by Hughes, Maya
I stared at the house across the street and two houses away. Not a sign of her, but I could practically hear the cackling from here. The cop climbed out of his car and stared up at me. His township badge glinted in the streetlights as he walked up to the porch with his gaze drilling into my skull.
The music downstairs came to a screeching halt, and people flowed out of the house and down the street like ants fleeing a can of Raid.
My own personal pain in the ass pushed her curtains aside and peered out at everyone like they were peasants who should’ve been dragged off her property. This was the eighth time she’d called the cops on us in four months. I had thought after last year, she would move out of her horror shack, but she’d been there glowering when we all came back from training camp. She dropped the curtain as someone knocked on my door.
The raised voices from downstairs filtered up through the open window, trying to stall the inevitable. The cop’s clipped tone brooked no arguments. I ran my hands over my face. The perfect end to a perfect night.
Berk poked his head in. His shaggy hair fell into his eyes and his shirt was half on. The signatures of partygoers were scrawled across his skin, along with more than a few phone numbers.
“You’ve got a visitor.” He braced his hands on the top of my doorjamb.
“Please tell me I’m drunk and it’s a campus cop, not the township.”
He clenched his teeth together and sucked in with a face filled with pity.
“Fuck.”
“We just won the national championship—they’ve got to cut us a little slack.” A couple of stragglers came out of the bathroom. The girls laughed and rushed by. He dropped his arms and jumped as one got a handful of his ass on her way downstairs.
“You weren’t the one who humiliated the township police chief’s son with a thirty-to-nothing loss at state back in high school, on top of the other thing.”
Berk gave me a grim nod. “Also true. Should I escort you to the gallows?” He stepped back from my door and followed me downstairs.
“Are the cops here for you? Seriously, do they know who you are?” a guy called out, slurring every syllable.
A slow clap broke the gentle murmur of the crowd. I looked out over the sea of people and there was one that stuck out.
“What the hell is Johannsen doing here?” I hissed at Berk. My shoulder ached just at the sight of him.
“No idea. He walked in here like he was looking for someone and then the cops showed up.”
This was not what I needed tonight.
His self-satisfied smirk made it hard to see straight. But I had bigger things to deal with.
“I’ll take the fall.” Another guy wearing a Trojans jersey pushed to the front of the crowd to pull an ‘I volunteer as tribute’ move. Damn, the temptation to nod and promise him a signed jersey darted across my mind. The cops had had a hard-on for me screwing up for a while now, but nah, I couldn’t do that, even as much as it would make my life a hell of a lot easier right now.
The cop stood in the living room surrounded by red plastic cups, booze-soaked streamers, school flags, and way more FU-branded articles of clothing than I’d ever thought could be misplaced during one party.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” The look on his face told me there was nothing I could say to get out of this.
“Officer.” I extended my hand. He stared down at it like I’d offered him a dead fish covered in thumbtacks, and then he slapped the silver handcuffs around my wrists and read me my rights. Everyone at the party chose that moment to start booing.
Well, my night was fucked. I wasn’t going to pull the ‘Do you know who my dad is?’ card. Only assholes played that card, and no matter what our breaking-and-entering, condom-avalanche-triggering neighbor thought of me, I wasn’t that guy.
LJ skidded into the living room. His eyes got so wide, I could almost hear his eyelids snapping back. He fumbled for his phone. “Do you want me to call your dad?”
The cop put my arms behind my back, tweaking my shoulder. “No! Do not call him. My wallet’s upstairs. I’ll call you if I need bail money. Just take the cash from my account.”
I was walked down to the cop’s car. He opened the back door and put his hand on top of my head, pushing me into the car. The scents of disinfectant and plastic invaded my nostrils. I supposed it was better than the alternative of beer-laced BO.
Berk and LJ stood at the top of the steps to our house, AKA the Brothel. That name, a holdover from when the house belonged to a frat, hadn’t earned us any favors, especially not when the police chief’s high school senior daughter had shown up on our doorstep, teetering on the edge of blackout drunk. He hadn’t cared that we’d called the ambulance for her and hadn’t served her one drop of alcohol. Nope, that had put a bullseye on our backs since almost six months ago, national football champions or not.
The cop car rolled down the street, and everyone craned their necks to get a good look at who’d just been arrested. We drove past the house whose inhabitant had started it all. She poked her head out of her upstairs bedroom window. Her face disappeared as we rounded the corner, and I could’ve sworn there was a flicker of remorse. It was probably just the moonlight playing tricks, more likely the beginnings of a smile and a gleeful dance in her bedroom window like I’d seen her do a few times before.
Little did she know, this wasn’t even the worst part of my night. Not by far.
3
Elle
The traffic getting home meant my normal thirty-minute drive took over ninety minutes. Screw me sideways for not having the college football schedule tattooed on my chest like everyone else in town.
By the tenth drunken rendition of the school fight song in near standstill traffic, I’d been ready to end things by slamming my head into the steering wheel. Was karma real? Wisps of my past life came wafting back, and they stank to high heaven.
My street was no better. People milled around in the middle of the road, and I had to park five blocks away from my house to find a spot.
I climbed out of my car and slammed the door three times before the latch caught. The last thing I needed was to come outside and find my battery had died because the door hadn’t closed all the way—again. It wasn’t like my interior lights even worked anymore, so how the hell did the freaking battery keep dying?
With every few feet closer to home, the bass pounded louder, but one was loudest of all: the fucking Brothel. Who named their house the Brothel, anyway? Asshole football players who had no respect for their neighbors, that’s who.
The S-Class Mercedes I’d driven back in high school hadn’t had these issues, but then again, this hunk of junk was all mine, though it was an insult to junk to call it such.
My shoulders ached. My feet ached. Hell, my eyeballs ached.
The tiredness I’d kept at bay for four years had seeped down deep into my bones. I was so close to graduation. All this hard work would pay off, and then what? No time to think about that now. Just keep busy. Keep moving and doing good deeds. Win the Huffington Award and then figure things out. The cash stipend that came with it would finally get me out from under the financial raincloud that had followed me everywhere since our middle-class life became anything but.
If I made it into the shower, it would be a miracle, but my clothes were rank. If I didn’t make it into the shower, I’d be better off sleeping on the floor so I didn’t have to wash my sheets the next day. How I’d gotten signed up for fried chicken duty, I’d never know, but the cooking gods were not smiling down on me.
My teeth rattled in my skull, and the pounding wasn’t just from the headache trying to schedule a late-night appointment. It was one in the morning, and the party across the street wasn’t showing any signs of stopping any time soon. I just wanted to sleep—in peace for once.
I tripped on the splintered wooden plank on our front porch. If I’d thought the landlord would actually do something, I’d have set a reminder to call him in the morning and add it t
o our list of three hundred other things that needed to be fixed, but if it weren’t for him cashing our checks month after month, I’d have suspected he’d died.
Someone set off fireworks, my death grip on the strap of my bag slipped, and I punched myself in the face. Son of a bitch! That was it. I was done. I wasn’t putting up with this anymore. My phone was out and the speed dial pushed without a second thought. And it wasn’t a text to my jerk of a neighbor for more of his fake promises to break up whatever bedlam was going on across the street. The cops arrived in record time like they’d been waiting for an excuse to enter the Brothel.
I slammed the door shut. Oh boohoo, their party would be over at only one AM. I was sure they’d survive.
After trudging up the steps, I was so tempted to flop onto my bed, but then I’d never get up—a lesson learned many times over the past three years. I put my hair up, grabbed my pajamas off the floor, and sniffed them. Eh, they’d do. Comfy flannel PJs that helped beat back the cold, my extra thick socks, and I was ready to go.
“Elle, you home?” Jules yelled from the bottom of the steps.
“No, it’s not Elle. It’s a polite robber who’s come to steal your pajamas and a scalding hot shower.”
“Okay, well you probably want to wash them first. Elle’s been wearing them for over a week without washing them. Oh, and wash them before you bring them back.”
It hadn’t been a week. “It’s only been…” I counted the number of days since I’d changed PJs on my fingers. Yikes.
“Exactly. Come down when you’re done. I’ve got a surprise for you.” I swear, she could’ve opened a phone sex line with that voice. Most people swore she was a pack-a-day smoker, but I’d seen her hiccup just drinking soda.
I chuckled and peeled off my clothes. The fried-food smell clung to everything. I’d need to do a double wash. Never again was I manning the fryer.
“Elle, look out your window.” Jules’ voice sounded like a siren wailing from downstairs.
I raced to the front of my room and leaned against the windowsill. My stomach plummeted. The gleaming silver of the handcuffs on Nix’s wrists shone under the streetlights. He was on a perp walk out of his house. Shit!
They weren’t supposed to arrest him, just get them to turn the music down. The car disappeared from sight, and I sagged against the window. Nothing I could do about it now. It wasn’t even all their fault this time—okay, most of the time, but their partygoers always took up all the parking spots on the street, which meant I had to walk multiple blocks to get home, exhausted, alone, at night. There were also the almost nightly fireworks set off from their roof to celebrate every win since the Trojans had made the playoffs, the fact that half the street still called me Condom Queen after a year and a half, and the nonstop horn parade that rattled the windows in our house after every win.
A national championship was impressive no matter what, but did they have to be so damn loud? It was a weeknight. So, for the cops to pick him up, there had to be some shady stuff going on. A zing of vindication shot through me. What could it be for the golden boy? Letting underage kids drink at the party? Drugs? I’d thought he was a run-of-the-mill entitled asshole, but maybe he was a hell of a lot worse than that and I’d just done the world a favor.
I stared at my reflection in my sparkling and brand-new (unlike most everything else in this place) window. It had been repaired with hard-earned money—my money—after the FU Trojan’s game of street football ended up with me sweeping up broken glass at one AM after getting off work. With that thought, my sympathy was well and truly gone, evaporated after being incinerated into the charred remains of my remorse. Screw him and whatever he was mixed up in.
I dragged myself into the shower and did the dance between the freezing cold air and the liquid fire pouring out of the showerhead. With my hair washed and my body bundled up like I was ready to climb Everest, I trudged downstairs. My bed called to me, but Jules’ tease of a surprise got me to zombie walk down the steps.
She popped her head out of the kitchen and pushed up her horn-rimmed glasses with the back of her hand.
“What’s all over your hands?” I yawned and steadied myself on the banister. It rocked and swayed.
“Come see. I saw this recipe on one of those time-lapse videos and I needed to try it. This is my fourth batch, and I think I finally got it right.”
While some people saw a picture and needed to visit a hot vacation spot or needed to buy a new pair of shoes, Jules needed to figure out how to make anything she spotted in the wild. I wasn’t complaining; I got to be her taste tester, and even her failures were better than I could manage on my best day in the kitchen.
It also helped battle against the freezing cold temperatures in the house. The oven kept at least the downstairs warmer than the ice-bath levels upstairs. It was so cold everywhere except the bathroom, which had lava pouring from the faucets. If we hadn’t been actually paying rent, I’d have sworn we were inside a psychological experiment.
A wall of heat hit me and seeped into my skin as I crossed the threshold into the kitchen. The entire place smelled like cinnamon and sugar had been going at it all night long, and it hadn’t been polite, nice-to-see-you banging. They’d had down-and-dirty, can’t-walk-right-in-the-morning, need-a-cigarette sex, and their fried babies were lined up neatly on paper towels on the kitchen counter.
While I’d had my fill of food at the soup kitchen, it was forgotten once my eyes landed on the golden brown, crunchy goodness in front of me. Tears welled in my eyes at their crispy on the outside, soft and doughy on the inside beauty.
“Are those churros?” I turned to Jules and grabbed her shoulders before staring at her with my hand against my chest to hold back the surging emotions, or maybe it was just my PMS turning into a sweets-and-carbs craving.
“Yes?” She pushed the glasses up the bridge of her nose.
I pulled her in for a hug; there might’ve been a rib crack in there it was so tight.
“Elle, you’re crushing me,” she wheezed out with her arm pinned between us.
I let her go, and she stumbled back.
Her cinnamon sugar hand had left a print on her face.
“Does this mean you’re a fan?” She laughed, wiping her cheek.
My earlier tiredness momentarily forgotten, I dropped my head down to the counter, sniffing their delectable aroma and nearly mainlining the cinnamon-and-sugar mixture beside the cooling desserts. The crispy, star-shaped sticks were perfection. The piping bag with the dough sat beside the pot with a thermometer sticking out of it. How many college students had an oil thermometer? There were people on campus who still couldn’t do their own laundry. I should know—I had been one of them.
Horns blared down the street. I pushed back the kitchen curtains, looking across the street at the Brothel.
“Looks like the cops shutting them down didn’t help things.”
Jules stared out beside me, her nose-prints already smudged on the glass. “I think it’s sweet they’re celebrating their hard work.” She’d taken the room facing their house once she’d found out who lived there. It wasn’t that I didn’t also have a view of their house, but hers was almost panoramic.
“Their hard work doesn’t need to be broadcast across the entire campus.”
“People just showed up. That seems to happen a lot. Remember that time people broke into their house to wheel the kegs in before their game was even over?” She dropped more dough into the pot and swirled around the crisp-ifying sticks in the crackling oil with a slotted spoon and tongs.
“They don’t do much to discourage it.” Parties like that had been mainstays back in high school. It didn’t matter that we were all underage or that someone’s parents should’ve been around. Houses were trashed. The world had been our oyster—but this was college. Some of us took our futures seriously.
She rolled a bunch of the churros in the mix on a tray, and my mouth watered. My stomach was practically lying spread eagle on the floor
shouting, ‘Take me!’ Lifting them like a tortoise running in molasses, she put them onto a plate. Her lips quirked up, and she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye.
I probably looked like a dog eyeing up a T-bone, pacing in the kitchen, waiting for her to say when.
“I should probably let these cool a bit more. Wouldn’t want you to burn your mouth.” She waved her tongs back and forth in front of her.
My eyes narrowed.
She burst out laughing. “Go ahead, but when you burn the shit out of your tongue, it’s not my fault.” Jules had quite the potty mouth when she wanted to. It was probably for the laughs at the shocked looks on everyone’s faces when she busted out a string of curses to make a sailor blush. Under her Easy-Bake Oven exterior was a hilarious, foul-mouthed, pole-dancing vixen who could rule the world, if she wanted—she just didn’t know it yet.
I lunged for the plate with the words barely out of her mouth. My fingers wrapped around one. The oil on my fingers turned the coating into pure gold. I pulled it apart, nibbling on each ridge, biting my way down like an insane typewriter. I ate the first one with my mouth open, sucking in cool air to stop my tongue from catching on fire, but by the third, I pulled them apart like string cheese, holding each churro strand up in the air and dangling it into my mouth. The sugar rush hit me hard.
“You’re the weirdest freaking eater I’ve ever seen.” She laughed and threw me the roll of paper towels.
I caught it with my arms, keeping my hands far away. Oh no, those fingers covered in cinnamon sugar were not being sacrificed to the paper towel gods.
“You look like a sweet version of the Joker with churro dust smeared all over your face.”
She pulled an upside down cupcake tin out of the freezer. It had dough piped over the backs of the cups.
“What are those?” My mouthful of churros muffled my words, but she was used to me talking with my mouth full of the stuff she baked.