“I wanted to protect you. I did the best I could.” Fresh tears fell down her face. I wiped them away with the pad of my thumb.
“You did amazing.” With a meaningful glance around the room, I added, “We can’t keep all of this forever, though.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“So let’s go through it. Together.”
“I can’t do it now, it’s getting late. Izzy and Al will be back soon. I have to meal plan and do their laundry and all the other stuff I usually do on Sundays.”
“Then we’ll do it later this week. Little by little, every day, until it’s done.”
Before we left, I took one last walk around the room, stopping when I got to Mom’s bookshelf. I removed one at random, a historical romance with a watercolor cover, an image of a woman staring down at what looked like pink peonies, a man in the distance, visible just over her bare shoulder. Lord of Scoundrels.
It was time to start reading again.
Chapter 28
The next morning, Natasha drove me to the debt lawyer’s office, which was essentially the front parlor of Nazanin Ansary’s Encinitas home. Before we arrived, I was terrified, expecting to be scolded and shamed for the duration of our meeting. But the experience was almost pleasant. Ms. Ansary was kind and helpful, walking me through the complicated process of filing legal paperwork to unfreeze my accounts, then showing me how to develop a step-by-step strategy for negotiating a debt settlement and, eventually, a repayment plan. She also stressed the importance of creating a budget, a task which Natasha was more than thrilled to help me with.
If the courts processed everything correctly, Ms. Ansary said my accounts would likely be unfrozen by the end of the week. After that, I could apply to become a HandyMinion again.
When the meeting was over, Natasha hustled off to clear out a client’s messy closet, and sent me back to PB in a Lyft. The whole ride home, I felt a growing sense of optimism about the future.
I was going to claw my way out of debt, one HandyMinion assignment at a time.
I was going to start volunteering at a worthy charity, to help make the world a slightly less unfair place.
I was going to read books. Lots of them.
And I was going to clean my apartment—really clean it, this time—and set up my space in a way that was both comfortable and functional. Or as functional as possible for a place where the toaster and hairdryer couldn’t be plugged in at the same time. The point is, I’d make it a home I could be proud of, so I wouldn’t find myself constantly daydreaming about living somewhere else.
Though I did hope to spend plenty of time in the blue bungalow—that is, if Trey would have me. We hadn’t spoken since I’d rushed him off the phone in the middle of the Passion Powwow. Would things be awkward when I saw him again? Thinking about it made my head hurt.
The throbbing intensified when the Lyft pulled up at the curb in front of the triplex, and I was faced with the possibility that my apartment may not have been empty. I’d instructed Rob to leave by Monday morning. Now it was Monday afternoon. He said he’d be gone by the time I got home, but he wasn’t exactly a man of his word.
Sure enough, as I headed toward the back of the building, the distinct odor of marijuana wafted from my open windows.
Goddammit.
Naturally, he hadn’t locked the door, so I didn’t have to take out my keys. I just pushed it open and screamed, “Why are you still here?”
It took him a second to register my presence; with Rob, there was always a momentary delay before his brain caught up to his surroundings. In that silent span of time, I took in the scene. He’d made himself right at home. And apparently, he’d been to Best Buy.
All the electronics I’d sold on Craigslist had been replaced. Actually, scratch that: they’d been upgraded. Rob had even installed a gaming chair in the center of my living room, which he sat in, headset strapped to his ears. First-person shooter graphics filled the TV screen, which I realized now was also new.
“You bought a new TV?” My screeching could not be contained. “I thought your parents cut you off!”
He slipped off the headset and paused his game. “Well, they kinda did. I mean, they kicked me outta their house, but I still have the Amex. I just told you that because I thought you’d feel bad for me and take me back.”
“I will never take you back! What you and I had was a joke. The only reason you liked being with me is because I let you do whatever you want and never complained. Well, I’m done. No more lying around my apartment smoking weed and playing video games. This all goes, and so do you.”
With a haughty flourish, I pressed the power button on the TV. Except it wasn’t the power button, it was the input button, and the screen went all blue. So I pressed another button, but that brought up the settings menu. So much for a dramatic gesture.
As I continued smashing buttons, Rob casually stood up from his gaming chair and crossed the room to the kitchenette, where he pulled a packet of frosted blueberry Pop-Tarts from a box. “What are you doing?” I yelled. “I told you to leave.”
“Yeah, I heard you,” he said, completely unruffled. “But I’m hungry. Lemme make myself something to eat real quick.”
The balls on this guy.
I watched in disbelief as he tore open the foil packaging and slipped a pastry in each toaster slot. The moment he pressed his finger to the handle, though, I realized he was making a terrible mistake.
“Don’t!” I screamed, but it was too late. Between the giant TV and the gaming chair and who knows whatever else Rob had plugged in at the time, the shady old electrical system couldn’t handle the extra load of warming a couple of Pop-Tarts. The outlet sparked, then sizzled, then a wisp of smoke curled out from the opening in the wall.
“Oh, shit.” That was Rob’s helpful contribution.
Meanwhile, I dove forward to unplug the toaster and felt a jolt from my fingertips to my elbow. The smoke increased, from a thin plume to a billowing cloud and that’s when I really started to panic. Instantly, I reached for the box under my bed. Because if this place was going up in flames, my memories of Mom were the one thing I wanted to save.
Racing down the steps, I dialed 911, then set my box down next to the curb, where I waited to flag down the fire department. Rob paced beside me, vaping up a storm.
“Why did you have all that stuff plugged in at once?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “You know how easy it is to overload that circuit. You lived here for three years.”
He took a hit from his vape pen and shrugged. “I forgot.”
Of course he did.
Minutes later, a fire truck turned onto Beryl Street, and we pointed our brave heroes toward my apartment in the back. There didn’t appear to be any smoke or flames coming from the windows, which meant the fire had probably not escalated, but they told us to hang back at the curb until they gave the all clear, anyway.
The thing about a fire truck is that it attracts a lot of attention from the neighbors. People I’d never seen before were suddenly sticking their heads out of open doors and hovering around at a respectful distance. Close enough to gawk, but far enough to avoid serious injury should the apartment spontaneously explode. I sent a wish out into the universe: Please, don’t let Trey be home.
Predictably, my request was ignored.
He came striding out of his front door in board shorts and bare feet, then rushed down the pathway and through the picket fence. His eyes went to the fire truck, the firefighters running back and forth behind the triplex, and finally, they settled on me. My pulse quickened a bit, not simply because he was gorgeous and the very sight of him affected me on a visceral level, but also because I was trapped.
This was not how I wanted our reunion to go down. At the very least, I had wanted to shower first. But I very much did not want Rob to be here, an awkward third wheel with
bloodshot eyes. How was I supposed to explain his presence, or the fact that he’d just set my apartment on fire?
It seemed I didn’t have to do much explaining, though. As soon as Trey approached, Rob lifted his fist for a bump. “Yo, yo, my man.”
My man?
The worst part was that Trey bumped him back. “What’s going on with the fire truck?” He directed his question toward Rob, not me.
This was bad.
“Not sure, man,” Rob replied. “Outlet started smoking for no reason.”
“It wasn’t for no reason,” I said. “There were too many things plugged in at once.”
“Sounds like shady electrical.” Trey gazed at me with something like disappointment in his eyes. “Might wanna talk to your landlord about bringing things up to code.”
“Definitely, definitely,” Rob said. When he saw the way Trey was looking at me, he said, “Oh, sorry, man. Remember I was telling you about my girlfriend? This is Bree.”
“I’m not your girlfriend,” I said. “And Trey and I already know each other. I didn’t realize you two had met, though.”
“Yeah, he got my poke bowl,” Rob said, then broke out in hysterics.
Trey seemed to find the whole situation less hilarious. “His GrubGetter order was delivered to my house by mistake. Apparently, your apartment doesn’t have an official address number, so it was hard for the delivery person to find. So I helped her out.” He clenched his jaw, eyes blazing. “It took a second for me to figure out where she meant, though, since you told me you were away for the weekend. I hadn’t realized Rob moved back in.”
“He didn’t move back in,” I said, glaring at Rob who was still laughing like a hyena. “He showed up on my doorstep Thursday night and told me he had nowhere to go. I let him stay here while I was in Palm Desert, but he was supposed to be gone by now.”
“Palm Desert.” There was a teasing lilt to Trey’s words. “I thought you said you were going to Encinitas, that your sister needed you at the last minute or something.”
Shit.
“I meant that I went to Encinitas on Thursday night. She drove us to the desert the next morning.”
“Cool. What were you doing out there?”
This felt uncomfortably like an inquisition, though he wasn’t asking anything unreasonable. His tone wasn’t particularly hostile, either. Then again, it wasn’t particularly warm.
“I was at a wellness retreat. Kind of. Actually, I’m not really sure what it was supposed to be.”
“From your Instagram, it looked like some sort of influencer conference.”
“My Instagram?”
“Yeah, Rob showed me. Bree by the Sea, right?”
I was going to murder Rob.
Though it was my own fault for leaving those incriminating padded envelopes around my apartment instead of throwing away my garbage like a civilized human.
“Right,” I said. “But I’m not really keeping up with that anymore.”
“Really? ’Cause you posted some great shots from the weekend. Like the one of you blowing glitter around. That one got a lot of likes, if I remember correctly.”
What was he talking about? The only photos I’d posted this weekend were the obligatory collaborations. I’d never bothered to upload the one he was referring to, the one Natasha took of me during the Passion Powwow.
Unless that’s what she was doing poking around in my phone while I watched the glitter float away into the desert.
I was going to murder her, too.
But frankly, I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. I felt attacked, ambushed, like he was trying to corner me into admitting something scandalous, or make me feel like an even bigger fool than I already did, standing here on the sidewalk next to my baked ex-boyfriend while an electrical fire ravaged my home.
“If you have something to say to me, say it. Because it feels like you’re dancing around your point, instead of getting straight to it.”
He let out a sarcastic laugh. “You’ve been lying to me since the moment we met, and suddenly now you care about being straightforward?”
“I haven’t been lying to you. If it’s about my Instagram, I can explain—”
“Were you planning this all along?”
“Planning what?”
He pointed to me, then back at himself. “This. Us.”
I shook my head, confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
With an irritated sigh, he jammed his hand in the pocket of his board shorts and pulled out his phone. “You know, I reinstalled the app just to see this because I couldn’t believe it.” His thumb tapped around his screen and I struggled to understand the problem. Was he really so upset that I’d posted a few poorly filtered photos of myself wearing ugly lip gloss and even uglier shoes?
“Here we go.” Trey turned his phone around, showing a picture of his adorable blue bungalow, hashtagged #choosehappy and #noexcuses. I’d taken this photo on my walk to the beach, the day of the stingray attack, the day Trey had helped me to safety. At the time, it was simply a dream for my vision board, no more.
“I can explain.”
Trey wasn’t interested in explanations. “Your life is your life, and what you do is none of my business. But you know how important my privacy is to me. You know I don’t want to be on social media.”
“That could be anyone’s house,” I said, but then Trey scrolled down to a comment: Trey Cantu lives here, I saw him waxing his board outside one day, omg are they dating?!?
Shit.
“It’s not what you think. I told you, you live in my dream home. I took this photo for my vision board, before anything ever happened between us.”
“Wait, something happened between you two?” That was Rob, ever slow on the uptake.
Trey ignored him. “You know, I thought about that, because of the time stamp on the post. But then I saw the photo before it, and it got kinda creepy.”
He swiped up, revealing the picture of the girl on the beach in the bright red bikini, the one fearlessly wading into the waves, her back turned to the camera. The inspiration for my ill-fated dip in the ocean.
“How do you explain this?” he asked.
“That’s just some random photo I found on Instagram. It was part of my vision board, to inspire me to get over my fear of the water.”
His eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “Why did you put Shayla on your vision board?”
It took a second to work out what he was saying. “This picture...that’s Shayla in the water?” When he nodded, I said, “But you can’t see her face. How can you tell?”
“I know it’s her because I took this picture. Last year, when we were still dating.” The screen went dark and Trey pocketed the phone. “You know it’s her because she posted it on her Instagram account.”
“No.” I shook my head. Granted, I didn’t remember which account I’d swiped this photo from. All I remembered was the #goodvibesonly hashtag. But it was a recent photo, not one from a year ago. Wasn’t it?
Regardless, now I looked like some unhinged stalker who’d conspired to hook up with Trey—and had documented the whole wacko plan on the internet for the whole world to comment on.
Even worse, did he think I was trying to build an influencer career off his name, just like Shayla had?
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I know this looks bad, but—”
Trey raised one hand to silence me. “I’m sure you have some perfectly plausible excuse,” he said. “But you might as well save your breath. At this point, I don’t believe a word you say.”
A thousand different responses raced through my mind—I’m sorry! You’ve got it all wrong! I’ll delete my Instagram and we can start over!—but I couldn’t force my voice to form the words. Then someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I spun around to see a firefig
hter removing his heavy-duty gloves.
“Excuse me,” he said, “are you the occupant of this residence?”
“Yes,” I said, frantic. “Is everything okay? How bad is the damage?”
He met my panic with calm, rational explanation. “None of your personal effects seem to have suffered harm, but that outlet in the kitchen is destroyed. The whole electrical system needs to be rewired, but to be frank, there are a number of safety concerns I have about that apartment. It’s not up to code by any stretch of the imagination. I doubt it’s even legal to be living there. I’m going to schedule an inspection with the city, but in the meantime, you’ll have to find someplace else to stay.”
Goddammit.
Just like that, I was evicted.
Chapter 29
Remember when I said my sister wasn’t a safety net?
I was eating those words right about now.
With nowhere else to go, I sent Natasha a quick Help! text, to which she responded by sending a Lyft to pick me up and bring me back to her place.
“Jonathan, red Prius, seven minutes.”
Before Jonathan arrived, I ran inside to pack the LeSportsac tote bag full of clean clothes. Meanwhile, Rob didn’t glance my way as he unplugged his gaming chair and hoisted it over his shoulder. I guess finding out I’d moved on from our dysfunctional relationship with the hottie prosurfer next door was a blow to his ego. He tossed all his expensive electronics into the back of his brand-new Jeep and hightailed it outta there without so much as a goodbye. Where he was going, I didn’t know or care. Truthfully, I hoped I’d never see him again.
I arrived at Natasha’s doorstep just before dinner. She answered the door with a spatula in her hand, giving me a one-armed hug. “I made a keto lasagna bake. It’s amazing, trust me.”
It actually was pretty amazing. Sausage, ground beef, three kinds of cheese—what’s not to like? I scooped a second helping while I sat at the dining room table, listening to Al discuss the perils of untreated overbites and Izzy talk about who was mean to whom on the school playground that day. I smiled and nodded and said things like, “Oh, how interesting!” But on the inside, I was crumbling to pieces.
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