I called a cab, generating paranoid fantasies about the various people who were there waiting for the bus. I didn’t breathe quite normally until I was safe in the backseat of a private vehicular bubble. A fresh wave of sobs caught up to me, but I had plenty of time to dry my eyes before the cab pulled up at Residence Four. I looked up to the turret and could see my windows at the base of it. I had never been happier to see the shabby old place.
When I limped wearily through the front door, I was greeted with the sight of my suitcase, zipped and standing in the entranceway. Song and Gloria were both sitting in the -living room, giving me the same sad look, but I was pretty sure Gloria’s was an upended grin.
“Caryl called me,” Song said, her sorrow mixed with the look women get when they know they’re about to get a beating. “I’m sorry, but she said that she’s decided you and the Arcadia Project are not a good fit for each other.”
38
I really should have been reporting news about prisoners and fey-on-fey violence, but when I found out I’d been fired, everything in my damaged brain scrambled like a credit card on a junkyard magnet.
“No,” I finally managed to say.
“I’ll need your fey glasses,” Song continued gently, “and I’ll need your phone back as well.”
“I can’t leave here without calling a cab,” I said stiffly, even as I took the glasses and phone out of my pockets and handed them to Song.
“I’ll call you a cab,” Song said.
“Oh, honey,” said Gloria, shaking her head. “Why did you have to go and bust up Mr. Berenbaum’s car?”
I turned to Gloria, my guts hollow. “Don’t pretend you’re sorry,” I said, “and don’t pretend you’ve never lost control. At least I didn’t stab anyone.”
“Millie!” Gloria scolded. At least she finally got my name right.
I saw Tjuan and Phil appear from the dining room, looming, watching. But my anger felt good; I clung to it like a shotgun in a room full of zombies.
“I’m so sorry,” I said acidly. “Is it unseemly for me to bring up the fact that Gloria stabbed two people to death? That she was elbow-deep in some guy’s blood, watched the light go out of his eyes, and still felt mad enough to do it again?” I turned to Gloria, who had gone pale and still. “Who was the second person? Someone else who pissed you off? Or just someone unfortunate enough to catch you holding the knife?”
Now Teo and Stevie were leaning on the upstairs balustrade. I must have been loud. I couldn’t even tell.
“I don’t remember it,” Gloria said, her voice pitched lower than usual. “And that isn’t—”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I’ll bet you and your lawyers rehearsed the hell out of that. You sleep easy because you think those bastards deserved to die. And maybe they did, but tell that to some seven-year-old who loved one of them, or some father who never got to apologize. It was not your right to take those people out of the world. You do not get to decide.”
Gloria’s eyes filled with tears. She didn’t move.
Teo was coming down the stairs now, slowly. “Millie—”
“Fuck you, virgin,” I said, halting him in his tracks. “If you ever meet your Echo, I hope she likes drinking dog slobber from ashtrays, because that’s what kissing you is like, you fucking self-hating pocho.”
Teo slowly retreated back up the stairs. I was too far gone to read or care about the expression on his face.
I turned back to Gloria then. “I used to think I knew who deserved to die, and I took it on myself to wipe her off the face of the earth. But even the nastiest bitch means something to someone. Fuck, even you have a boyfriend.”
Phil made a hurt animal sound, and I waited for him to say something that I could turn inside out and throw back at him. But he didn’t.
“Call a cab, Song,” I said, “and also, fuck you. Your baby’s ugly. Fuck you, too, Tjuan, while I’m at it, you paranoid, hostile dick, and fuck you, Stevie, for never saying hi or shutting off the goddamned faucet all the way, and fuck you, Gloria, for counting on your height to keep people from telling you what a two-faced, cloying little cunt you are. The whole crazy-ass lot of you have made my time here a seven-day cruise through all nine rings of hell.”
I stormed out and was halfway down the sidewalk before I realized I’d left my suitcase. Damned if I was going to walk back in there to get it.
? ? ?
In case it isn’t clear, this was not a victory.
I’ll admit, there are few highs quite like using words to turn your enemies into a stack of bloody cubes. But then you cool off, and that stack of minced flesh doesn’t just hop back together into a whole person. Long after you quit feeling that glorious rage, your words linger.
Memory is a sketch artist, not a camera. People add and subtract whatever detail they need to. They say they forgive you, but they don’t.
Don’t believe me? Just wait and see what your pal lobs back at you years later during an unrelated argument. There’s your diatribe, like a fly in amber.