As I watched her walk away, I thought about all the good friends I had in my life. And then I thought about all of my friends who had offered to buy me a meal. And then I thought about all of my friends who knew that my prized possession in the office would be a bag of candy hidden in my desk.
I’m no math genius but I can count to one.
Chapter 30
It was the smell of bacon that woke me up. There are worse things to wake up to. I know this from personal experience. But this begged the question of who was cooking bacon in my kitchen and where they found the bacon they were cooking.
I opened my eyes. I was in a bed covered in flowered sheets. Those sheets matched the curtains through which the late morning sun was streaming like a cheerful, uninvited guest. In one corner of the room were several garbage bags full of stuff that looked an awful lot like mine. On the table next to the bed, I recognized Crash’s bowl. He wagged his fins at me as if to say that I’d been sleeping long enough. Next to his bowl, there was a picture of me, Ella, and our parents back before I’d stopped agreeing to be in family pictures. It had to be at least fifteen years old.
Shit. I’m not at home. I’m at home.
I sat up quickly and tried to remember what day it was. Saturday? Sunday? A weekend for sure. But then again, all of the days felt like weekends now that I was unemployed. I’d figure it out. I just needed to get some bacon inside me and it would be all better.
I had on a pair of pajama pants with laughing monkeys and a plain white tee. That was good enough to make an appearance at breakfast at my parents’ house. “Crash, I’ll be back in a bit. Then we can talk about you getting a job. Bacon isn’t free, you know.”
Downstairs, my parents were already at the table eating. Both were reading the paper and neither looked up when I walked in. My dad was the first to speak. “Up before 2 p.m. That’s a first.”
“Bacon,” I mumbled.
“Of course.”
“In the kitchen,” added Mom.
Seconds later, I came back with plate of eggs, bacon, and toast. I sat down, intending to gorge in silence. But my parents apparently had other ideas. Mom started. “How long have you been with us, Audrey?”
“30 years,” I said with a mouthful of food.
“No, I mean since you ‘lost’ your apartment. Again.” I could hear the air quotes in her voice.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Four days, and six hours,” Dad volunteered.
“That long, huh? Seems like I’ve only been here for a few glorious minutes.”
“Glorious isn’t the word I’d use,” Dad deadpanned.
Mom ignored us and continued. “Since this seems to be something that’s going to take some time, your father and I have decide that we need to set some ground rules.”
“Listen, I’m a grown woman—”
“A grown woman sleeping in my bed, watching my TV, and eating my bacon,” she interrupted. “So if you want to continue doing that, you’ll do what I tell you to do.”
I stuffed another piece of bacon in my mouth. “What are we talking here?” I said it as if I had the leverage to choose my terms but we all knew I had no other place to go. So if I didn’t want my next piece of bacon to come from the dumpster behind Burger King, I’d have to be okay with it.
“Honey?” Mom was talking to Dad. He pulled a piece of paper from his lap and slid it over to me.
I picked it up and read the header. It said Landlord/Boarder Agreement. “What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a rental contract.”
“But I don’t have a job. If I could afford rent, I’d be someplace else.”
Mom took a sip of her coffee. “Aww, that’s so sweet of you to say, Audrey. But if you just do a little reading, you can see that your rental contract doesn’t require any payment for the first 30 days—”
“That’s 25 days left now,” Dad interjected.
Mom patted Dad’s hand across the table. “Thank you, Elroy, but I have this.” Then to me, “Read it. After that, we can talk.”
I scanned down the document. It basically said that I could live with my parents for 30 days for free and then I had to pay rent. The amount wasn’t that much actually. It was just enough to make it not worth staying there, though. I mean, if the bacon-flavored legal ambushes at breakfast weren’t enough. But the second part of the agreement was what really got me going. There was a list of things I would and wouldn’t do.
“Do you really think you need to put in a contract that I will keep my room clean?” Mom raised her eyebrows at me and Dad put down his paper to look at me with shock. “Fine. Okay. I’ll keep it clean. But what about the no cooking rule. You’re always telling me I need to cook more.”
“I mean you need to learn how to cook with supervision. Please don’t turn on the stove, the oven, or the microwave unless we’re here to help you.”
Now that was just insulting. “The microwave? Seriously?”
Dad chimed in with “Just don’t touch anything that has to do with heat or fire. We don’t want a repeat of what happened with that curling iron.”
I slammed down my fork. “First of all, it was a flat iron. Second, the fire department said it was faulty wiring. And it’s not like you didn’t have insurance. The upstairs bathroom is beautiful now. You’re always getting compliments on it since the renovation.”
Both of them stared at me wordlessly. “Fine! I won’t cook. I don’t want to cook anyway. Anything else?”
“It’s all there, Sweetie,” Mom said.
“But you need to read it over a couple of times to make sure you understand it all,” Dad added. “No guests. You need a job. You need to pay rent. You need to clean up after yourself. It’s all standard stuff that most normal people don’t need to put down on a piece of paper.”
“Then why did you?”
Mom pushed a pen toward me. “Because we know you’re not normal, Audrey. We’ve known that for a long time. Sign at the bottom when you’re ready.”
Chapter 31
I was late. Again. That’s literally the story of my life: Audrey Is Late Again. And it wasn’t even a Thursday.
Cranky Beans was a mom-and-pop coffee shop on the Upper West Side. It’s a tiny little place in a city where you can get coffee on any corner at any time of the day. What makes it special is the beans. Customers can choose from hundreds of coffee beans from all over the world. Although the place is small, most of the space is taken up by an entire wall of beans that goes from floor to ceiling. We grind them and make the coffee right there in front of the customer. It’s a hand-crafted cup of coffee from start to finish. It’s also time consuming so we have to get it done as fast as possible. It’s not cheap but who am I to judge. As long as the customers keep buying and I keep getting paid, what I think doesn’t matter.
I guess you’d call me a barista, but the job is a little more athletic than that. Climbing 14 or 18 feet to get coffee beans, using hot, temperamental machinery, and serving extremely hot product to cranky customers tends to lead to injuries. My boss likes me because I will work any shifts he throws my way and I never have to go home over injuries. Just a few minutes in the bathroom and that severe burn is suddenly no big deal.
I walked into Cranky’s and my boss was at the counter talking to the customer. “You’re late,” Lou yelled at me right in the middle of taking her order. They didn’t call this place Cranky’s for nothing.
I squeezed past him, wiggled out of my hoodie and threw on an apron. “I know. I’m sorry. Subway problems.”
He rolled his eyes and gave the customer her change. “I need you to work a double because Molly is still out with that burn.”
“Fine.” It’s not like I had anywhere to be anyway. Well, I did have to be at another family dinner at home. But now I could send a sorry-gotta-work text to my parents and get out of it. Besides, I still needed a new cape. Those things weren’t cheap.
The nice thing about Cranky’s is that the day moves fast. There’s always so
mething to be wiped or brewed or put away. There’s no time to do things like worry about how you’re going to find a new place or whether your district numbers are good enough.
By closing time, I was exhausted. Lou had left after the first shift and I was on my own for the second one. Business tends to slow down as the day goes on. I served the last customer, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and then locked the door behind her. I’d been working hard to get out of the place on time so most of the closing stuff had already been done. I just needed to count down the register, put the money in the bank bag, and put it in the safe for the night.
I usually counted down the money a few times. I would get in trouble if the count wasn’t right and I wasn’t known for my math skills. Doing it until I got the same number twice in a row was how I covered myself. I was counting the money in the register for the third time when I heard the noise.
It came from the unisex bathroom in the corner. I paused. I’d already checked out the bathroom just before dealing with the last customer. I hadn’t seen anyone go in, but I wasn’t exactly watching, either. Maybe I was tired enough to miss something.
“Hello?” No answer. “Is anybody there?” Still, no answer.
I shook my head. I’m imagining things. I transferred the money into the bank bag and walked into the office. As I was bending down to open the safe, I heard a noise behind me. I turned to see a man dressed in black with a matching ski mask over his face pointing a gun at me.
“Give me the money,” he said.
I swallowed. “No.”
“I’m not fucking playing! Give me the money!”
I licked my lips and said it again. “No. If I give you this money, I’m probably gonna be fired. And I can’t afford to be fired.”
He waved the gun at me. “Can you afford a bullet in your head?”
“No, but it’s better than having to tell my parents I got fired again.”
“You won’t be telling them shit if I shoot you.”
“Listen, don’t shoot me. This is not enough money to shoot anybody over. This is a mom-and-pop shop and it wasn’t that busy today.” I pointed to the bank bag. “There isn’t even a thousand dollars here.”
“I don’t care!! Give it me or I’m going to put a bullet in you!!”
I sighed and shook my head with resignation. “No.”
The guy looked at me with absolute confusion. I could tell that this wasn’t how he expected this to go. He even lowered his gun for half a second. And then he pointed at me again and shot me twice.
One thing flashed across my mind before I hit the floor. Shit. Here we go again.
About the Author
Princess Jones is a fantasy author with an obsession with the stories we tell ourselves over and over. Super is the first in her ongoing series about a nontraditional super hero. Jones currently lives in Austin, TX with her husband and a constantly revolving menagerie of stray people and animals. She spends her time reading good books, watching bad television, and trying to teach her dogs to fetch Twinkies.
A Word from the Author
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