"I'll pay Princess Peach back," she said.
"If we find a job," I said.
"When we find a job," she said. "I refuse to take her money."
I felt the same way, but it seemed Elise was our breadwinner for now.
~*~
Living for a week on seventeen bucks was a miracle. Every penny counted. Repugnant as the thought of handing money to Celia was, we decided to eat in the deli. There was just so much tuna fish and peanut butter a girl could stomach, and we had enough cash for two corned beef sandwiches.
A few days later, Karmen decided that enough was enough then she got a job as a waitress at the deli. Well, the whole story happened faster than a farmer could milk a cow. It started when we found Ms. McHugh bending over with color drained from her face one morning. She was sent to the ER afterward and was now recovering from the high blood pressure. The doctor advised her to take a long rest. Celia had no replacement and decided to ask if any of us wanted to take a part-time job waiting at her deli. I was surprised that Karmen agreed. It was that time that we realized we had hit rock bottom.
Karmen had her waitress uniform the next day. She pretended that she was just helping out while Ms. McHugh was sick.
"Some pride to swallow, eh?" Elise said to her as we sat down at our table. Karmen looked like she wanted to kill her with a spoon.
"May I take your order, your highness?" she said. I tried to civilize them by taking up the conversation to another direction.
"So how long are you going to work here?" I said.
"Until I stumble upon two million dollars on the street that is," she said sarcastically. I kind of felt bad for her. I would have taken up the job but Celia only offered one position.
"Aw, don't be so bitter about it," Elise said with a smile. "Perhaps it's a good time for you to practice your walk, especially with those shoes."
Karmen looked down at her black old-fashion oxfords that Celia required her to wear. They were hideous.
At that point, I thought Elise's saliva must be pure acid. I could feel the sizzling burn from where Karmen stood.
"I'm afraid, one day, you'll find one up your rear if you don't shut up," Karmen shot back. These two needed to stop biting each other.
"Okay! That's enough," I said and had to push Karmen away with our orders.
After breakfast, Elise left and I went for a walk. You can't spend all day cooped up anyway. It isn't healthy. I walked up to a certain block where Elise said Clarice's place was. If I could accidentally-on-purpose run into her, I could strike up a conversation. I would portray myself as the strong, silent type, not too nice, but with a sense of maturity.
Of course, Karmen and Elise were my best friends, and you weren't supposed to screw up your friends. But Karmen didn't deserve Clarice. And Elise, well, I wasn't sure she was that into the Elven Princess. I had a feeling that she went out with her to piss Karmen off. She hadn't even mentioned her at all after that night. Besides, if I didn't step up my game, waiting for someone to fall for me could take forever!
I looked from window to window, up and down the block, half believing it wasn't a waste of time. Did I expect a golden aura to be emanating from the building that housed Clarice Kingsley and her legs?
I almost laughed at myself afterward. On my way back, I found her— on the billboard. It was a group photo for some bikinis commercial. I also found Elise on it. Their smiles froze at each other. I felt my chest tighten with jealousy and decided to return to the deli.
It was the first really sweltering day of the summer, and the air was heavy and humid. I escaped back to the air conditioning, waiting for Karmen to finish her shift and Elise to come home from work. I was already sweating in this hot weather. Now imagine what was like in the kitchen where Karmen was. Poor girl. The air was like vaporized oatmeal. I waved at the Jogging Grandma as she jogged by, energetic, cool, and sweat-free. Everyone seemed to have things to do and places to go.
Inside the door, I paused, looking distastefully at the employment section. Looking for a job was harder than working. I scanned the first couple of ads. All of them said experienced required. How are you supposed to get experience if no one will hire you because you don't have experience?
I tried not to feel so self-conscious about being the only one unemployed. Then Celia whizzed by my table and looked at me.
"You're not working?" she said. I didn't want her to think that this would lead to rental payment complications, so I smiled brightly back.
"It's my day off," I lied.
"Well, it looks like every day is your day off," she said with a raised brow.
"Look, Celia, I'm trying my hardest to find a job, okay?" I said. "And I'm going to have one sooner or later, so don't you worry about that."
"I'm not worried," she said. "Just want to let you know that the rent is due next week."
I scowled in disgust at her. I wondered if that was what she did all day, going around reminding people about their rent due.
"Is that all you can think about?" I said. "What good would money do you then?"
"Well, I would die happier," she said and walked away.
~*~
On Monday, I was in the grocery store, filling up my cart with our usual cheap instant everything, when someone called my name.
"Azra!"
I looked up. There was Clarice, smiling and waving. Did it just happen? I strut myself all over the neighborhood with absolutely no results, and now that I've finally written her off of my mind, guess who finds me? And I didn't even expect her to remember my name.
Clarice bounced forward with her Barbie doll's legs. She still looked all voguish even in a plain tank top and white shorts. It was like she just stepped out of a billboard. That should be a crime.
"Am I ever glad to see you!" she said breathily. "What are you doing here?"
"Er...finding the cure to cancer?" I said. Clarice blinked back for a second and then she burst out laughing.
"You're funny," she said. "Yeah, silly me to ask."
"If you're here to shop, first you have to get a cart..." I said.
"Actually, this is more like an assignment," she said. "And I'm just happy I ran into you here. I wonder if you could help me out."
"What?" I asked. She blushed and smiled sheepishly.
"Well, in one interview I sort of told a reporter that I can cook a vegetarian dish," she said. "But I only know a little bit about it. Then a cooking show invited me as a special guest. Now I'm trouble! I don't know what I should make on the show that won't make a fool of myself."
"Oh, I see," I said. "Model's life, huh?"
"Yeah," she said with a shrug. "Elise told me a lot about you. So can you cook?"
"Not very well," I said. "Why?"
"I really hope you can help me out then!" she said expectantly. I wanted to roll my eyes. She showed me a list, which she had written exactly one word: Beans.
"What's this?"
"My homework. It's a cost versus nutrition chart on at least twenty different items. Can you help me find them? I don't even know what they are."
What an honor! For this bright shining moment, I found myself wishing I had Celia's mouth. I meant— what had she done for me? Aside from dating both of my best friends?
All I said was, "Well, I'm kind of in a hurry to get home so I can start looking for a jo..."
"That'll take two seconds, Azra!" she assured me, grabbing my arm and swinging it. Calling my name with such a sweet voice was bad enough, her touching me...oh well.
I found myself being led by the hand through aisles of vegetables. My cheeks burned hot with that physical contact. She had a pretty strong grip, too.
Very quickly, I learned why Clarice would have a panic attack about the cooking show. She didn't know a carrot from a radish, and it wasn't because she was colorblind, it was because she didn't want to know. I had never seen any girl care so little. I ended up doing all the work, choosing her ingredients. When the cart was filled, I handed the list to her.
"What am I going to do with all these?" she groaned. "Gosh, I hate cooking! I even have to remember not to put salt in my coffee."
I laughed in her face. It felt great after all the time she ignored me.
"Well, good luck with the show," I said.
"Thank you so much, Azra!" she said. "You're a godsend."
"Er...you're welcome," I murmured.
"Oh no! I'm late!" she said then she and her vegetarian list galloped off. I wondered if I had dreamed up the whole thing. What I was painfully aware of was the fact that she did not ask me for my number, let alone a date.
I was still dazed half an hour later. I started the shopping. But it didn't go very well. Every time I picked up an item, I kept seeing it as Clarice's face and her stupid vegetable list. Our usual groceries were among the most expensive and the least nutritious products in the store.
Maybe this encounter with the Elven Princess wasn't a waste after all. When you buy instant and prepared stuff, it costs a whole lot more than when you buy the ingredients and make it yourself. Plus, instant food is full of cheats and lies. In fact, when I checked all the labels on the stuff we'd been eating for the last few months, there were all sorts of crazy chemicals. No wonder, we were all feeling like killing each other sometimes.
So I got this brilliant idea. Instead of buying microwave chicken nuggets, I'd buy fresh chicken, instead of TV dinners, I'd buy real food. And while saving a few cents here and there didn't seem like much, you've got to figure on three people eating three meals a day, each consisting of at least four or five elements, we could save twenty-five bucks a day! Seven hundred and fifty bucks a month! More, if you calculated it against Celia's deli prices! Maybe Clarice Kingsley was going to poison somebody on the TV show, but it was the answer to our economic prayers.
I walked back home a little happier than usual. I couldn't wait to cook a real meal for the other two girls.
Chapter Seven
Along the way to our apartment, I walked past a store with a mini popcorn machine on the display. It looked too adorable with all the red color and wheels, and it was on sale. With the lovely popcorn maker, we could enjoy the fresh popcorn in minutes!
The next thing I knew, I was carrying the popcorn machine home. In the back of my mind, the little voice told me that was why I was poor, but I tried not pay too much attention to it.
Karmen opened the door for me. She was in a towel, and her body glistened with water as if she'd just finished taking a shower.
"What's this?" she asked.
"Hmm...our groceries?" I said, feigning the obvious financial mistake I'd just made.
"Azra, don't tell me you just bought a popcorn machine," she said. Well, she already knew it from the picture on the box, so there was no need to explain.
"But it's too cute!" I said. "Look! It also comes with the wheels! And we do need some popcorns for Netflix and chill, don't we?"
"How much is it?" my best friend said. Normally, Karmen wasn't the type to worry about spending money, but now it seemed she couldn't underestimate the power of being broke anymore.
"It's only fifty dollars," I said sheepishly.
"I work my butt off at the deli so that we can have a roof over our heads," she complained, sounding more and more like a mom. "And you spent...wait...is it only fifty bucks?"
"Yeah!" I perked up.
"Oh, wow, that's cool!"
"I told you." I grinned at her and went to install the popcorn machine on our kitchen counter. I asked Karmen to put the corn in while I sorted out the groceries into the fridge. Afterward, we were watching the machine in fascination.
At the same time, Elise came through the door.
"What are you guys doing?" she asked.
"Elise, come and see this," I called out to her. Elise came over. We crowded around the machine. It started running and making a little humming sound as it dispersed the heat. Then popcorns started bubbling out from the kettle. We were like children happy to see the funny course of the production.
"Isn't it cool?" I giggled. The popcorns came out nice and hot and buttery, but the problem was the machine wouldn't stop running, and we found out pretty quickly that we had put too much corn in it, so now it started flooding over to the kitchen floor. Then the machine made a weird noise before spitting out bright sparks instead of popcorn. We jumped up with a yelp.
"Azra, turn the damn thing off! Turn it off!" Karmen yelled. Elise was clinging to her as she screamed. I panicked and pulled out the plug. But it messed up the electric socket and the current went haywire and exploded into a mushroom of white smoke. Elise jumped onto Karmen's arms in shock. The towel that wrapped around Karmen came loose and dropped to the floor, but at the same moment, the power went out. Everything turned pitch-black like a cave. I realized it wasn't just our apartment. The whole building also suffered the outage.
"Oh uh," I said in the dark. The three of us just stood there with our mouths hanging open as Celia burst through our door ten minutes later.
"Who did this?!" she bellowed, shining the flashlight at our faces.
We all pointed to the popcorn machine.
The chaos took place afterward, and it lasted about half an hour to die down. Mad didn't do it justice to describe how our landlady was. When the power got back up, she handed us a bill for the damage. We had to pay $350 for a new socket and burned wires. Celia had warned us that if we ever made one hassle in her building again, she'd start handing us our suitcases and throw us out.
"Look at the bright side," Karmen said. "At least we've got too much popcorn to last us a whole month."
~*~
When the stress and anxiety and self-hatred and all those good procrastinator's feelings built up, you tend to find stuff you don't normally do. For the first time, I realized what total slobs my two best friends were. In the bathroom, I found all sorts of things lying around, from hairbrushes to bags of cotton wipes.
Their rooms looked like a tornado had just hit. Elise had left the bed unmade for days, and Karmen turned everything into a bomb site, sheets, and pillows all over the place. This was the same girl who thought a few wrinkles on her clothes and less-than-perfect contours were a disaster.
A whole morning of tidying up had killed my job search. But who wanted to live in a pigsty? In the great summer of independence, here I was doing household chores! Voluntarily!
"Living with girls, they said," I muttered as I vacuumed the carpet. "It would be fun, they said."
My mom mailed my favorite scone from our bakery. It would have been perfect if she didn't forget the distance we had. The bread cake was like a block of granite. The Jogging Grandma brought it up to us, don't ask me how. I'd have invited her in for a piece, but it would have shattered her dentures.
"Elise could make a model of Stonehenge from these," I murmured to myself. Karmen was irritable because Clarice didn't reply her text messages. I told her she must be too busying posing before the camera to read fifty million messages she sent.
Karmen shrugged. "She can't avoid me forever. Sooner or later, she'll get back to me. Patience is the key."
Before I knew it, she was bouncing around the apartment, laughing and singing, when Clarice agreed to go out with her Friday night.
"Eat your heart out, Princess Peach! You've seen the last of this girl!" she giggled. "She finally understands what she's missing."
Eliska Novikova must have ice water in her veins. She took it all in calmly, no bugging, insults, or sarcasm. But on Saturday night, she went out on a date with, guess who?
I was even more shocked than Karmen. Who did Clarice Kingsley think she was? Did she honestly believe there was nothing wrong with dating both my roommates at the same time?
Eaten up with jealousy, I despised her. If there were a dozen people living in our apartment instead of three, she would probably be going out with eleven of them, leaving me high and dry!
Stupid Clarice and her model's legs. And on top of it all, I had to prevent the war betwe
en her two girlfriends.
"You should both dump her," I said. "She's playing head games with the two of you."
"If Elise breaks up with her first," Karmen said.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Elise shot back. "Clarice all to yourself?"
"She's not going to you," Karmen said. "I would never let her go even if it means I have to marry her or kidnap her."
All this disturbing bickering was going to cause us trouble with Celia, who seemed to especially scorn the soap opera that was our lives. Who ended up with Clarice would no longer be an issue if we got kicked out.
On Sunday morning, we sat for breakfast in the deli. There we found Celia in a state of wild despair.
"Can you believe it?" she was raving. "That snake, that woman! Why her and not me?"
"What are you talking about, Ms. Celia?" Elise asked.
"You haven't heard? No, you don't want breakfast now. You'll throw up when you hear this."
I sighed. "Okay, what happened to your business rival?"
"Monica, that witch who already has a fortune from her tenants and customers," Celia started, "She's just been awarded a Michelin star! And what do I get? Me, who slaves every day in the restaurant, gives to charity, and is nice to everyone? None!"
"What's to stop you from applying for one of the stars?" I said.
"Ha! If I could afford a Gordon Ramsay, I would," she said.
"Actually," said Elise seriously, "to qualify for such an award, you would have to invest in improving the quality of your place, which you are clearly unwilling to do."
"Miss. Novikova, on the scale of 1 to 10 for being annoying, you're a solid 12," our landlady told her. "I'm too busy doing real work. A layabout, too lazy to get an honest occupation doesn't have a say to me and neither does the jobless!"
"Hey!" I protested. "I am looking for a job!"
"Oh yeah? How many interviews did you go to this week, Miss. Kononovich? Five? Seven? None, maybe?"
"Listen!" I seethed. "I've been cooking, and cleaning, and shopping, and that are important stuff! A house doesn't run itself." What was I saying? This was my mom's speech, right down to the tone. I stopped before I got to the part about how unappreciated I was. Celia just snorted and waddled off in the direction of the counter.
Stressed Spelled Backwards Page 4
