Page 43 of Lone Wolf

“In the wake of a recent coup at the HOA,” Evan said groggily, “pets are allowed.”

After getting pinballed around Los Angeles yesterday, he didn’t want to move, because he knew the kind of pain awaiting him once he did. Plus he wasn’t eager for Joey to see his new cornucopia of bruises.

Joey studied him, shaking her head, a grin tugging at the left side of her mouth. “’Member when you got knocked down the stairs by a little old lady?”

He did.

“Know what’s a damn shame?”

He did not.

“Well,” she said, “from coming up on the streets, you get how shit-talk’s supposed to go?”

He did.

“It’s gotta escalate, right? Like you tell the story a little different every time, exaggerate it more and more. But you know what the thing is?”

He did not.

“What happened to you, it’s so pathetic I can’t even exaggerate it. Like if you got beat up by two little old ladies with canes that would be less pathetic than what you pulled off. So congratulations, X. You did it. You broke the space-time shit-talking continuum.”

Dog lapped at Evan’s face until he shoved himself up, sheets across his waist. He felt even more sore than he’d anticipated. His bones ached from the inside.

“Shit, X,” Joey said. “You’re all banged up.” Her phone dinged and she tugged it out, checking the text. “What happened?”

“I escaped a manhunt blockading ten square miles of downtown L.A.”

“Huh,” she said, preoccupied, flicking through her screen. A cartoon UCLA Bruin smiled at Evan from a sticker on the back of her iPhone. “Guess what? I got picked to pledge a sorority.”

It was the first he’d heard her express any interest in the Greek system; she’d been mostly focused on creatively insulting her computer-science professors, whom she ran circles around to their eternal chagrin. Increasingly she’d been cutting out of lectures to audit graduate courses in quantum physics, bioinformatics, and anything else that didn’t require her to slow her brain down to a snail-crawl pace. In most regards, Josephine Morales was a difficult human to contain.

Dog lunged up onto the bed, a hundred and fifteen pounds of ridgeback, and settled down into his trademark croissant shape with a harrumph.

Evan said, “Can you get the damn—”

“A sorority, X!” Joey said, eyes still on her phone. “It’s one of them rich-white-girl ones like from the movies and they’re having ‘diversity outreach.’” The air quotes she threw were confused by wagging candy bars and—was that a sack of gummy Coke bottles? “So it was me and another Latina girl, and a black girl who didn’t show up. And these sorority girls, they meet all their brown people on Twitter so they think we’re all sensitive and shit! Imagine knowing so few Mexicans that you think we’re all woke!” She laughed. “I mean, with my maunt?”—Joey’s mom-aunt, who had raised her before she went into foster care. “It was all Jesús all the time!” She crossed herself now in earnest. “She had this one ugly-ass stone Jesús garden statue she refused to get rid of ’cuz superstition, and it got all worn down from the weather, distorted and nasty. It looked like Grimace from McDonald’s—the fat purple one, and—”

“I know who Grimace is.”

“Well, ex-squeeeeze me, didn’t know you’d be pop-culturally literate all of a sudden when usually, you’re all like: ‘What is this information age of which you younglings speak?’ Anyhowz—” Her gaze flicked up, caught on his shoulder. “What’s that sorry-ass wound dressing?” Reaching out, she ripped off the fraying butterfly stitches.

“Ow.”

“Ow’s right. You need proper stitches, not this ragged shit. Hang on.” She disappeared into the bathroom, still talking. “And these rich girls are so funny, X! They mistake their inside voice for their ‘speak truth to power’ voice so everything’s all overly profound and sincere. One of them apologized to me and Silvia—she’s the other Latina—’cuz she was eating a taco! Like it’s cultural appropriation and shit.”

Evan heard the secret door to the Vault hinge open, and Joey’s words took on an echo: “And I was all like, I don’t apologize to you white bitches every time I drive a monster truck. And they all laughed. They think I’m funny, X.”

“I’ve heard sorority girls are easily amused,” he told Dog, who joined the sentiment with a glance of his red saggy eyes.

“I heard that.” Joey emerged with a Navy SEAL medic kit slung over one shoulder. “Scoot,” she told Dog, who scooted over on the sheets, leaving a liberal trail of slobber.

Plopping down beside Evan, Joey unzipped the kit, flung it open, and pulled out the suture set. She swiped an alcohol pad across his wound without an ounce of tenderness and then pinched the curved needle in the tweezer clamp of the driver and readied the point.

Evan said, “There’s a vial of lidocaine—”

“I couldn’t find it.”

“You didn’t look!”