AK47 put her juice down and wiped her mouth. I could tell she was thinking. Her brows were wiggling.
“Okay, but if he screws up, that’s it.”
“We will give him his rules and if he breaks them then that’s it.”
She smiled. “You’re a good sister, you know that? He’s lucky to have you.”
“Us,” I said. “He’s lucky to have us, because we will keep him in line.”
I dipped my hash brown into the maple syrup container until it was almost all covered with syrup and put it in my mouth. If Gert was here he would probably tell me to use less maple syrup and be less messy, even though it was me who ate the hash browns, not him. I wanted him to stop doing things like that. I was getting tired of rules that other people made for me. I wanted to make my own rules.
“When things are my business,” I said, “I want them to be my business. I want to have my own business. Like the sex.”
We talked about how Gert had gotten so angry about the idea of me and Marxy having sex. AK47 actually thought that Gert had a point, though she didn’t agree fully with him.
“By point I mean, it’s probably normal for him to feel weird about it. On the other hand, Marxy’s mother is right. You do need to talk about it. And he needs to not get weird when someone says ‘period.’ ”
“Maybe that should be one of the things on our RULES FOR GERT. No getting mad about sex and periods.”
She nodded. “Good start.” The rest of the McMuffin went into her mouth. She used one of her fingers to wipe extra cheese off her lips. After two chews she swallowed all of the food in her mouth. She pulled a pen out of her bag and clicked the tip out.
She flattened the receipt from the food on the table and stared down at it. She tapped the pen against her chin.
“I mean, we don’t want to be too harsh,” she said.
“I want you to be back together,” I said. “Why would I make it harder for you to get together again?”
“Yeah, but I have him by the balls, and with your brother that almost never happens. I figure we can put our heads together and maybe get the most out of this, while he’s ready to make concessions.”
A concession could mean a stand, where hot dogs and soda are sold at basketball games, or it could mean giving something you don’t want to give to another person, so that you can get something you want back.
AK47 and I were trying to figure out which concessions Gert would want to make so that he can get what he wants, to be back together with AK47. And actually, she wanted to get back together with him too, but for her it was backward. Her concession was getting together with Gert, since there is a lot of crap that is part of being together with my brother.
“He needs to cut the bullshit,” I said. “Right?”
AK47 started writing on the receipt.
“Good. We have to make sure they’re specific enough, you know? So that if he gets pissed we can have ammo to fire back at him. We need them to be demands. I’ve already confiscated the gun, so we can cross that off the list.”
“What does confiscated mean?”
“I’ve taken it from him and will be getting rid of it. So we can cross that off our list of demands.”
Demands are the opposite of concessions. When warring tribes meet to decide what happens next, if they don’t want to fight with swords, they fight with words to figure out who gets what. They fight with demands.
AK47 had four demands to getting back together with Gert. They were “deal-breakers.” She would not make concessions about any of them. They were:
Gert would have to begin going to see Dr. Laird on his own again, which he’d stopped doing.
He would not sell pot anymore or be friends with people like Toucan, who is almost for sure a villain, AK47 said, since she asked around and apparently a lot of people believe he is a “shady motherfucker.” Shady motherfuckers are worse than fuck-dicks and shit-heels combined, according to AK47.
Gert would do summer school in order to make up for the credits he lost when he dropped courses.
He would throw away his gun.
We put a check mark next to Number 4, because AK47 had taken away the gun.
I asked her why she didn’t have another deal-breaker about Gert having sex with other girls.
“That goes without saying,” she said. “Actually, it doesn’t go without saying. Good call.”
She wrote “Don’t have sex with other people” on the receipt.
My demands were that I wanted him to stop telling me what to do all the time. For example, when it comes to having sex with Marxy, he cannot stop me. I had also decided that I wanted to have my own job.
“And I would like his support,” I said. “And I am going to open my own bank account and contribute to the tribe.”
AK47 smiled and said we could do that without him. “You can just go into the bank and open an account. Though you should probably get someone to go with you before you sign anything.”
We continued writing our RULES FOR GERT.
On the ride home, I thought of a different demand. It wasn’t just for Gert. It was for AK47 too. And it wasn’t a RULE, it was something I wanted.
She had the radio on and turned down the volume. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“I want to see the essay,” I said. “The one that got him the scholarship.”
She did not say anything. I asked her what was going on in her brain. She said that she didn’t know if I wanted to read it.
“I mean, I know you think you do, but it was written for a particular audience. It wasn’t written for you to read.”
“Gert wrote it, and it’s about me. I want to see.”
It started to rain. The sun was mostly gone behind clouds and rain spat on the windshield. AK47 turned on the wipers. I watched them go back and forth for a while. I had made a demand of her and I realized that I did not have any way to force her to show me the essay. Also Gert would not want to show me either.
“Like I said,” AK47 said, turning toward our apartment building, “that’s his call.”
* * *
It was very official when we brought Gert our list of RULES FOR GERT. We sat around the kitchen table. Each of us sat at a different corner. We were in a business meeting. AK47 had rewritten our demands on a piece of paper with two rows: one for her demands, and one for my demands. We wanted to make it more official-looking than the receipt and the napkin.
“You got to be kidding,” he said, holding the paper up. “What is this, the Second World War? Which one of you is Poland?”
“Deal-breakers,” I said. “That’s what those are.”
“Why do you have deal-breakers on here?” he said to me.
“I’m negotiating on her behalf,” AK47 said. Gert shook his head.
“Two against one. How’s that fair?”
Gert went through the list. He said he was fine with everything, even seeing Dr. Laird.
“You can’t go Berserker.”
“I’m fine.”
“The sex thing, though,” Gert said.
“It’s her body,” AK47 said. “Her life.”
“It’s my body and my life,” I said. “And when you love people, you show them your love by touching each other in ways that are nice. I love Marxy.”