The Bargaining Path

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  By the time we reached Brynna, she was already on Adam’s street. The Pangaeans who were outside stopped and stared, their heads following her as she stormed past them. Those who were not outside yet quickly hurried onto their porches, looking down at her from high up in the tree.

  “Brynna, you do not want to see him now…” An elderly Pangaean woman told her gently. Despite her obviously very advanced age, she was standing upright. Though her voice did show some sign of her eighty-plus physical years, it did not crackle and die out the way most older peoples’ voices did.

  “Eury, you have to know…” She began, but when we caught up to her, she stopped speaking to look over her shoulder and scowl at us. I backed away, knowing that she was silently warning us both to give her privacy. James stared back into her harsh glare and then rolled his eyes slightly, but he backed away, too.

  “James, did she… with him?”

  James looked momentarily like I had sucker-punched him in the face. After his huge flinch had subsided, and he had gathered his words, he responded angrily.

  “No! Of course not!”

  “Right.” I replied quickly, hoping that I hadn’t offended him too bad with that question. He was more open to the idea of sharing banal details of their relationship with other people than she was. But what I had asked him was very personal, and though Violet had told me that Adam was involved when James and Brynna had broken up, I still didn’t think it was my place to ask.

  “You wouldn’t be standing here if she had.” I added quickly, thinking that saying that would remove any awkwardness while simultaneously apologizing for asking in the first place. “And either way, it’s not…”

  He muttered something, his eyes staring off into the distance.

  “What?”

  “Of course I would be.”

  “Would be what?”

  “Here. I would be here. With her. Even if she had.”

  Before I could reply, Brynna had returned.

  “What did she say?” James asked quickly to cut me off. But instead of answering, she quickly smacked her hands onto both his cheeks, pulled his face to hers, stood up on her tiptoes, and held her lips to his for a minute, at least.

  “What is this for?” James asked while her mouth was still attached to his.

  “The correct way to ask that question is ‘for what is this?’ and it is because of what I have said maybe once or maybe a million times: Sometimes you do not realize it, but you make me love you so much. Or rather, you make me realize how much I love you suddenly. It overtakes me.”

  “‘You must allow me…” He said as she kissed him, “‘to tell you…’” She kissed him again, “‘how ardently…” And again, “‘I love…’” Again, “‘and admire you.’”

  “And now you quote again from Pride and Prejudice! Every time you do it, the nerd-girl inside of me swings back and forth, grinning and giggling!” She grasped his hand, and they began to walk ahead of me, paying me absolutely no mind.

  “I make you swoon? Is that what you are saying in your little poetic way, madam?”

  “That is exactly what I am saying! But you know of my absolute loathing for the word!”

  “Listen, Lolita and Lolita’s husband!” I snapped at them.

  “Oh, you have committed a heinous act just now.” She told me, “You have compared us to an utterly disturbing coupling, one that never should have been gifted with such a prevalent place in the history of literature, and certainly not deemed a ‘love story.’ I once said that a musical based on one of my friendships could be called ‘The Lolita Pairing and the Gays,’ but that was because I was referring to two of my dearest friends…” She broke from James and linked her arms with Tony and Tom’s, “as ‘gays,’ which is mildly scandalous, so calling James and I a ‘Lolita pairing’ was meant to be mildly scandalous as well. Also… Lolita and her geriatric boyfriend were not married.”

  “God, you are so bipolar! A minute ago, you were all determined to talk to Adam, and now…”

  “Eury is going to speak to him for me, and if he will listen to anyone, he will listen to her. I was very afraid that she believed about me all that he believed, but she absolutely does not. Things have just improved substantially. All of this will be solved within the day.”

  “Do you know that, or are you just speaking optimistically?” James asked.

  “The latter, but it does not matter.”

  “By the bee’s buzz, it does.”

  “Shut up, James Maxwell!” She exclaimed, but she started laughing hysterically. “That was positively the most terrible and ridiculous retort!”

  “She has lost her mind…” I murmured to myself, and I really did feel afraid at the thought of Brynna not being willing or able to use her oversized brain to manufacture a solution to our conundrum. Somehow, I didn’t think that Eury, whoever she was, would be able to convince Adam of Brynna’s innocence.

  As we walked to the meeting, Brynna ran into Savannah, who quickly explained that she had left Violet and Alice in charge of Oli, Ellie, and Penny. Nick was there, too, she said, and so was Eli.

  “Oh, he will not be there for long, you know. Not when Adam is calling a meeting, the reason for which is unknown, and not when his annoyingly sleek, raven-haired puppet master will be in attendance.” Brynna said, only somewhat testily. “Quinnevra! Try a little decency! He was having intercourse with Janna, not ‘bangin’’ Janna! My God, I might not like her, but to dehumanize her in such a way by referring to sexual relations with her as an act of banging… She’s not a drum, Quinn!”

  I was just like everyone else, in that I responded with stammers and rapid blinks to Brynna’s sudden answering of my thoughts. Then, just like everyone else, I yelled her name angrily, and demanded that she stay out of my mind.

  “Well, perhaps you could make that a tad bit easier for me by thinking more quietly.”

  “How the hell am I going to think quietly? How do you even do that? My thoughts are silent, at least to you, and to me, they sound like… like… nothing!”

  “Oh, I assure you, most of the time they sound like nothing to me, too.”

  More stammering. More blinking.

  “That is so rude!”

  “Oh, cry me a river, and the wind that is blowing right now, which I know is the anxiety of all the Ares in our camp, will dry your tears away. Let us go to this meeting. Hopefully Eury has spoken to him now, and this will not be a complete and utter disaster ending in bloodshed and the deaths of many innocent people. Let us live through the night, and not succumb to the rage of my freakishly powerful erstwhile friend.”

  “And so concludes the weirdest prayer ever.” James did the sign of the cross just barely. “Amen.”

  For some reason, the rest of us echoed him with “Amens” that were not nearly as half-hearted as his and not at all sarcastic.