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“What?” he said again, this time confused. He didn’t want to be having this conversation right now, but he also didn’t want to shove away the thing Lilli was maybe saying. She’d obviously been right, he could do nothing but bring Gia down, get her hurt, that was already proving true and they weren’t even together, but dear god, he needed Lilli to take it back. Even if it couldn’t come to anything, he needed the hope.
“Grab the good you can, Zaxx. You and Gia both. Seek happiness, and decide for yourselves what that means. Make your choices when they come upon you, and don’t worry about what you leave behind when you choose.”
“Everything left is lost,” he said, remembering Gia’s ink. He didn’t remember the Italian words.
Lilli’s head tipped to one side and her eyes narrowed as she studied him. “Right. Ogni lasciata è persa.”
She gave his hand a squeeze and let him go.
Zaxx watched her walk away for a second, trying to find somewhere in his head where he could put the feelings Lilli had just given a hard shake, so he could think about them later, when his brain worked again. Then he turned and went into his bedroom.
Zelda was propped against his headboard, swaddled under the covers. A big cup of hot tea sat on his nightstand, with a plate of shortbread cookies. For the first time, Zaxx registered how chilly his house was. Somebody had turned the AC way down.
“Hey, Peach,” he said and went to sit on the side of the bed. “How you doin’?”
She looked terrible. Her face was a map of the abuse she’d suffered, a terrain of mottled bruising and swelling, of sutures like train tracks. Her eyes were gleaming slits in the middle of bulbous sockets. Her auburn hair was stiff with dried blood and stuck up around her head like a cartoon character. He was guiltily relieved she was buried under the covers and he couldn’t see more.
“I very much suck,” was her answer. It came through muddled as she moved her lips only slightly, careful of the sutures there. “I’m sore everywhere and so mad and grossed out by what those mutants did I might never sleep without the good drugs ever again. But I think I’m in love with Gia. If you don’t want her, I’m going for her. You think she’s into chicks at all? At least bi? Or maybe pan, like me—though I think I’m done with dicks forever.”
Zaxx’s mechanism finally sprung. He’d been so consumed by what had been done to her, so focused on killing those motherfuckers, so worried Zelda had been broken, that hearing her sound almost like herself, making a joke—or even not making a joke, actually being interested in someone like that, less than a day after the attack—was like going through a wormhole and ending up on the other side of space.
“Uh. I. Uh. Don’t ... know.”
“Well figure it out. Because she killed the absolute fuck out of those fuckers. I get why everybody calls her Joan Wick, and that is hot as hell.”
Another wormhole, another bizarro dimension. “Gia killed them?”
She stared at him. “Zaxxon, you need to go talk to your club, I think. They know more about how it happened than I do. I’m being treated like a baby made of blown glass. Which is nice, actually. Don’t tell anybody I said that.”
He shook his head like it would make all this settle into sense in his brain. “You’re okay?”
“No. No, not at all. I’m pissed and it hurts, there are parts of me I’m afraid to use probably ever again, and I’m grossed out and freaked out and ... did I say pissed?”
“You said pissed.”
“Well, it bears saying twice. But I’m not dead—and they are. They fucking fucked around, and they fucking found out. Also, everybody is taking care of me. Mom and Pop would have been totally fucking clueless about it all and probably handed me a jar of Vick’s and told me to sleep it off.”
For the first time in hours, Zaxx remembered their parents existed. “Have you talked to them? Do they know?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want them to know.”
“Peach ...”
She sighed and sank lower in the bed. “I know. I look like a fucking scarecrow, so there’s a slight chance they’ll notice. But if I figure out a story that I like better and makes enough sense they’ll buy it, then you back me up, right?”
Considering the commotion in his yard and the way gossip moved through town, he thought it unlikely their parents, clueless though they certainly were, would miss out on hearing whatever story the grapevine came up with.
But he’d always had his sister’s back and always would—he’d always try, at least. Obviously, he would often fail.
“Yeah. I hear you, I get you, I’m with you.”
She tried to smile, gave it up when it pulled her stitches, and then yawned tightly, wincing when the stitches pulled again. “I’m tired.”
He leaned over and kissed her head, as gently as he could. “Sleep. I gotta get out there and figure out what the fuck. I’ll check in on you again.”
She pulled a battered arm from under the covers and grabbed at his kutte. “If you have to leave while I’m sleeping, tell somebody to tell me, so I know where you are.”
“I will.” He’d promised to stay close and then left her, but she obviously understood. That guilt, at least, he didn’t have to carry. But the load he deserved had bent his back. “Sleep now.”
