way it is. And neither one of us can do a damn thing about it.”

So,that’s the way it is. For the foreseeable future, every damn time I do an event with the Body Bus, Mack shows up on his damn bike and watches me work. And just like he said, there’s not a single damn thing I can do about it.

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