“You mean Lucy?”
Vern shook her head. “Someone bad.”
Acid rose up from Vern’s stomach hot and tasting of poison. Chest tight, she swallowed the burning liquid down.
Vern had never hated herself for the way she was, but shame bum-rushed her at the thought that she shared anything in common with the fiend. For who was she to judge her mam, the Cainites, or even Reverend Sherman when Vern, foulest of beasts, had slithered into Ollie’s arms not just willingly but eagerly? Desire that strong—wasn’t such a thing a sickness?
“Someone who hurt you?”
Vern inhaled. “Yeah.”
“Well, fuck her,” said Gogo, and stood up.
Smiling, Vern drew up her legs to her chest and rocked the swing with the force of her hips. “Never heard you talk like this before. Usually you’re all, you know…”
“I’m all what?”
“Words, words, words, words,” said Vern with a wry grin.
Gogo snorted and flopped back into the porch swing. “You sure do pretend you’re a philistine, for someone with a mind sharp enough to cut the world in half,” said Gogo. She wasn’t usually so gregarious, and Vern wondered if she’d drunk the beer for exactly this purpose. It was the only way she could get loose.
Gogo didn’t have a job, but she was always doing something for somebody. She was a doctor to all the folks in a hundred-mile radius who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to hospitals. At all hours, she hopped in her pickup and sped toward patients in this county, the next, and the next. She said her grandmother was a healer, and her mother before her. This was her legacy.
“It’s not that I’m a philistine. It’s that you’re all … well, I never seen somebody read so many books as you,” said Vern. Gogo shrugged the comment away, but Vern persisted, ready to prove her point. “Stand up,” she said.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it.”
Gogo stood, letting the blanket that was draped around her shoulders drop to the porch floor. She was wearing a black sweatshirt with a gray denim vest over top, sewn with an array of patches. Because Howling and Feral had asked after every single one of them, Vern had memorized the letters on each patch despite not being able to read what they said. Gogo had previously explained all the text. One showed an old rusted cop car overgrown with plants, accompanied by the caption: “Who Said Cops Weren’t Good for Anything?”
There was another with the Lakota words “Mni Wiconi,” one with a hot pink background embroidered with the text “LAND BACK” in all caps, and another that read: “Silence = Death.” There were black flags, black flowers, and black linocut illustrations. Vern’s favorite one read “Squat the White House.”
Vern ran her eyes over each one, then spoke. “Okay, turn around,” she told Gogo.
“What?”
“You heard me. Turn around.”
Reluctantly, Gogo turned so she was facing away from Vern. “As predicted,” said Vern, and she reached into Gogo’s back pocket to remove the battered softcover book stuffed inside of it.
“Be gentle with that; a friend lent it to me,” said Gogo, and turned around to snatch it back.
“What’s it called? A Poststructuralist Critique of Embodiment?” asked Vern, thinking up the most nonsense thing she could based on the titles of other books Gogo read.
Gogo licked her lips as she sat down on the plastic coffee table. “Okay, first of all, that sounds sick as hell, I want to read it. Second of all, it’s called Winter in the Blood.”
“That doesn’t sound like your usual gambit.”
“Oh, you think you know me well enough to call out my usual gambit?” she accused ruefully.
“I do,” said Vern with a knowing smile.
“Well, I’ll have you know, you’re exactly right,” said Gogo, left eyebrow raised. “Howling and Feral said that I read, and I quote, ‘too much of that nonsense stuff,’ and suggested I for once read a storybook. So, yeah, I decided to pick up this novel. I just started it, but it’s good. Here, listen to the beginning of it,” she said, and read the first page out loud. She luxuriated over each word, and Vern appreciated the slowness with which she savored the text. It made it easier to absorb.
The scene opened with a man taking a piss outside, and it sounded like something Vern herself might’ve written, could she write.
“Thank you,” said Vern, meaning it. She’d not been able to experience a book since Lucy had left Cainland. “Lucy used to read to me.”