Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  But Jason was getting defensive. “Because this is a prank, not a crime.” He snorted. “I’m not a criminal.”

  “Oh yeah. Grand theft auto, totally legal.”

  He’d started on an angry retort, then caught himself and laughed. “Okay, okay,” he said. He ran his hands through his hair, and I could see that his palms were sweating from the damp trail they left in his bangs. “Maybe I’m also a little worried I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I nearly failed shop.”

  “So that’s why you got mono last year.”

  “Saved my GPA,” he admitted.

  My own GPA was in free fall. I’d already guessed I wasn’t going to UT with Jason next year and wanted to spend as much time with him as I could. In the end, I had agreed to do it for the same reason I agreed to everything Jason wanted: because he wanted it.

  I was supposed to set an alarm for one a.m. and sneak out of the house, and I went to sleep early but full of adrenaline, sure that I would roll out of bed at the first beep. Instead, I awoke to a desperate tapping on my window sometime in the early-morning hours, still dark but way past one. Lost in a thick waking haze, I couldn’t tell if I actually saw Jason standing outside my window in the bushes, pale and shivering, or just heard him furiously tapping. But whether awake or asleep, I knew that I would never crawl through that dog door and steal Mattie’s keys, much less follow Jason to a field three counties over and watch as he banged up Mattie’s truck so I could drive him home afterward. I told myself I wasn’t really awake, and the tapping sound followed me into my dreams.

  I caught up to Jason the next day in the cafeteria. Standing in the nacho line, he couldn’t get away from me, but he wouldn’t look at me either.

  “Okay, top ten reasons I didn’t do the plan last night,” I said. “Number ten: It was a stupid fucking plan.”

  Wrong move. He stared resolutely at the floppy cardboard boats under the heat lamp, their tortilla chips stuck together with greasy cheese, then slid one onto his tray.

  “Number nine: Dreamed I was helping; woke up in the bathroom trying to shift the toilet into third gear.”

  Nothing. I swallowed.

  “Number eight: I’m a rotten friend.” I touched his sleeve and, in a different tone, said, “Jason, I’m sorry. Really.”

  As if he hadn’t heard me, couldn’t even feel my hand on his arm, he mechanically heaped sour cream and guacamole onto his nachos.

  “Fine, skip to number one,” I said. “I chickened out, Jase. I didn’t want to tell you, but I was scared.”

  Eyes still fixed on his tray, he slowly grinned, then chuckled. “You should have seen the look on your face when I was telling you about it.” He tossed the guacamole scooper into the hot-water tin with a splash. “It was like hurdle-jumping day in gym class all over again.”

  I beamed, relieved. “In my defense, I still don’t think you should have to have a doctor’s note when you’re obviously a midget.”

  By the end of the day, we were acting like it had never happened. Jason never brought up pranking Mattie again—although he took up smoking shortly afterward, which seemed related somehow—and when his girlfriend dumped him right before prom later that year, he gave her ticket to me. Standing next to him in a pile of silver balloons for the picture, my red column dress looking slightly silly next to his Texas tux, I felt thoroughly forgiven.

  Deep down, though, I knew I had lied about the reason I’d stayed in bed that night. It was true I was scared of Mattie, but I wouldn’t have let that stop me from helping Jason out. The number-one reason I hadn’t helped Jason steal Mattie’s truck was that he couldn’t admit he was too scared to do it alone. We both pretended he’d have gone through with it if only he’d had the keys, but he wouldn’t have. And that was ultimately why I couldn’t join him in crossing the line. He needed me too much.

  Trust me now? The question still hung unanswered in the little speech bubble on my screen.

  Amanda had crossed the line without me, unhesitatingly, on my behalf.

  I do, I typed into the text box, and pushed SEND.

  7

  “Absolutely not.” I glared at the red cross-front apron full of spray bottles that was lying on Amanda’s sofa. “You said I’d be a runner. You never said anything about a maid.”

  “It’s the only Runnr service he uses regularly!” Amanda protested. “Think of it like a part.”

  “I don’t do maids.” One of the reasons I’d stopped scouring the audition boards years before I left L.A. was that I got sick of showing up to read for the best friend and getting handed sides for the cleaning lady.

  “It’s just a costume,” she said, seeming genuinely bewildered. “And you won’t be wearing it long. Once you get inside—”

  “I know, I know.” I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was a finalist for Funniest Person in Austin. “Just shut up and give it to me.” Amanda dropped the apron into a shopping bag, and I stalked out to the car with it wedged under my arm.

  Once home, I donned the cleaning outfit as quickly as possible, to get it over with, and forced myself to look in the mirror. The red Runnr apron aged me ten years, and the half-empty bottles of cleaners in the pockets along the front forced my shoulders into a heavy slump. I thought of my mother hustling off to work in heels every day, her shoulders thrown sharply back. Even after getting laid off from her secretarial job at the helium plant, she had refused to return to the housecleaning work she’d done when she first came to Texas. “I don’t clean up messes anymore,” she’d insisted. “Not your father’s, not yours. Not anyone’s.” I pulled my own shoulders back, straining against the apron straps, and even attempted an old acting-class trick of inventing a walk for the character. But in the end, my waddle more or less invented itself, an attempt to minimize the sloshing of the bottles as they bounced off my belly. Pilot idea, I thought, then stopped myself. Too depressing.

  I checked my phone for activity on the app. For a regular weekly job like this, Amanda had explained, Branchik would get a notification on his phone to approve the run before it went out on the app. It was part of the company’s philosophy not to allow standing gigs to go to the same runner week after week. That might foster an independent relationship between user and contractor, encouraging them to drop the middleman altogether.

  “The Runnr philosophy is based on the fungibility of labor,” Amanda explained, and then she saw my blank expression and clarified. “Price, speed, and quality are the only variables that are supposed to matter to the algorithm. The way Runnr sees it, familiarity breeds wage inflation and tolerance for mistakes. You get to know someone, you learn their kids’ names, suddenly they’re a person. The Runnr customer is supposed to be able to order up human help like an appetizer, at the spur of the moment, without worrying about that stuff.”

  Just then, the notification arrived with a ding. The words We have a Run for you! popped up on my screen, a shower of confetti raining down behind them. I tapped DETAILS and watched as Doug Branchik’s address came up with the specs for the cleaning job; bathroom, kitchen, laundry, all boxes checked. At the bottom of the screen, the bidding price Amanda’s program had auto-generated to ensure I would win the run: $16.79.

  Unbelievable. If this were a real run, my percentage of the take would barely cover round-trip bus fare. And the bus was, unfortunately, a vital part of this plan, so my car wouldn’t be seen downtown on the day of the strike. I tapped the ACCEPT icon and stormed out the door.

  The bus arrived at the stop by my apartment complex ten minutes late. Climbing aboard, I was already sweating heavily, feeling at once ridiculously conspicuous in my uniform and angry at how invisible it made me. By the time I reached Branchik’s door and typed in the key code that had been sent via the app, I was already sick of the whole thing.

  Looking around the condo, however, I felt a fresh surge of inspiration. I’d thought I was messy. Branchik’s floor was wall-to-wall dirty clothes and empty takeout containers. An overturned juice bottle lab
eled POWER PULP lay on the gray sofa next to a greenish splotch. Boxer shorts lay twisted up on the carpet and draped over the elliptical machine in the corner of the living room. This was the cleaning job Branchik expected some faceless runner to perform for $16.79? An anarchic spirit of rage swelled in me as I surveyed the scene. I’d show him “fungible labor.” I crossed the squalid living room and drew the blinds with a brief glance up at Amanda’s balcony—she was on lookout duty—before peeling off the apron and kicking it viciously into a corner. Then I took off all my clothes, pulled the blond wig out of my apron pocket, and slipped it over my hairnet. It was time for my close-up. Naked except for the wig, I put my phone’s camera in selfie mode and started clicking.

  The wig was Ruby’s. I’d told her I wanted to borrow it for my act. She had a closetful of them, and this one was a relic of a long-ago attempt at Betty Grable—a miserably failed attempt, since its platinum locks drooped and wouldn’t hold a curl, but it was perfect for my purposes. The goal wasn’t to look natural—nothing about the radioactive blond against my olive skin looked natural—but simply to hide my face from shots that might inadvertently reveal it.

  The trashiness was a bonus. The minute I had it on, it transformed my nakedness into a costume far more lurid than fetish lingerie or stripper heels. Like most female comics who weren’t a size 6, I had an arsenal of defensive jokes about my body for the mic, but as I warmed up to the selfie shots, I gained a new appreciation for how well my body photographed. The girl I saw in the pictures was sexy—slutty!—her generous curves pillowing out into pornographic landscapes, wisps of the plasticky blond wig contrasting against brown nipples. It was exhilarating.

  So exhilarating that I almost lost track of what I was doing. I needed incriminating shots. The décor in Branchik’s company-owned apartment was generic, and even the mess was largely an anonymous mess, the kind someone might leave in a hotel room. Hoping to capture a few recognizable pairs of boxer shorts in the background, I rolled around in the nests of dirty laundry—another act that would have seemed unthinkably disgusting to me when I had clothes on but that bare-ass Betty seemed to relish—but it wasn’t quite enough. I needed a backdrop that was unmistakably identifiable as Branchik’s apartment. I got up, dusted the crumbs of some bachelor meal off my back, and picked my way into the bedroom.

  Bingo.

  On the bed, by the nightstand, stood a framed wedding picture. It was shot at sunset on a sparkling beach under a hazy Instagram filter, the bride’s slender gown of tiered lace in the rich hippie style accessorized with a flower-crown veil; she had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. Laughing vividly, as if caught in a candid shot, Branchik’s new wife nonetheless looked a touch rigid, a gleam of manic anxiety in her eye. Knowing what I did about her husband, I might ordinarily have been at least a little moved by her plight, but wearing the garish Betty wig, I thought it was hilarious. In any case, it was the perfect background detail. I plopped myself on the bed and began clicking selfies at virtuosic angles, photographing my mountainous breasts in extreme close-up and then twisting around to capture my ass half entangled in sheets. I contorted myself for crotch shots, experimenting with more and more explicit angles, always careful to keep the photo of Mrs. Branchik’s desperately grinning face in the background.

  I was so absorbed in this task that when the first text came, it took me a moment or two to look away from my own image and read it.

  DB’s car in garage, get out

  I jumped off the bed in a panic, but the texts kept coming:

  He’s walking into lobby get out NOW

  He’s in the elevator OUT OUT OUT OUT GET OUT OF THERE NOW

  I ran for the pile of clothes in the living room, grabbed my jeans, and started yanking them on. I’d gotten one of my legs in when I heard a tiny ding coming from the hallway outside. The elevator. I tripped trying to get the other pants leg on and had to finish lying on my back on the floor, legs in the air. Footsteps creaked outside the door as I frantically threw my T-shirt on, braless, and jostled the apron full of bottles up my arms onto my torso. There was a metallic key-chain jingle followed by the swipe-and-click of a keycard as I jerked the strings into a knot behind my back and stuffed my bra down between the bottles in my pocket. A moment before the door swung open, I remembered the wig on my head and yanked it off. There was no more room in my apron, so I crammed it down my shirt.

  I didn’t wait to get a good look at Branchik but instead began yelling indignantly in Spanish cribbed from my mother’s long-ago rants about my room: “¡Sucio, sucio! ¡Es muy sucio!” I stalked back and forth, flailing my arms wildly to indicate the debris on the floor, the mess of takeout containers on the table, the general state of filth. He began to protest, but I yelled over him, “¡No habla ingles!” and “¡Sucio!” until he took a few steps into the room, clearing the doorway. I ran past him and stomped out of the apartment without looking back, bottles rattling on my thighs. The elevator doors were still open, thank God, and I darted around the corner and pushed the button, praying that Branchik wouldn’t care enough about his failed Runnr experience to take the stairs down after me. I had run through all my Spanish fit for the occasion.

  Amanda screamed with laughter.

  “It’s not funny!” I said, barely able to get the words out between heaving breaths. I stood in Amanda’s apartment, hands shaking, hair plastered down with sweat—I’d ripped off the hairnet and apron as soon as I was out of Branchik’s building—thighs quaking from the effort of getting myself across the street and back up into her apartment without attracting undue attention. Leaning back against the safely locked door, conscious of staying as far from the window as possible, I tried to stop my heart from hammering in my chest. “It’s not—” I tried again but found my gulps of air turning into sobs of laughter. A moment later I was sliding down the wall, my legs collapsing under me, still laughing. “It’s not funny!” I gasped from the floor, tears oozing out of the corners of my eyes. “I almost got caught!”

  “You’re right, not funny at all,” Amanda said, regaining her composure for a moment only to crack up again a moment later. “No kidding, I heard you from all the way in here. ¡No habla ingles!” She giggled explosively.

  “Hey,” I said, catching my breath and wiping my eyes. “That was some top-notch improvising. Probably the best scene work I’ve ever done. Apparently the secret is fearing for your life.” I trudged forward on my hands and knees, not bothering to get up, and made my way to the sofa. Sitting on the living-room rug, I propped myself up against the sofa near Amanda’s legs.

  “It was closer than it should have been,” she agreed. “What happened in there anyway?”

  “I guess I got carried away,” I said. “Here.” I passed the phone to her, photo app open.

  Amanda squealed as she started swiping through the pics. “Oh my God, these are amazing! You are so good at this.” She lowered the phone and looked down at me. “You have a gift for sexting, my friend.”

  “I learned on the job.”

  “You should consider working for Pornhub.” She turned her attention back to the screen. “How did you manage to keep the photo in the background so clear? The depth of focus is like an Ozu film.” She squinted. “There’s a lot of detail in your, uh, foreground too.”

  “Look close. I think you can see all the way up to my tonsils.” Now that my adrenaline was beginning to ebb, a wave of exhaustion hit. “This had better work,” I said, “because my DNA is all over that apartment.”

  “It’s going to work,” Amanda said. “After this, he’s not going to want to call anyone. Not a private detective, not the police. And definitely not”—she grinned—“another housecleaner.”

  “What if he’s complaining to Runnr right now?” I said. “I didn’t exactly deliver five-star service. And it’s his company.”

  “That’s exactly why he won’t complain,” she said. “The system is supposed to sort out the bad apples on its own. If the app says you’re a five-star runner,
you’re a five-star runner, end of story. And Branchik’s the one who fought hardest against background checks.” She frowned. “He might try to look into it on his own, though he’s too dumb to get far. But believe me, by the end of today, his lousy maid service is going to be the last thing on his mind. He’ll be on his hands and knees scrubbing the floors himself, getting rid of the evidence for us.”

  I snorted. “If he cleans anything in there, it’ll be a first.”

  “You’ll have made such a difference in his life. Brenna should send you a fruit basket.”

  “Who’s that?”

  But Amanda had already grabbed her laptop from the coffee table, attached it to my phone with a USB cable, and started typing. I leaned over her shoulder and saw that she was uploading a few of the choicest pictures to the comments section of a blog called From Cali Girl to ATX Mommy. The banner photo of the site showed a pregnancy test lying next to a Mason jar full of Texas wildflowers.

  “Brenna Branchik,” she said, still typing. “Duh. You saw her wedding photo.”

  “ATX Mommy?” I said. “She’s—”

  “Pregnant, yes,” Amanda finished. “And very bored. Picking out furniture for the Lake Travis house doesn’t take up nearly enough time to keep her busy. She spends her days at the local spa, getting expensive blowouts and taking yoga classes.” Amanda was still concentrating on the pictures. “She’s especially chatty after bikram. That’s when she told me about her blog.”