“Oh, before I forget, Jeremy stopped by a little while ago.”
He snorted. “Jeremy was awake before noon?” Jeremy was Owen’s younger brother. Their mom lived in Richmond’s East End, and Jeremy lived with her. Jeremy was a bona fide, certified man-child.
“Yeah, I actually don’t think he’d been to bed yet.”
“What did he want?”
“He says he lost that hundred you gave him last week, and he needs you to spot him until he has that job interview next week.”
“He always has a job interview next week,” Owen muttered. His brother’s real occupation, apparently, was playing video games in Mom’s basement. Owen tried to look out for his brother because he’d been through a lot—they both had—but sometimes Jeremy made it so difficult. “Wait a minute, what do you mean, ‘lose’? How’d he lose a hundred dollars?”
Dante shrugged and held up his hands. “Hey. All I know is he said he was on his way back from Atlantic City. He just got back this morning. You know what I’m saying?”
“How’d he—he doesn’t have a car.”
“He probably took the bus. Or maybe he got a ride with someone. He does have friends, right? In real life? Not just on the video games?”
Owen ran a hand over his face and sighed. “Aw, man. I gotta fix this. I’m surprised Mom hasn’t called yet.”
“Probably doesn’t know yet.”
“Helpful. You’re real helpful.”
“I know,” Dante said. “You’re welcome.”
Owen jumped and then pulled his vibrating phone from his pocket. He looked down at the caller ID. Mom.
“It’s her, isn’t it? Right on cue.”
Owen picked up a pillow from the end of the couch and tossed it half-heartedly at Dante who caught it. As he answered the phone, Dante said, “Tell Mom I said hi. And thanks for those homemade granola bars. Those things were on point.”
Owen nodded in answer to Dante and said, “Hey, Mom,” fully prepared for her to be in crisis mode yet again because of his brother’s mishaps.
Chapter Three
Monday afternoon, Marci was ready to be in a bad mood. Her pain killers were wearing off, and it had been one hell of a day. She kicked open the door of her apartment while balancing her books and a greasy bag containing her burger and fries in her arms. Yeah it’d been a burger-and-fries kind of day. She couldn’t wait to add some bacon to these cheese fries and chow down. While still juggling everything in her arms, she misjudged the distance to the couch. She stubbed her toe on the edge of it, dropped her books and early dinner—or midafternoon snack, she hadn’t decided which yet—onto it, and swore.
“Hello to you, too, Sunshine,” Veronica, who went by Ronnie, said from the desk on which her computer sat in the far corner of the living room. Ronnie insisted that she needed a desktop.
Marci grumbled a reply with a sneer pulling at the corner of her lips while grabbing up her greasy brown paper bag and heading for the kitchen.
Ronnie started in on a rant about the hot water heater still being busted and how the landlord hadn’t returned any of her calls. Then she brought up Tyler and how he said he wasn’t coming home until Marci apologized. Tyler. That boy was always self-generating drama of one type or another. She didn’t even know what she’d done this time. She told Ronnie as much.
“He said you weren’t there for him when you needed him.”
“If he’s talking about last weekend, first of all, he didn’t need me. He had a room full of people there just for him. Second of all, I was there until nearly the end of the night. The word ‘friend’ does not mean twenty-four hour lap dog.”
“You ran off with some guy you’d just met at his birthday party.”
“And?” Marci stopped in the middle of the small kitchen; she could easily see Ronnie from where she stood. The apartment was a three-bedroom loft, which meant plenty of open space. “I bought him a birthday drink or three. I was there for most of it. And that guy was hot. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have hit that.”
Ronnie shrugged. She flipped her long, dark brown hair over her shoulder. She was spilling out of her navy blue V-neck T-shirt, which was nothing new.
Marci walked over to the stainless steel fridge, ready to grab her bacon. She’d asked them to hold the bacon at the restaurant because she only wanted her bacon. She was very particular about her bacon. She had some pre-cooked, and she couldn’t wait to rip it up and sprinkle it over the cheese fries, maybe add some to the burger. Except—something was wrong. Slamming the door of the fridge closed, she whirled around to face Ronnie. “Who ate my bacon?”
Ronnie hunched over her keyboard and stared intently at the computer screen as if she was learning the secret of the true meaning of life from it. “What bacon? I don’t even eat bacon.”
“Well, somebody ate it, and it wasn’t me.” Marci’s stomach gurgled sadly at that thought.
“I don’t know who ate your bacon, okay?”
“Are you sure about that? Because all I know, is when I left this morning, I had bacon. Now I have no bacon. So, while I was gone today, somebody who was not me must have eaten my bacon.”
Ronnie finally looked up from the computer screen. “Well, maybe…Jeremy ate it. But I told him not to eat it all.”
“Jeremy. Your worthless, freeloading friend I said I don’t want touching my stuff anymore when he comes over Jeremy? That Jeremy at my bacon?”
“I’m sorry, okay? He was hungry, hadn’t eaten all day. He said he was gonna make a sandwich. I didn’t watch everything he took out of the fridge. I guess he ate it. I’ll buy you some more bacon, okay?” Ronnie’s Jersey accent was coming out the way it often did when she was agitated. “What’s the big deal? There’s other stuff to eat in there.”
“Forget the bacon. That’s not the point.”
“Chill, Marci. What is the point?”
“I almost died this morning. This was after I got stuck in the line at Java Time and had to listen to this guy complain for five minutes about the guy in front of him taking too long to order his coffee. Five minutes. Do you know how really and truly long five minutes can be?”
“Sure. Five minutes trying to run on the treadmill? Forget about it.”
“The guy who was in line in front of him was acting like he’d never been to a coffeehouse before. Give me this one, no give me that, what’s in the other one? Are you sure there’s no dairy in the soy latte because I’m lactose intolerant. And on. And on. Then the guy behind him, the one who was in front of me, slowed the line down even more by going on about the good old days and customer service and I don’t know what else. I was about to have an aneurysm because I just knew I was going to go from being early to class and doing a little last-minute prep for my presentation to being late and having to use the first five minutes of my forty-five to set up the friggin’ power point. I finally made it out of the coffeehouse and was on my way to class when this idiot—cute idiot, but still a dern fool riding his bike on the sidewalk, and you know how I hate that—reamed into me and spilled my own coffee all over me. Then he insisted on taking me to student health and making sure I was okay.”
“What a monster,” Ronnie deadpanned.
“Can I finish please?”
“Go right ahead.” Ronnie gestured in front of her to indicate that the way was clear for Marci to finish her story.
“Thank you. Then? I got reamed out by my professor. She tells me I can’t make up my presentation. And I don’t even get in the door good, and here you come. Jeremy ate your bacon, Marci. The hot water heater is still busted, Marci. Don’t you care about Tyler at all, Marci? Can I please get five minutes before you rip into me? Five minutes?”
“I’m gonna let all that go because sounds like you had a rough day,” Ronnie said. “But don’t go ripping my head off, girl. And I’ll get you some bacon. I’m going grocery shopping tomorrow.”
Marci sank into the couch, closed her eyes, and put a hand over them. “I’m tired and I’m angry, and I
’m just going to stop talking now.”
“Good idea.”
Marci heard footsteps. A moment later, she heard the microwave going and stomach-rumbling smells of burger and grease filled the air after that. When the ding signifying the microwave was done sounded, she heard the door open and close. Then more footsteps.
“Here. Eat. Should make you less cranky.”
Marci looked up and saw Ronnie holding a plate with her burgers and fries on it. She had a glass of pineapple juice in the other hand. Marci grinned and took the plate and glass from her.
“I don’t deserve you,” Marci said before biting into the huge, juicy, savory burger she’d been dreaming about attacking since she bought it on her way home earlier.
“I know,” Ronnie said.
“I’ll call the landlord tonight. I’m in the mood to deal with him now, believe me.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Tyler started this,” Marci said in between bites of her burger. Without ever letting go of the burger, she reached for her bag, which contained her painkillers, with her free hand.
“I gotta be honest here. I’m done being the go-between for you two on this.”
Marci popped a pain pill and chased it with pineapple juice. After swallowing, she said, “Fair enough.”
#
Saturday morning, Marci woke to a dull ache in her chest—much better than yesterday. She soon discovered she wasn’t going to have the convalescing luxury of sleeping in, though. She pulled the covers over her head once she discovered that the dirty looks she was giving Ronnie were having very little effect on her.
“Ronnie, I love you, but if you don’t pull those curtains closed, I’m going to have to kill you.”
“That’s gonna be hard to do since you seem glued to that bed.” Ronnie sat on the corner of the bed. She was dressed plainly in jeans and a white T-shirt. Her dark hair hung wet over her shoulders. No makeup. Ronnie didn’t do early mornings much better than Marci did. “I just got out of a cold shower. Don’t think I’m jumping for joy over here.”
“New hot water heater has been ordered and should be in by Monday. Landlord promised.”
“Let’s hope. Anyway, we’re volunteering today with the Hope Center this morning. You said not to let you oversleep, right? We said we’d be there by seven-thirty.”
The Hope Center owned a thrift store downtown that used volunteers only to run the cash registers and stock the shelves. The Hope Center ran strictly on donations, volunteers, and the sales they received from the store’s merchandise. They used the funds they raised to provide temporary food and shelter to people who had nowhere else to go while they developed job skills and tried to improve their lives.
Marci groaned. “But it’s so early.”
“Don’t care. Get up,” Ronnie said. “I’ll toast us some bagels while you’re getting ready. And we can grab coffee from Java Time on our way.”
“Okay.” Marci sat up slowly, gingerly in bed. “I guess it’s a deal.”
“Better be.”
About an hour later, Marci found herself standing in the back room of the Hope Center Thrift Store holding a plastic cup of coffee—iced coffee. Even though it was a crisp, cool early October morning, she wasn’t able to bring herself to drink hot coffee so soon after her little incident. She’d also made sure they went to the Java Time close to the apartment and farther away from campus, knowing now that Owen worked at the other one. She definitely wanted to avoid an awkward run-in with him if at all possible.
A couple of volunteers wearing bright blue Hope Center polo shirts and who were just a little too awake and cheerful for 7:30AM were going over the basics with them. They wanted Ronnie, who’d volunteered there before, to help train a group of new recruits—five women from a nearby battered women’s shelter who had recently moved into the Hope Center dorms and would be working shifts in the thrift store soon.
Marci was on in-kind donations. In-kind donations were far more prevalent than monetary donations for the Hope Center. Besides, asking for and collecting monetary donations was handled mostly by the Hope Center’s full-time employees. The exceptions were the two phone-a-thons held in the fall and spring each year that required many volunteers to call community members and field calls from those interested in giving.
That Saturday, Marci was taking in new donations of clothes and furniture and whatever else people brought in, sorting and inventorying donations, and getting them ready to go out front for sale.
“Now where’s Tyler?” One of the overly chipper volunteers looked down at her clipboard.
As if on cue, Tyler straggled in with a hoodie pulled over his head and large sunglasses covering most of his face. He held up his hand and mumbled something that sounded like, “I’m here.” His blond hair fell over the top of his sunglasses. His bangs had grown long enough to hang in his eyes now, and that was his new look apparently. He claimed he’d had better luck at auditions since growing his hair out. Black skinny jeans clung to his narrow hips. That boy was impossibly skinny. Red boots covered the lower part of the tapered legs of his jeans. The new red leather boots he’d bought himself for his birthday. Like Marci, he clung to a cup of coffee. Except his was hot coffee in a paper cup.
“What happened to you?” Marci asked.
Ignoring her, he asked one of the blue polo-shirted volunteers, “So where do you want me?”
Curly blonde-haired, overly enthusiastic about life, woman-with-the-clipboard chirped, “You can help Marci out back here.”
Tyler’s face moved in Marci’s direction, but most of his expression remained hidden from her thanks to his large sunglasses. The disgruntled set of his mouth gave her a good idea of how he was feeling, though.
“You two be nice to each other,” Ronnie said as she walked past them.
Marci and Tyler both looked at her without saying anything. After Ronnie and the polo-shirted volunteers went to the manager’s office down the hall that doubled as the training location, Marci got Tyler up to speed on what they were doing with the donations.
Tyler didn’t say anything the whole time she talked. In fact, she wasn’t even sure he was looking at her with those glasses on.
“Can you take the glasses off, please? You’re not a movie star yet.”
She could see his jawbone working the way it did when he was annoyed. “Oh. So you’re not done being shitty to me. That’s good to know.”
“Is this really all because I left your party early? Like, maybe an hour early? After being there all night?”
“You knew that guy what, 30 minutes? An hour?”
“Longer than that.”
“The point is, you met him that night, and you abandoned me for him.”
“I did not abandon you. And what about all the times I’ve let you borrow my car for auditions in New York? Or driven up to New York to get you and bring you home because you got drunk, passed out, and missed your bus or train home on Sunday and didn’t have money for another ticket? And all the bad breakups I’ve seen you through?”
“You haven’t been there much for me lately.”
“I haven’t been there much for anybody lately. School is kind of killing me this semester.” And it just got worse. “But you know I love you. I care about you.”
“I guess.”
“And that guy was pretty hot. Admit it.”
Tyler removed his glasses and the hood of his hoodie. A slow smile crept over his lips. “He was scrumptious.”
“Scrumptious?” Marci laughed. “Did you really just say scrumptious?”
He laughed and bumped her shoulder with his. “I did. Come off it. You’re still in the doghouse, you know. So you better be on your best behavior.”
“Okay, how am I going to make it up to you?”
“You can start by going out with me tonight.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“The Hops.”
“You and Ronnie love that place.” Marci wasn’t a big fan of beer. She was a liqu
or kind of girl—might as well get right to the point.
“Hey. This is your penance. Besides, they have wine. And a full bar.”
“I’ll do it. For you.”
“You don’t have to say it like it’s killing you.”
“But it is a little bit.”
“Ha ha,” Tyler said dryly.
“Only for you, love.”
He threw his arms around her. “I’m so glad we’re friends again. I hate being mad at you. It’s so stressful. And Gary’s couch is beyond uncomfortable.”
Marci laughed. “Is that where you were the last few days?”
“Staying over at ex-boyfriends’ places is so not a good idea. Don’t even get me started on the debauchery that was the last few days. I’m getting too old for this.” He flung the back of his hand against his forehead and leaned his head back in an exaggerated pose of despair.
“You’re twenty-three.”
“That’s forever in acting years. I’m fast approaching celebrity middle age before I even get my big break.”
“That’s not even close to true.”
“See why I need you in my life?” Tyler asked. “Okay, so tell me what you’ve been up to while I was away. Then I’ll tell you all about how I got kicked out of a club in D.C., lost my favorite jeans, and almost got in a fight with a queen all in one night.”
“Sounds like yours is more exciting than mine. I want to hear yours first,” Marci said, knowing how he loved attention. And he was right. By Tyler standards, she’d abandoned him over the last few weeks. A little selfish and moody when he wanted to be, Tyler was still a great friend. Very loyal. Really good friends, the kind that brightened your day just by being around you and made you realize that the word “family” could mean so much more than blood, were hard to come by. She didn’t want to lose any of hers.
“You first, you first. We’ll save the best for last.” Tyler grinned.
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