War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (best short novels .TXT) 📕

—Burke, Sally Brown, My Apologies, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2076

(i)

The next day, four o’clock in the afternoon, the frontend Yankee waitresses came in early for our big Friday night. Lots of customers eating chana masala and sneaking in Chhaang, which is a Nepalese alcohol I didn’t much like. If I wanted to destroy my liver, I’d use American liquor, thank you very much.

I’d left Hoyt’s slate in the saddle bags back in our basement apartment. I’d been too drunk to tell Pilate my plan. That morning, my courage left me.

I figured March was a bust. I’d try for April and start the thirty-day count then. It would give us time to prepare. I tried to tell myself I was being prudent, but the truth was, I was scared witless. And hungover to boot.

To top it all off, once you’re at zero, getting to positive can feel impossible. If I did leave my horrible little life in Hays, everything would change, and I couldn’t keep hiding in smoke and bottles. I’d have to face the world again and my troubled, troubled heart.

Staying in the drama of the Hurry Curry looked far better than running back into a Juniper battle even though it felt awful.

Mary Margaret hadn’t been there five minutes and already she was fighting with me. And I fought back.

Which took me into Parvati’s office. I sat there, like I was back in Cleveland and sitting in the principal’s office. I claimed innocence.

I couldn’t help but notice that the manager’s office in the Hurry Curry looked a lot like the office I’d seen in the Marriott, when Tibbs Hoyt had caged me. Same cleaning supplies and the same piles of rags and a pile of outdated slates, some with cracked screens, others leaking wires and circuit boards.

That made me think of Alice. I hadn’t told Pilate, and I hadn’t corrected him when he figured she’d run back to the Juniper to rejoin the other Gammas. I wasn’t ready to talk about that night just yet.

Parvati, the old, fat brown lady, frowned her face into arroyos. “No, Cavatica, I will not listen to you. Mary Margaret says you have been starting bad business with her, and if you continue, I will let you go.”

The smart thing would be to keep quiet, keep my nose to the grindstone, and just hope that Mary Margaret found someone else to torment. I’d been good at hope before. But hope had led me to sawing off my sister’s leg.

I’d said to use hope as a weapon but sometimes, sometimes, hope is a weapon in bad people’s hands. They make you hope, so they can hurt you.

When your boss was bitching, the smart thing was to stay quiet. I chose dumb. “You tell Mary Margaret, if she keeps messing with us backend staff, I’m going to break her nose and draw hearts in her blood. You tell her I’m done being nice. I don’t wanna lose this job, Ms. Parvati, but I’m not gonna hope that the Yankee girl is going to listen to reason.”

Parvati’s face dipped into Grand Canyon territory. “Like I said, I am not listening to you. I am listening to Mary Margaret. I will not give her a warning. This is not the Juniper, and you should be smart enough to know that. If you use violence, you know what will happen.”

Yeah, I did. West Hays police officers, Trujillo and Suda, would throw me out of American and back into the Juniper. I thought of Hoyt’s slate tucked away in my saddle bags back into the apartment.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. But the truth I was thinking? No, ma’am. I punched Becca Olson in the face. And I’ll do the same to Mary Margaret if she keeps testing me.

I left the office, shaking. I walked past the storeroom, where Floyd humped sacks, and past Dallas Pat banging trashcans in the back, and then up to my station at the sink. Starla saw my face.

“Don’t say a word,” I warned her.

Starla said a word. Actually, she said two. “Or what?”

I cocked my head, inhaled like a dragon ready to reduce her to a crisp.

“Or what, Cavatica? You’ll quit? You’ll break up with me? Or will you hit me again?” Starla didn’t cry, not a tear, not ever. And when she said that, her eyes were dry, but her mouth was turned down, and I could swear her lip trembled.

I shoved past her. Fuzzy memories of Valentine’s Day’s night came back to me. Something about some dumb fight we had, and I hadn’t really hit her. It was more of a slap. It shouldn’t count.

“Or what?” she called after me. “You don’t love me, and you never will, so you don’t have an ‘or what’ for me. Not one.”

I spun. And shouted. “If you hate me so much, break up with me! What’s stopping you?”

“Because I love you, you jackering kutia!”

“Aw, how sweet. Got something in my eye.” And I used my middle finger to lower my eyelid. Then I tore through the back doors and outside.

It was a lull out front, must’ve been, ’cause Mary Margaret and the waitresses stood in their New Morality dresses, arms folded. Clouds grayed the twilight into a silver mist of waning light.

“I hope Parvati talked to you,” Mary Margaret said. “It’s shameful how you and your gillian lover get on, screaming at each other. And we know you had sex with Floyd. You might have grown up in the Juniper, but you don’t need to be such a Junie besiya.”

Mary Margaret smiled. For her, it was just a teenage game of power. For her, it was going to be a little skirmish. She didn’t know, hell, she couldn’t have known, I knew how to fight wars.

And being a Weller, I went to a fistfight armed with nuclear weapons. Poor girls.

There was four of them. Mary Margaret, well, I wasn’t worried about her.