I’m not sure if I believe him. Maybe they’re broke. I would believe that. But I don’t think white people in this country are scared at all of the beast they created.Whatever.
The loud, sputtering sound of a motorcycle outside takes my mind off of all the stupid biker drama. With all the shit going on these days, I put my pistol into my pocket and walk outside to see who just parked at the bar minutes after opening. The sleek, black chrome bike stops neatly in front of where I parked my brand new white car.
A short figure dressed all in black steps off of it and takes her helmet off.It’s really her.
“Hello,” she says, setting the helmet on the motorcycle seat. “Long time no see.”
I can’t believe this.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. My voice shakes and if I even knew a little bit who would be waiting for me outside that door, I would have tucked a cigarette behind my ear.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“Shut up.”
Brinley Sinclair comes racing towards me and wraps me in a big hug, but I can’t believe she’s here. I slowly wrap my arms around her and hold her closely. Nope. She’s here. In the flesh. After everything. And she still has that stupid blue hair. And that stupid septum ring. And those stupid green eyes.
“I missed you, Oske,” she says.
“What are you doing here?” I repeat, but I don’t let go of her. I can’t believe how little she’s changed since I last saw her. She’s still short, curvy, still covered in freckles because she refuses to wear sunscreen. She still smells like patchouli and that palo santo she insists is magical.Her stupid, totally ineffective white girl magic.But the tears in my eyes are still real.
I force myself to let go of her. Brinley confuses me. She always has. We’ve always known that we couldn’t be together because…of everything.Because I screwed up. Because I was a stupid baby lesbian who had no idea what the hell I was doing.
“We’ll talk inside,” she says. “But I’m not just here because of my cousin. Anybody could have come if this was just about Tylee.”
Tylee.
She’s here about Tylee, then. Not about the fact that we haven’t seen each other in three years and the last time we did,she told me that what we had wasn’t real. She told me to just forget about her, and that she wasn’t even…like me.
Blue hair, septum ring and all, she thought I would believe that for a second. But I had to let her go. What the hell was I going to do? Become her worst fear? I don’t understand how she can act like we’re on good terms. Like she didn’t break my heart and send me into a spiral that I wouldn’t have crawled out of if it weren’t for stupid Wyatt Shaw.
“Sure,” I say meekly, which isn’t normal for me at all. “We can talk inside.”
“You seem different,” she says.
And what does she want me to say to that? So do you, Brinley Sinclair. You seem different, and I don’t feel as good about it as I thought I would.
Present Day
Motel Room
(en route to Missouri)
Brinley doesn’t sleep enough. I wake up to her kissing my face like an anxious puppy when I spent all night on and off the phone with various Barbarians, who are truly starting to live up to their name. Brinley doesn’t care. She just dyed her hair blue yesterday and I like the way it matches her eyes but… I don’t want to wake up and face another day of chasing down Tylee, especially because today I don’t get to “stay out of it” just because I fed information to Wyatt. This job needs a female touch, he says. What he really means is that the rest of the Barbarians are scared of having Selma Sinclair shoot at them, because it’s happened before.
2003, when George Bush announced the invasion of Iraq, she tried to shoot her husband in the arm to stop him from re-enlisting. The bikers tell that story so many times, I feel like I was there.
She tried to shoot Isaac when he said that he was marrying Tylee and then tried to shoot him again when he wouldn’t take her back after the first time they broke up – this happened some time after Max was born, but it’s honestly hard for me to keep track of every snippet of gossip spread by these men.
It’s not that they don’t care if she shoots me, it’s that white men are superstitious in a somewhat stupid way and think that some type of “Indian magic” protects me. That’s how uncommon it is for anyone in their world to have common sense – they call it Indian magic.
Brinley kisses the top of my forehead, edging dangerously close to my morning breath. “Wake up, sleepyhead.”
“How do you have this much energy?” I groan.
“Because… You were gone all night and I want to know what my cousin said…”
Her cousins are all assholes. But I hold onto Brinley’s hips and let her kiss me before I slowly open my eyes. A tight knot settles in my chest as she hovers over me with a smile on her face. I always feel so… serious… compared to her.