Chapter 10: Raptor and Tina

Montana, back in the day

“I HATE YOU, BITCH.”

The girl who would become Raptor gave Tina the finger and walked away. She’d had it with a girl who didn’t play fair. Who didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings, not even Tony’s. Not that Raptor really cared about Tony, either. He wasn’t Chinese and that put him out of bounds as far as her parents were concerned, even if he was OK as a friend and more than welcome as a customer in their restaurant.

Tony had asked her to the prom and she’d accepted. Raptor talked her parents into springing for a special dress, nothing too expensive, and after trying on just about every dress in her size at Penney’s she’d found one that wasn’t too bad. Shoes as well, although her parents made her pay for the shoes. Tony promised a dinner at the San Marino before the prom. “You’d probably rather skip Chinese, right?” Ha ha ha. So funny. But the prospect of those luscious lips made her keep her own mouth shut.

Saturday morning, Tony called.

“Hey, girl?”

“Hi, Tony.”

“Uh, um, I mean, something’s come up?”

“What’s the matter, Tony?”

“See, I forgot something completely.”

She knew this was ridiculous, and one part of her knew already what the asshole was thinking.

“What’s that, Tony?”

He heard something in Raptor’s voice, because he gulped and stuttered for a moment.

“Um, it’s Tina?

“What about her?”

“I forgot that I asked her to the prom first.”

“What the fuck, Tony!”

Raptor’s mother overheard her and shook her head. Raptor ignored her.

“I mean, what the fuck!”

“I’m sorry, girl.”

“Fuck you, Tony.”

She hung up. This was disgusting. It was beyond disgusting. She was tempted to call Tina but decided against it. There would be time for Tina later.

“Later” turned out to be the Monday morning after the prom.

“I hate you, bitch.”

Washington, DC, back in the day

That was pretty much the end of any contact between them until Raptor finished grad school and found her way to Washington, DC. She wanted to put her MPA degree to good use, one of thousands of college graduates who figured a graduate degree in public administration would give them a leg up. Most were disappointed to find the real world of politics and bureaucracy and the collision between the two was not a pretty sight and one not really covered in their seminars or lectures. At least not in the whole glorious and awful full-color close-up that maneuvering in the overheated DC environment brought with it.

The minority leader wasn’t the minority leader back then. Newly elected from a state known for its music and horses and coal, he was learning the ropes himself. His appearance didn’t help. Later in life he would be mistaken for a turtle, sort of, but even as a younger man he didn’t make any girl’s heart go pitter-patter.

Raptor wasn’t one to be swayed by looks alone. Her contacts with the future minority leader, which admittedly were not very many or very close as the most junior and, in the beginning, unpaid member of his staff, convinced her he had brains behind the aw-shucks down-home manner he greeted the world with. To her dismay, Tina the bitch turned up as well, a low-level staffer in a lobbying firm that specialized in issues important to the future minority leader’s home state.

The two women didn’t see much of each other at first because they were too junior to matter to anyone. A willingness to work hard, innate intelligence, and a shrewd sense of who was a bullshitter and who had serious chops behind his blather meant they moved up quickly in their respective organizations, leaving more than one confused and angry white boy on the sidelines. Not that they cared, they didn’t. Washington was for winners, not losers, and each girl was morally certain she was and would be a winner in whatever competition presented itself.

There was very little Tina wouldn’t do to advance her client’s interest and her own. That included some occasional straightforward, albeit discreet, whoring. Known as the Chinese Firecracker, and known to many in the trade who came up against her and lost as the Chinese Bitch, she had no hesitation in using whatever she had to win a contract or persuade a member of Congress or one of his or her staffers to deliver a desired vote.