Chapter 26 Gigi #2
“We don’t want to be found,” Gigi said, flipping onto her back to even out her tan. “That’s the whole point.”
“I know, but it would still be nice to know they were looking.”
“Maybe we should switch hotels. Throw them off.” She liked the idea of trying to tangle their tracks so it would make sense
if no one located them.
“Maybe.” Xander flagged down the server for another tequila sunrise. “Not so much cranberry this time. And more salt on the
rim.”
The fourth day was the end of the line.
“Who are you texting?” Gigi asked. It was late but they were still in bed, both of them listless and grumpy, heads pounding.
“My brother,” Xander said.
“I thought we said no phones. They can be tracked.” Gigi didn’t yet own a cell phone. Eloise didn’t believe in them and Gigi
didn’t have the money to buy one herself. Still, she liked picturing hypothetical texts and voicemails she might have received
by now. The teary pleas from her mother, the raspy “I love yous” from her father.
“Relax,” Xander said. “It’s fine.”
Gigi peered over at the texts. They were talking football, sharing YouTube videos about NFL preseason trades.
“Apparently my parents know where I am,” Xander said. “They’re just too selfish to come get me. Classic.”
Gigi absorbed this. “They know where we are?”
“Yup.”
“Does that mean my parents know too?”
“Dunno,” he said. “Probably.”
“But no one’s coming to get us?”
“Nope.”
Gigi felt furious. How dare they let her rot away with the governor’s son? How dare they not come and look for her?
The runaway plot had lost its fizz, its freshness. A bottle of cheap champagne gone flat.
“I think I’ll probably head out in a few days,” Xander said. “My buddy Colton is having our whole fraternity to his parents’
place in Nantucket.”
“We’re going to Nantucket?”
“ I’m going to Nantucket.”
Gigi was starting to despise Xander.
“And what am I doing exactly?” she asked, sitting up on the pillows, tugging the sheets to her side.
“Whatever you want,” Xander said, still texting his brother. “That’s the point of freedom, right? You can go back to Mackinac
if you want. You’re clearly homesick.”
“No, I’m not.” Though Gigi did ache for the lakes, the trees, the horses. The scent of Eloise’s peanut brittle, the sound of Rebecca flipping the pages of her books.
The phone in their room rang. Xander answered but Gigi could hear the voice on the other end. Xander’s credit card was no
longer valid, the hotel had been notified. They would have to put down a new payment method.
“They cut me off,” Xander said, slamming down the phone. “Fuckers.”
He started chucking things into his suitcase. Their room looked as if a small bomb had detonated in it. Bathing suits and
boxers, condom wrappers and room service trays. They’d kept the “Do Not Disturb” sign on so they could sleep as late as they
wanted.
“I’ll buy you a plane ticket back to Michigan,” Xander said when Gigi told him he was only thinking about himself.
“You don’t have any money,” she said.
“I still have my emergency credit card,” he said. “My brother said our parents put a five-thousand-dollar limit on it, but
it’ll get me to Nantucket at least.”
Five thousand dollars was more than Eloise earned in a month. Gigi knew this from watching Eloise budget at the kitchen table,
filling in her spreadsheets by hand. There was a shift in Gigi, a shake.
“I’m not leaving,” Gigi said.
She was starting to feel ashamed of herself. There was no way she could face Eloise after this.
“You’re putting your credit card down?” Xander said. He knew Gigi didn’t have a card.
“No, I’m getting a job down here. I’m staying in Florida.”
She was homesick but she couldn’t return to Mackinac. It wasn’t just that she didn’t think Eloise would take her back. She
hadn’t come all this way only to quit when her partner in crime bailed.
Radical change was what she’d wanted, and this was just accelerating the goal.
Taking the training wheels off the bike that her dad had taught her to ride and then left her to careen down the big hill alone.
The bike that her mother had deemed too dangerous to ride alone, so she’d locked it in the garage with a key that she kept out of Gigi’s reach.
Gigi was done with her past... all of it.
“Why would you stay in this place?” Xander said with the implication that this had been the worst four days of his life, a
harsh test of his survival skills.
“Because, unlike you, I actually want a new type of life.”
“Don’t call me to bail you out of jail,” were the last words Xander spoke as he hustled out of the room, nearly sprinting
to the elevator.
Soon after, there was a rap at the door. Gigi didn’t answer, expecting it to be the cleaning staff telling her she had to
leave.
“Gigi? Are you in there?”
Gigi knew that voice. She opened the door. It was Rebecca, looking like a total wreck. “You’re okay,” Rebecca said, flinging
her arms around Gigi. “You’re okay.”
“Of course I am.” She had never been the hugging type, but Gigi returned the embrace. “No need to cry,” Gigi said, delighted
to discover she had the ability to produce such emotions in her sister. “Is Mom with you?”
The answer was no.
“She didn’t want me to come either,” Rebecca said. “Even when the governor told us where you were. I had to sneak out, get
Dad to sign a form to let me fly as an unaccompanied minor.”
“You talked to Dad?”
“Of course I did. You were missing . Dad made me feel better, actually. He wasn’t worried at all.”
Gigi tried to take comfort in this but found it difficult. It had been so much nicer to pretend that her parents really cared
about her than to test the hypothesis and watch it fail.
But Rebecca was here. Her little sister who was so terrified of airplanes, so terrified of going against their mother’s will.
But she had overcome all of that to come and find Gigi.
She vowed never again to take Rebecca for granted.
It didn’t matter that Rebecca was Eloise’s favorite.
Gigi didn’t care anymore about being her mother’s favorite or her father’s.
She wanted to be her own favorite, and she was going to figure out what that looked like.
“Look at us,” Gigi said to Rebecca as they stood there in the chandelier-lit hallway. “A couple of fugitives.”
Rebecca tried to smile but still looked close to tears. “Yes, you know me. The wild child.”
“I’d say sneaking off the island and getting on an airplane qualifies as rebel territory.”
“The flight was awful,” Rebecca said, looking woozy. “But I needed to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine,” Gigi said. “Perfectly fine.”
***
Her sister flew back the next day, without Gigi. Rebecca begged her to come too and assured her that she would help manage
Eloise. But Gigi was steadfast, flaring up with anger at Rebecca for coming at all.
“I didn’t need to be saved,” Gigi said. “I needed to escape.”
Gigi wasn’t proud of how she treated her little sister, but she really couldn’t help it. She was hardwired to metabolize softness
into concrete after twenty-four hours.
Gigi found a hostel in a gritty slice of Miami. She negotiated a rate of fourteen dollars a night (down from the forty-five
advertised). Then she walked into twenty-two restaurants and bars to see if they were hiring. Some asked for her résumé. She
didn’t have one and didn’t feel like typing one out at a library computer. It would all be forged anyway.
Finally she got a place to take a chance on her.
An Irish pub called the Brazen Head. It smelled like Guinness and beef stew.
Gigi walked by it one day and saw a line of people waiting to get seated.
The staff was nowhere to be found. Sensing an opportunity, Gigi stepped in and stood behind the host stand.
She wrote down customers’ names on the notepad and spewed out estimated wait times (ten minutes for friendly customers; two
hours for hostile ones). The real hostess finally returned. A girl not much older than Gigi, with an aura of stress. She was
doubling as waitress too. “Who are you?” she asked Gigi.
“I’m the new hostess,” Gigi said.
“Joe didn’t say anything about a new person.”
“Do you want the help or not?”
The girl nodded. “You stay here; I’ll do the food.”
The next day they went to Joe together and pitched Gigi for the job. He hired her on the spot. She made six dollars and twenty-five
cents an hour and could work her way up to a waitress, which she did a few months later, when she turned eighteen. She liked
it at first, the way she could charm customers and get them drunk enough to tip too much. But it came with a cost. The fake
smiles, the niceties, the men ogling her, the women screaming at her for not putting the salad dressing on the side like they’d
asked.
“Why are you ordering a salad at an Irish pub anyway?” she said once, then regretted it when the customer left no tip.
The problem with waitressing was that it made her be somebody she wasn’t. She’d fled one conformist environment just to be
shoved into another.
She quit after six months and got a job at a bike shop. She knew a bit about bicycles from Mackinac, and the things she didn’t
know she winged with such bravado that even the mechanics at the shop started wondering if they’d been doing it wrong all
along.