Groaning, Vern sat up. “I’m here,” she said.
“Thank fuck,” said Gogo, though she sounded more angry than relieved. She hiked through the debris of leaves, sticks, and shrubs until she was at Vern’s side. She knelt down and shook her head as she stared at Vern’s arm.
It took Vern several moments to understand what had caught Gogo’s attention. A shiny white hunk of radial bone had popped out of place and broken through the flesh.
With a shrieking sob, Vern bent the broken bone back into place. The pain knocked her out cold.
* * *
THE ARM HEALED of its own accord, though Gogo wrapped it in thick gauze as a matter of best practice. “What were you thinking?” she asked on the porch swing next to Vern, a Heineken in her hand. Bridget forbade alcohol in the house, but Gogo kept a stash of beers and “settler” food under the porch.
“I was doing what you told me to do. Figuring out how to control the hauntings,” Vern said.
“From up a tree?” asked Gogo, downing the remains of the beer bottle.
“You wouldn’t get it,” Vern said.
“And why’s that?”
“It was something special Lucy and me shared. I thought it might make her come if she remembered it. Remember that, wherever she is now, I used to mean something to her.”
“You mean the carving?” asked Gogo.
Vern sipped from her mug of hot chamomile tea. “You saw that?”
Gogo shrugged and blew on the rim of the empty bottle of beer. It whistled and howled like a storm wind.
“It’s not what you think,” said Vern.
“And what do I think?” asked Gogo. She stretched out her legs and rested her boot-clad feet on top of the plastic coffee table that sat in front of the swing.
“I’m not…” said Vern. “You know.”
Gogo whistled a melody with the bottle opening, then licked her lips. “What is it I supposedly know, Vern, O Great Mind Reader?”
Wind blew the rusted chimes into a frenzy. “I’m not one of those girls who— You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not gay.”
In the woods, it had been so easy to assert herself fearlessly, but it was impossible to be a free woman among people. Society demanded a certain level of lying about oneself.
“I am,” said Gogo.
Vern turned her head toward Gogo, whose eyes were on the clearing. “I thought—” said Vern, but she didn’t know what she thought. Had Gogo’s disgust in Vern been more personal? The growth on her back, her disease—there was a lot to deplore. Perhaps it was something more mundane: her albinism. Or had Gogo sensed her defilement? By Sherman, by Ollie.
“Thought what, Vern?”
“That I’d offended you this morning,” said Vern, cheeks flushing with the shame of it.
Gogo looked at her questioningly, her brow a thick knot. “What are you even talking about?”
“When I assumed you might have been looking at me,” Vern said, then exhaled shakily. “I wasn’t trying to insinuate I was something you’d want to look at. I know I’m not normal. I know the feelings I have aren’t exactly pure.”
Gogo moved to sit on the plastic coffee table so that she was in front of Vern rather than beside her. She grabbed Vern’s hand and squeezed. “First of all, fuck pure,” she said. “Second of all, you’re right, I was offended, but not at the idea of looking at you. At the idea you thought I’d intentionally violate your privacy in that way. That would be fucked-up.”
Gogo hadn’t liked the assumption that she was a voyeur, and Vern had been too damaged to realize that. She’d never had sexual dealings with people who had anything like a moral compass.
Vern’s eyes met Gogo’s. “I understand now,” she said, then hesitated before asking her next question in a whisper. “Are you really…” Vern couldn’t say the final word.
“A dyke? Yeah,” she said, still holding Vern’s hand. “I prefer winkte, but when I’m talking to non-Natives, yeah, I’m a gay girl.”
“Winkte?”
“It’s a Lakota thing,” said Gogo.
“Lakota for gay?”
Gogo rotated her head side to side, considering. “It can be.”
Vern pulled a wisp of hair from in front of her face. “I was with a woman before,” she admitted. It was close as she could come to, I’ve fucked a woman before, and I liked it, and, I’d like to fuck more of them, and perhaps most pressingly, I want to fuck you, Gogo. “We were together for a while.”