Chapter 28 Gigi
of keeping Ronny waiting.
Of all the spots on the island, the fort was most associated with paranormal activity. People swore they saw ghosts of soldiers
clad in war-torn uniforms, heard their strangled cries. Gigi didn’t buy it. As a kid, she’d always been on the lookout for
spirits, but nothing good ever turned up. A rogue creak of a door or a burned-out lamppost didn’t satisfy.
Beyond ghost hunting, the fort was popular for stargazing. Located at Mackinac’s highest point, its views of the skies were
sweeping. Down below, the last ferry had long departed. Off the coast, the lighthouse blinked, illuminating the water just
enough to make Gigi aware of how little of it she could see.
“Look who showed after all.”
Ronny, in a T-shirt and cargo shorts, was seated on the ruins of an old stone wall. A beer in his hand, a six-pack at his
feet. There was no Cruiser. Ronny appeared to have walked.
“Told you I would,” Gigi said.
Ronny had a speaker blaring nineties punk rock. Loud enough to make people raise their eyebrows, quiet enough that they wouldn’t
file a noise complaint. Gigi knew the volume well.
“Let the games begin,” she said, taking a seat next to him. She was wearing safari shorts and an oversized sweatshirt.
Ronny ran his hands through his long, lemony hair. “That’s all this is to you, huh?” he said. “A game?”
Gigi shrugged. “That’s all life is to me.”
“Truth.” He reached for another beer and offered Gigi one.
She accepted, cracking it open on the rock wall rather than the bottle opener Ronny was using. The awed look on his face triggered
Gigi’s endorphins.
There was something so familiar about Ronny, something homey, even. She thought about what her therapist in LA had said. “When you have a traumatic childhood, someone who feels like home might not be a good thing. It can mean they feel like instability
and anxiety. You can easily mistake anxiety for excitement. The bodily reaction is nearly identical. What you really want
is someone who makes you feel something new. Something more like peace.”
As Gigi played back the words, she couldn’t help but think of James and how he brought a strange calmness over her. Or maybe
it was just boredom. She wasn’t really sure of the difference.
She sipped her beer to wash away the bad taste.
“I’m off duty tonight,” Ronny said, though Gigi hadn’t asked. “And we deserve something for surviving this hellhole for the
summer, don’t we?”
“Tell me about it.”
“What are you doing back here anyway?” Ronny asked. “A free spirit like you doesn’t belong. Did your mom guilt you into visiting?”
“Something like that.”
Ronny guzzled his beer. “You’re a better kid than I am. My parents have to come visit me if they want to see me.”
Gigi envied the boundaries he’d set. She would like to give her parents the same ultimatum, but she was worried they simply
wouldn’t come see her at all. “Do they?” she asked. “Visit you?”
“Every once in a blue moon. Still way too often, if you ask me.” He laughed but it lacked resonance. Gigi detected pebbles of melancholy, sidestepped by humor. She wondered if he was happy being so independent or if he’d found it lonely like she had.
“Why were you kicked out of your hometown?” she asked.
Ronny’s jaw twitched. “I don’t ask about your past, you don’t ask about mine. Deal?”
Gigi felt it, that compulsion to be liked. Not to be loved or cherished, just to be approved of as the chill girl, the one
who wouldn’t cause a scene when he didn’t text her tomorrow. “Deal.”
His hand rested on her bare thigh. “All the tourists are high on fudge and think this is some fucking fairy kingdom,” he said.
“You get it, though.”
“Being high on weed always beats being high on fudge.” She took a joint and a lighter from her pocket. After taking a drag,
she handed it to Ronny.
“Why can’t every girl be a troublemaker like you?” he said.
“ My little troublemaker ,” Gigi’s dad used to call her, a proud lilt to the phrase. Gigi knew that on some level her rebellious streak had always
been a plea for love from the one man she’d needed most. That was the thing about being in her late twenties now. She had
more self-awareness. But she still kept choosing the same actions, the same patterns. Maybe it was habit or maybe it was just
that she found life more fun this way—luring people in, letting them go.
Gigi took the joint back, gave it another puff. “Yeah,” she said, “I’m pretty great.”
“Modest too.” Ronny wanted her, she could tell.
It was enough for Gigi to want him, too, or at least to be curious about where their relationship might go next.
Clouds were rolling in quickly from the coast, obscuring the stars. The wind was picking up, the air humid. A storm seemed
to be coming. Gigi liked the thought.
She stood up and tugged down her shorts so they didn’t ride up her ass. “You promised me a tour of the fort.”
Ronny grinned. He’d either never had braces or had stopped wearing his retainers years ago. Gigi liked the lack of perfection.
“I did, didn’t I?” He slung his free arm around Gigi’s shoulder.
Something about the motion drizzled déjà vu over Gigi. She’d been on this date before. Not with Ronny but with one of the
other guys from her past she’d put on a performance for to impress.
She thought back to what James had said about how she should have been an actress. In many ways she had become one. The thought
had a sour flavor.
Ronny led her over to the cannons, aimed at the water. “This is where the Americans fired the cannons at the British,” he
said, putting on the air of a tour guide. “During the Battle of Mackinac.”
“Nope,” Gigi said. “The British won the fort in the war of 1812. The Americans tried and failed to retake it in 1814—that
was the Battle of Mackinac. The fort was returned to the US at the end of the war and stayed active until 1895. During that
time, the island transitioned from a fur trade hub to a tourist destination.” She recited the words swiftly, no pauses.
“Who invited the nerd?” Ronny said.
“It was ingrained in us in school like the ABC’s.” Gigi pointed to a white stone building built into the hill, its shingled
roof refurbished in the style of the 1700s. “Those are the officers’ stone quarters, originally barracks for the British during
the Revolutionary War. The oldest building in Michigan.”
Ronny yawned. “Enough with the history lesson,” he said. “Let’s get to anatomy class.”
Gigi wondered if Ronny was really so vacuous or just pretending to be. She would give him one more chance to impress her.
Leaning against the door of the barracks, she faced Ronny, challenging him to move first.
He tossed his beer can on the ground, crunched it under his boot, then closed the gap between them. His breath tasted like beer and weed and barbecue sauce. The kiss was less restrained than on the boat. His hands found the back of her shorts, then the front.
The first clap of thunder echoed from off the coast.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“I’ll take you back to my mom’s,” Gigi said dryly.
“I wouldn’t make it out alive.”
“I thought you were an adrenaline junkie.”
“And I thought you liked me, but you’re setting me up to be murdered.”
“To be fair, my mom would probably execute both of us.”
The thought made Gigi smile. She felt a strange splash of gratitude for Eloise. Her mother could go too far sometimes, but
it was nice to know she cared and was there.
“What a comfort,” Ronny said. “Let’s go back to mine.”
With Gigi on the back of the electric scooter, Ronny drove full-speed to his apartment. Gigi whooped as they careened down
the hill. As a kid, she used to ride her old manual scooter up and down the hill at the fort for hours at a time. Every Christmas
she’d asked for an electric scooter, once she stopped asking for a pony. In the end, she’d gotten neither.
They flew past the medical clinic just in time to see James locking up for the night.
Ronny didn’t slow down, just called out to him, “’Sup, Doc!”
If James replied, his words were swallowed by the night. He’d seen them, though—Gigi knew he had. She was glad. He would know
she wasn’t waiting around for him, wasn’t pining.
They lurched into the gravel driveway of Ronny’s place. As Ronny switched off the scooter, Gigi thought about driving herself
home or taking a solo lap around the island.
If they hadn’t passed by James, she might have done that.
But something about seeing him locking up at the clinic for his important job as a doctor made Gigi aware of how little she had to show for nearly thirty years on the planet.
How far away she was from her dreams and, worse than that, how she didn’t even know what they were anymore.
She’d spent the past decade not running toward anything, just running away.
The idea of figuring any of that out tonight was too daunting. She felt newly drawn to Ronny as a distraction, so she followed
him inside, enjoying the shape of her shadow under the porch light. Long and distorted like she might be somebody else, perhaps
already was.
The apartment was sparse and messy, a true bachelor pad. Before she could even kick off her shoes, her phone chimed. Gigi
would have guessed it was Eloise, unleashing her wrath that Gigi was out so late, except that Eloise would call, not text.
It was Gus.
After many weeks of silence, here he was, suddenly back in her orbit. Excitement rose. Anxiety too, since they were different
sides of the same coin.
Gigi!! Sorry I missed ur last text... r u surviving the island and ur mom?! Unfortunately looking like I won’t get back
there this summer... my South America trip got extended a few weeks. Will keep u posted
As soon as Gigi finished reading the text, she wished she had waited longer to look at it. This was all her dad had for her
after being off the grid for so long? One flimsy text to tell her he wouldn’t be coming back to Mackinac to see her? The emojis
especially infuriated her.
Feeling a new punch of that old pain, she made to leave Ronny’s apartment.
“Where’re you going?” Ronny said from the stairwell.
“It’s past my bedtime,” Gigi said.
Ronny scoffed. “You’re a grown-ass adult.”
“That makes one of us.” Gigi opened the front door.
“You scared your mom’s gonna yell at you?”
“I’m really not,” Gigi said. “I’m just tired.”
Gigi was not looking for a boy. She was looking for a man. A man to be her father and a man to be her partner. She didn’t
have control over the first. But she sure as hell did over the second.
“Good night, Ronny,” Gigi said, setting out into the dark, the flashlight from her phone illuminating her way. It was starting
to rain. “And goodbye.”
“You’re a fucking tease,” Ronny called out after her. “No wonder no one on this island can stand you.”
There was a violent clap of thunder. Gigi liked to think it was Mackinac coming to her defense. More likely it was a storm
she’d created from her own chaos.
Either way, Gigi followed the lightning home.