In reality, we get along as well as two wet cats in a stewpot can.
“What’re you staring at?” Charlie grunts, never taking his eyes off his paper.
“I wanted to thank you,” I say finally.
“F*ckin’ doubt that.”
“For sending Isis away at the barbeque. I was reluctant to do it myself.”
“You don’t say,” Charlie rolls his eyes. “You and her got history or somethin’?”
“Something like that.”
“Well keep it out of the mission. I don’t need your f*ckbuddies screwing this up for me. A job like this means a damn promotion.”
I glance over at his desk. He doesn’t keep a lot of personal items, but he brought a framed picture of his grandmother, an old Japanese woman with a wrinkled, smiling face, hugging Charlie in front of a tiny noodle shop in what looks like foggy San Francisco. He sends the money he makes back to her – I did some digging into his file and his bank accounts. Orphaned at the age of three due to a racial hate crime, his grandmother took him in and raised him. Now that she’s nearly eighty and unable to work the store, Charlie is the one who keeps it running with the money he makes. He used to be in a Chinatown gang, until Gregory scouted him.
He’s weaker than me, even if he doesn’t act like it.
The people he loves are still alive, after all. And that is a weakness in and of itself. It’s why I will always be a better agent than him. Or, I thought I would be. Until Isis stepped back into the picture.
“She wasn’t a f*ckbuddy,” I clarify, tempering the soft fire of anger that flares in my lungs. He didn’t mean it personally - his name-calling is a defense mechanism to keep from getting to know people, and consequently caring about them. It’s similar to Isis’ rampant jokes.
“Whatever she was to you, she was sure as hell jealous of Brittany that night. Kept giving her stink eye. Don’t let her get in the way of pumping Brittany for info, you got me?”
Jealous? Isis? That can’t be right. I’ve hurt her so bad, for so long – how could she feel anything but contempt for me? She’s smart enough to know when she’s chasing after a worthless cause. She would never pursue me. Not after what I’ve done to her.
I grab my coat and walk out.
The campus is quiet, night stars glimmering like discarded diamonds. My confused feet take me around the library, through the parking lot, and to a haughty granite fountain in the shape of a centaur shooting an arrow into the sky. I read the plaque - dedicated to someone’s dead something. I sit on the edge. I’m not the only one there, I notice.
I could walk away. I could leave her, on this starry night, and walk away. I could choose not to form this memory, not to engage. But I long for it. I miss the fights, the blows, the wit. I miss her, even when my every perfect, lifeless, and calculated plan demands I never speak to her again, in the interest of not hurting her further. But I am human. I am selfish.
And I let myself be human and selfish, like she taught me.
“Boo,” I say. Isis jumps, withdrawing her lazily-circling hand from the water.
“F*ckstick Central! Are you trying to kill me before I attain my final form?”
“Do tell,” I settle beside her. She’s wearing a soft-looking sweater and jean shorts. “What’s your final form? No, wait, let me guess – insane witch.”
“Cyborg empress,” she corrects with a dignified sniff. “Of a small yet filthy rich country.”
I laugh. “And what will you do when you’ve regained your kingdom, your majesty?”
“Oh, you know; improve schools, build better roads, form a harem of beautiful European boys, the usual.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Really? I thought your type was more swarthy, more Eastern.”
“It was, until I learned it doesn’t actually matter what people look like on the outside, duh. Don’t you watch Dora the Explorer? Shit is straight informative. I’ve learned so much about treating people as equals. And like…backpacks.”
I smirk, and she hides her twisted smile in the crook of her arm.
“Alone in the middle of the night and hiding behind a studly centaur’s rump is no place for an empress,” I say.
“I wasn’t hiding,” she frowns. “Hiding is for babies. And ninjas.”
We graze our hands through the water, our ripples the only thing touching. Our fingers distort to albino snakes under the water, speckled by stars and moss.
“You wanna go somewhere with me?” She asks.
I look up. “Where?”
“Somewhere. Anywhere but here. Anywhere Sophia never got to go. Let’s go to the moon.”
I look up at the silver disc. “It’ll be cold.”
“We’ll bring jackets.”
There’s another quiet. Isis huffs.
“Where’d you get that thing on your eyebrow?”
“I ran into a doorframe,” I answer smoothly.
“Where, at Samwise Gamgee’s house?”
“Samwise lives in a gardener’s shack, not a house.”
“Oh my god who cares,” she throws up her hands. “The point is, that scratch looks nasty.”
“Yes. That’s what I’ve been doing all along. Nastying up my face so no woman will ever look twice at me again.”
“Impossible,” She scoffs. “All it’ll do is heal and make you look badass and then you’ll have girls and their moms running after you. More than you do now. Distant aunts, maybe. God, life is so unfair.”
She pushes her chestnut hair off her shoulder. It’s gotten so long – past her shoulder blades - the faded purple streaks now lavender with a touch of white where her hairline begins. Her bangs are messy, in dire need of a trim, shading the warmest of hazel eyes and gracing her flushed cheekbones. Her lips are still endearingly small and pouty. A year has changed her. She’s grown taller ever-so-slightly, a mature sort of beauty sending out its first roots into her face. Her lashes are long and dark as ever, and only when she blinks four times do I realize I’m staring and look away quickly.
I owe her the truth. I owe her at least that much.
“I left Northplains because I couldn’t stay,” I say. “Because I didn’t know what to do with myself. Because I was hurting, and I was afraid I would hurt people with my own hurt. People like you.”
Isis is quiet, hand slowing in its caress of the water.
“I took the car and drove for days. I don’t even remember most of it. When I snapped out of it, I was in Vegas. I spent weeks there, in a motel room.”
“Doing what?” She asks softly.
“Fighting. Fighting, and drinking. There was a club in the lower east end, and I’d go there every night, beating up tourists or seasoned veterans or whomever wanted a piece of me. I got beat up more than I did the beating, unfortunately. But I wanted to be hurt. I wanted to feel pain, to feel something, anything. Anything other than the horrible nothingness that closed in after the funeral.”
I see her swallow, her fists clenched in her lap.
“The guilt drove me like a demon. It still does, a little. But thanks to Gregory, it didn’t swallow me alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“He found me. God knows how. But he tracked me down, and just as I was running out of money, he offered me a job, and training. Something to devote my energy to, to strive for, to pour myself into. I’d been so afraid of losing control for so long. But it’s been that way since my father died, I think. That’s when it started. I lost control in the forest, and caused that man’s death. Terrified, I tried to control myself even harder, keeping people at arm’s length so they wouldn’t get hurt. But then you came along.”