Page 12 of Roma Queen
“I don’t know what I expected,” I answer, the truth ringing loud and clear in each word. “I’ve been too worried to really expectanything.” On the far side of the camp, I recognize Patrin hovering just outside the doublewide trailer, wearing just a black Pogues t-shirt and pants—clearly, like Pasha, he doesn’t feel the cold all that much either. The tall, grim-looking man radiates an air of unhappiness so potent and intense that I can feel his displeasure searing me like a brand from seventy feet away.
“Don’t worry about that moron,” Shireen says, as she arrives next to me, tugging a pair of thick, worn worker’s gloves from the back pocket of her jeans and pulls them onto her hands. “He won’t say a bad word to you. Not if he knows what’s good for him.”
Pasha laughs, loud and brazen, the sound of his obvious amusement sending a warm caress down my back, between my shoulder blades; Patrin must know we’re talking about him, because the furrow in his brow deepens exponentially. He turns, about to open the door to the doublewide, but it swings back before he can even take hold of the handle, and then Shelta is there, dressed all in black, too-slim, hair dragged back into a bun, face furious, the very embodiment of a bad omen.
Pasha curses colorfully under his breath. As much as I’m intimidated by the fortune teller, I feel desperately sorry for her son. My own mother was no warm hug, but to have had a woman like that caring for you when you were a child? Fucking brutal.
“All right then. Time to go rock the boat,” he mutters unhappily under his breath.
Wearily, Shireen sighs. “Pash, you’re gonna sink the damned boat this time. I hope for your sakes that you’re both good swimmers.”
Six
PASHA
“You know,I almost had Patrin’s tongue cut out. He came to me and told me this…thislie, but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe you’d bethisstupid. That you’d directly disobey me in such a flagrant way.”
Inside the gathering hall, my mother paces up and down in front of the log burner, hands on her hips, enraged eyes lashing me every time they dart in my direction. She still hasn’t looked at Zara yet. The moment she dares to turn her malevolent gaze in Firefly’s direction, there’s going to be serious fucking trouble.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come to your senses. Cleo and Bonnie said you wouldn’t let me down like this. They vouched for you. Called you a good Roma son. They said you were going to return to us and do what’s right, and I believed them.” She scoffs. “How stupid do I look now?” With her head tilted back, chin raised, her chest rising and falling too quickly, she finally stops her pacing and practically knots her arms across her chest, as if the skin and bones of her limbs are strong enough to form an impenetrable barrier between us.
“You know she’s the one your grandmother warned us about, don’t you?That girlis the one she said would tear this family apart and take you from us forever.”
I’ve never been all that great at keeping a level head. In high school, I used to have to grind my knuckles into the brick wall behind the canteen in order to temper the rage inside of me. If I didn’t extinguish the anger with my own pain, I found myself extinguishing it with others’, and that never ended well. Detention. Suspension. I didn’t give a fuck about the punishment they doled out whenever I broke the rules. What I cared about was the judgement in their eyes. The teachers, the administrators, the other kids, their parents: they’d all made up their mind about me before they’d even met me. Whenever I knocked a kid’s teeth out or launched a chair across a classroom, I confirmed their suspicions and justified their prejudices.
It took serious fucking effort, but by the time I hit junior year I was a model student. No fighting. No cursing. No stealing, breaking, smashing. I studied, I worked hard, and I out-performed every single last one of those motherfuckers. They’d expected me to disgrace the establishment with my questionable, rogue heritage, but in the end all I’d done was left them with a sour taste in their mouths—the taste of their own narrow-minded bigotry.
How many opportunities have I had to snap since high school? I wouldn’t even be able to guess at the number. I’ve leashed myself, and used the fights to stem my simmering wrath, and for the most part the system I’ve developed works. When trouble comes looking for me, I turn the other way. When someone has an issue with me and wants to use their fists to make themselves feel better about it, I either settle the matter with them inside the cage, where I can at least make some money from their glaring stupidity, or I tell them to go fuck themselves.
I’ve been poked and prodded, laughed at, threatened, antagonized and provoked, and never once have I lost my cool. But right now, I am barely in control. My grip on my emotions is weakening with every passing second, my nerves frayed. The caged beast inside me wants out, is rattling the bars on its prison, and I amthisclose to saying fuck it and letting it out.
And all because of my own goddamn mother.
“She isn’t a girl,” I murmur under my breath. “She’s a woman. Her name is Zara, and she deserves your respect.”
Shelta stills. She has the look of a storm cloud about her—grey and dark and ominous, about to unleash hell. “Respect? You want me torespecther?”
Beside me, Zara bristles. She’s staring down at her muddy shoes, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, her eyes blazing with indignation. All I want to do is take her hand and get the fuck out of here, but that’s not going to happen. It can’t happen. Until we’ve gotten to the bottom of all of this, wehaveto be here, and wehaveto deal with Shelta. Sighing, I bite down on the tip of my tongue, taking a second to breathe. “It’d be nice, but I’m not stupid. I know that’d be impossible. You don’t respect anyone or anything.”
She shakes her head, her thick, grey-streaked hair brushing the tops of her shoulders. “As usual, you’re wrong. I respect this family. I respect everything we’ve built together over the years. I respect our culture, and our heritage. You’re the one throwing that all away, because of agadjewhorewho doesn’t know the first thing about you or your people.”
Zara ceases to rock on her heels. She’s a living, breathing statue, her eyes fixed on the bare wooden floorboards beneath her feet.
Gadjewhore.
The words have been eaten up by the thick silence that now fills the gathering hall, but I can’t unhear them. I can’t stop them from viciously repeating like the echo of a gunshot inside my head. I’m betting the hatred and the cruelty of my mother’s words are replaying over and over inside Zara’s head, too. I look at Shelta—ramrod straight back, cold, steely eyes, flared nostrils, arrogance and pride rolling off her like smoke—and for the first time in my life, I actually want to hit a woman.
I won’t.
I would never.
But, fuck me, does she deserve it.
Shelta’s resolve appears to falter as I stare her down; I know her better than she thinks she knows me. She’s waiting for me to throw myself at her in a whirlwind of anger and fists, but I’m beyond that shit. Once more, I’m disappointing her. If I let my temper get the better of me and I lash out, if Ihurther, then she gets to be the righteous victim, and I fulfill the role she’s undoubtedly cast me in—the role of crazed, unpredictable, brutish son.
Zara looks at me out of the corner of her eye, her auburn hair turned light and golden in the winter light flooding in from the skylight above our heads. She’s clearly upset, but her face is full of resolve.Don’t react. Don’t respond. Don’t give her what she wants.
She is fucking incredible.
