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“No,” he told his president. “I need to make sure my sister gets clear of the charges.”
“And if that means, when it comes down to it, we leave the cop alone?”
“Then I guess we leave the cop alone.”
Badger leveled another fatherly look at him. “Zaxx.”
Knowing what Badger was pushing back on, Zaxx amended his statement. “We leave the cop alone. If it comes down to it.”
Badger grabbed his phone. “I’ll call Dom in.”
Dominic O’Brien was their intelligence officer, in charge of most of the club’s information gathering. These days, he mainly did research for their security jobs, but every now and then he had to get his hacker hat out of mothballs.
“You’re making the right call, kid,” Badger said.
Zaxx knew he was, but it rubbed him raw nonetheless.
Chapter Four
The tiny house was really cute, and really her taste. Honestly, it was perfect. It should have been, anyway.
Gia leaned back against the miniature kitchen island—about two square feet of stainless steel counter atop a cube pedestal with three shelves on each side—and looked across the kitchen to the living room. Really cute, the whole thing. Really her taste. So why was she feeling hurt and pouty about this extremely expensive, work-intensive, loving gift?
Well, standing here feeling sorry for herself because her family had gone out of their way to do something nice for her was stupid as fuck. At the very least, she could unpack. Maybe putting her clothes away and finding places for her books and shit would help her get over this weird mood.
Idly, Gia opened her new yellow fridge—so cute, looking like it came straight out of a 1950s New York apartment. And then she gaped at the interior.
The thing was stuffed with food. Again, all her favorites, and much of it obviously farm-fresh. In addition to an array of store-bought condiments, there was milk in a plain glass bottle, a small wire basket of six eggs (from their chickens, no doubt), vegetables and fruits in crispers, and a hand-wrapped loaf of multigrain bread. Mom kept a lot of that stuff outside the fridge in her own kitchen, so she must have assumed Gia wouldn’t eat it all quickly enough for room-temp storage.
A peek into the tiny freezer revealed several packets of Jamba Juice Razzmatazz smoothie mix, four pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy (yep, favorites), and a bin of ice from the teensy icemaker.
So much thought and effort here. This gift was sweet as honey. So why the fuck did it taste like vinegar?
Okay. Enough baseless petulance. Settling in here would probably fill in whatever hole had opened inside her. Then she’d be able to appreciate this for the wonder it was.
Gia closed the freezer door and went to the living room. She picked up a box of her books and carried it up the stairs to the loft bedroom.
~oOo~
She was on her third box, her books from school arranged on the wall shelves, and now setting up her desk—but not yet feeling good about all this—when her phone buzzed loudly, vibrating on the bare wood of a nightstand. The buzz was only about a second long: a text. Expecting it to be someone in her family, Gia finished emptying the box before she went over and picked up her phone.
It wasn’t Mom, Dad, or Bo. It was Hilary Jasper, an on-again, off-again friend for most of her life. Hilary and her older sister, Mindy, were both danger junkies, and they could be Mean Girls, too. For Gia, they were firmly in the ‘frenemy’ zone. Generally they were friends when Gia was pissed at her parents and feeling rebellious, and then eventually they’d cross a line Gia wouldn’t cross. Then they’d call her a baby, and she’d call them psycho, and they wouldn’t speak for weeks or months, until the next time Gia was pissed at Mom and looking for trouble, or one of the Jasper girls needed somebody with a ‘particular set of skills’ to get them out of some kind of trouble.
That was the other weird element of their frenemy-ship: Mindy and Hilary were a little bit afraid of Gia. They compensated for that with big talk and stupid digs, but they never pushed her to a point where they worried she’d turn those skills on them. Not that she ever would; she’d been thoroughly taught that physical violence could be an answer only to physical threat. You hit someone who’d hit you, not someone who’d said something shitty, no matter how shitty the said thing was.
Actually, she could think of a few shitty words that would deserve a punch, and was fully aware that both her parents felt the same, but their lesson had been words don’t rise to the level of physical violence.
Gia enjoyed that little bit of wariness from her troublesome ‘friends.’ There was respect in it, and she knew how to exploit it when she needed to.
They were a toxic combo all the way around, really. However, Gia had never had many non-Horde friends (and the Horde didn’t count; they were all family). That was because of the Horde’s reputation outside Signal Bend (stupid fucking movie) and also because, another thing of which she was fully aware, she was known to be ... call it prickly.
She fought back. With words or acts, to peers or teachers, she returned fire. That she had often fought other people’s fights for them had not made her a hero to her classmates or her teachers, it had only made her scarier and weirder to her classmates and more of a problem to her teachers.
Her excellent grades and various scholarly accomplishments hadn’t eased that so much. Instead, her ‘good student’ rep had collided with her ‘problem student’ rep and caused only more wariness.
Hilary was the only person from school who seemed to appreciate anything about her. That was probably because Hilary was two years older than Gia but in the same grade. She’d been held back twice, in second and in fourth grades, and when they were both in sixth grade and Hilary was in danger of being held back again, their teacher, Mr. Brake, had forced Gia to tutor her.
Mr. Brake was an absolutely horrendous human being whose reputation as a ferocious asshole every student in the district knew, but somehow he kept his job. He wasn’t a pedo, but he delighted in torturing his students in all sorts of ways that never quite crossed the line of malpractice or impropriety. Like putting the hothead class genius together with the mean-girl dimwit in a room every day during recess and waiting hungrily for the explosion.
