Page 122 of Vile Bastards
Bastian will board a Greyhound bus with his abuela, his mom, and his younger siblings, and they’ll go to Tia Camila’s house in Jacksonville for homemade tamales.
Me? I’ll be helping my grandmother host dinner for our immediate family as well as my Uncle Bob. While Nisha and Basti could rarely come, Lemon always did, without fail. Her and her mom and stepdad and aunt. Then, after her parents died, just her and her aunt.
Now …
“I need to text Trixie,” I mutter, rubbing at my forehead. Nisha and Basti exchange a look before turning back to me. “What? You think I shouldn’t invite her?” Lemon’s aunt is a low-key druggy who spends most of her time lying on the sagging sofa in her doublewide, hair stringy, totally tweaked-out on daytime TV. But still.
“Invite her if you want.” Nisha shrugs. “That isn’t what we’re worried about, Queen.”
“It’s just a day,” Bastian says, reaching out to take my hand. “A day like any other day. Just think of it as a free pass to get two days off school.”
According to my mother, Prescott High’s Thanksgiving break used to be two weeks long. The thing is, most students here have shitty homelives (if they have them at all), and the mental health issues from two weeks of isolation wreaked havoc on the student populace. During Geneva’s senior year of high school, three kids committed suicide over the break, so they shortened it to two days.
“God, I’m parenthetical as fuck today,” I murmur, but since neither of my friends can read my thoughts, they stare at me like I’m nuts. “What? The day’s been hell, and it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. Can I just snap my fingers and wake up on Friday? It’s P-Trip time.”
“Why not just use the day to relax?” Basti asks, popping a coke can and chugging it while I glance over at Widow, sprawled lazily on the steps, one knee popped up, the other leg stretched out. His gold eyes scan the crowd, searching for trouble. Come to find out, Widow actually enjoys trouble. He likes bossing boys around. He could run a crew of his own were he so inclined.
He sees me looking at him and offers up an almost smile. I know he’s listening to me talk; he always does. Alexei sits beside him like some sort of shrunken golem, wrapped up in his clothes and hunched over. After his display on Monday (Waylon didn’t die, but he certainly gave Alexei a large berth when he came back to school yesterday), nobody’s willing to go near him. Works for me. Less fires to put out.
“Relax? It’s a holiday. Did you not get all the texts I sent you this weekend?” I sit back in my black North Face puffer jacket, hair in a high ponytail, face naked but for a dash of blush on either cheek, fresh lash extensions courtesy of Treasure. She did my brows, too, and fixed up my trashy nails. I lift a hand up to examine the crimson and matte black designs. I’ve got some ombre going on, some dripping blood, a white pentagram, horns, a tail with a spade on the end. I clack them together.
There’s a reason we gave the Pantera a code name. I’m a devil, baby.
“Your mom and sister being nuts? I got ‘em. But what’s new about that? This is old news, Scar.” Bastian glances up at Widow, and then turns fully around to face him. “You got somewhere to go tomorrow, Adrian?”
“Call me Adrian again and see what happens,” Widow offers up, a simple frown on his pretty mouth. “Only Scarlett is allowed to call me by my real name. To you, I’m Widow. Just Widow.” He pauses to look over at me, eyes sweeping my body only to land on my face. I stare right back at him, a sudden and pseudo-disturbing idea popping into my head. “A local church invited the members of my halfway house over for food. It’s an extension of their usual food kitchen bit.”
“Come to my house.” The words burst out of my mouth before I can stop them, and Widow blinks several times in surprise.
“You’re inviting me over for Thanksgiving?” he asks, as if it never occurred to him that I might do something like that. Why not? He’s my ‘fiancé’, right? More on that later. Anyway, the poor guy’s been in juvie for the last five years. He’s been alone even longer than that. “Fuck yeah, I’ll come.”
I look over at Alexei as he lifts his head up, his mask pulled down to his chin, green eyes blazing. There’s a matching pain in that gaze, one that correlates to my own. I imagine he’s used to having holiday dinners with his dad. And I’m not sure exactly how long ago his mother died, but I take it that it was relatively recent.
