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“You didn’t see him, Alice”, I say, the memory choking me up even further. “He was out of the pages of a comic book, so perfectly drawn even the Gods couldn’t help but admire him.” My head sinks. “And now I’ve lost him.”
“If he found you once”, Alice says, “There’s nothing to say he can’t find you again.”
“And if he does, even though the chance of that happening is slimmer than Reed Richards slipping under a steel door, what is he going to find? I’ve got no job now, and if I can’t find another one soon, I’m going to have to move back in with mom. That’s not exactly sexy, is it?”
“The desperate, socially awkward princess rescued from the jaws of poverty? It sounds like a modern day fairytale to me.”
“If it were a modern day fairytale”, I say, “There’d be two princes not one.”
Alice shakes her head in disbelief.
“Come on, if I’m going to dream-”, I begin to add.
“Let’s just concentrate on the real things first”, Alice says. “When you’ve sorted those out you can work on your fantasies. Even if you did have his digits, you can’t exactly call Mr. Perfect if you haven’t got a working cell to call him from. Even I know that only true superheroes have the ability to project things into the sky.”
“That’s very true.”
Alice fetches her purse and checks how much money she has inside it.
“I’ll get some more out on the way home and you can pay me back when you can get to the bank”, she says, offering me a handful of notes.
“You don’t have to do that”, I insist, pushing her hand away.
“And what are you going to do in the meantime?” Alice reasons. “Just pay me back on Monday.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you”, I say feeling so embarrassed it’s actually come to this.
“You’d probably still have your bag”, she says. “I feel bad I convinced you to stay out last night.”
“I wanted to stay”, I say. “And besides which, I wouldn’t have got Prince Valiant’s number at all if it weren’t for you. I’m the idiot who left my purse in the car.”
“It’s easily done”, Alice says.
“Not for someone with obsessive compulsive disorder it’s not. Any other day I’d check the car a bunch of times to be sure.”
“I suppose you could call that progress”, Alice offers sweetly, and despite everything that’s happened today, I have to laugh.
It’s going to take at least a week to get my cards replaced, and about the same time to get a replacement sim card for my phone. I’m tempted to get a temporary number, but without a cell to put it in there doesn’t seem much point. I figure I’ll sort everything out on Monday when the dust has settled a little bit over this recent snapshot of disastrous misfortune and I can work out how to proceed, prince or no. Until then it’s going to be phone calls from cabins in run down neighborhoods and cash in hand without leaving a trace, living off the grid like a cold war spy.
At least until I have to call Mom to come and save me, that is.
Part Two
Chapter Nine
The idea of my mom having a boyfriend has always sent shivers down my spine. It’s not that I think she shouldn’t have one, it’s just that I’d prefer if I didn’t have to think of her in that way, as a normal human being like I so often pretend to be, with the same kind of urges, desires and expectations.
Moms are not meant to be anything other than moms, already existing in a kind of permanent parental state, from which their programming determines they never deviate. That means that despite the breakdown of the relationship that created that role in the first place, it isn’t right that they should rebel against their essence and do all the things in the world to suggest that they were never that person in the first place.
Alright, I’m exaggerating slightly. Just because mom has a new boyfriend who happens to be rich and much better looking than I expected, that doesn’t mean that she stops being a mom, and nor does it mean she doesn’t deserve it. I guess I’m just a little grumpy that’s all. Despite all attempts to locate him, my prince seems to have vanished as quickly into thin air as he appeared, and while mom seems to be having the time of her life with Mr. Sexy Money Bags, I still haven’t found a new job.
I’m broke, jobless, boyfriendless and likely to be homeless very soon unless I find some miracle to help me out of this hole.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Penny”, Mr. Sexy Money Bags says, “Your mom has told me a lot about you.”
I wonder just how much mom has divulged about my recent and concurrent problems but as much as I narrow my eyes at her, it’s not going to be enough to find out.
“Likewise”, I say chirpily.
His real name is Brandon Fox, and even though he explains what he does to me in quite a lot of detail, I can’t help but get distracted by the technical language. I think it has something to do with buying and selling companies on a grand scale, but I can’t be sure. Whatever it is he does, he makes a lot of money doing it, that’s for sure. I know that not only because of what mom has told me, but because of the place we’re in right now. It’s the kind of restaurant you don’t even know exists until you’ve got enough money to buy the kind of map that it appears on. It’s the kind of place where there aren’t any menus, because everything here has one price: more expensive than ninety nine percent of the world can afford.
I don’t belong to this world and nor does Mom, even though she seems to have slipped into it with ease, and I’m happy to make an effort to do the same. Brandon’s not like most of the super rich that Mom describes either, he actually seems down to earth and actually quite humble. I have no doubt that he probably has more money in his wallet then I’ll ever earn in my entire life, but he’s not sat there setting fire to it in a gaudy display of his wealth, and nor does it seem to bother him that mom doesn’t have any money either.
Sickeningly for me, but brilliantly for mom, they seem to be getting on like a house on fire, and he seems to genuinely, if I dare to use the word, really, really like her. Okay, I don’t dare to use the word.
The last time I thought mom was seriously in love, the guy turned out to be a con-man so this time I’m not going to be so hasty. Brandon clearly doesn’t need her money, but he might have made his in exactly the same way.
Anyway, the point of all of this, as I crunch a sesame seed lined breadstick that’s probably cost more to ship in than the clothes I’m wearing, is that in the real world of fiction, dreams and invented stories, this is the figurehead a leading character like me is supposed to hate. In this distorted version of the truth, however, and no matter how much I search for it, there doesn’t seem to be anything about him that is at all disagreeable.
He is rich, attractive, self-sufficient, well-educated, humble, respectful and laid back, and he hasn’t made a single comment about my two water glasses or my nervous ticks, which seem to be completely off the scale recently. It makes my failed attempts to find someone even half that good, somewhat embarrassing.
Alright, it’s absolutely heartbreaking.
“Katie tells me you’re an artist”, Brandon says enthusiastically.
“I try to be”, I say. “It’s been kind of hard finding work after college to be honest.”
“I bet. It’s never been easy for artists. What’s your discipline?”
I slim down the truth to make it more palatable. “I like to draw, sketches, comic books, that kind of thing.”
“She’s very good”, Mom adds. “Wasted at the comic store.”
r /> I haven’t had the heart to tell her yet. When I find another one, I’ll just tell her I left the comic book store and that’s that. Until then, she doesn’t need to worry unnecessarily.
“Do you ever do graphic design, storyboarding, that kind of thing?” Brandon asks me.
“Sometimes I guess”, I respond. “A lot of my drawings take place in the same kind of world or belong to a series.”
I want to ask why, because the Sherlock Holmes in me feels like this is a leading question.
“What’s your notice period like at your current job?” Brandon adds, this time with a twinkle in his eye.
Now I definitely want to ask why, my spidey senses twitching. “I could be out of there the same day”, I say instead. “They’re very flexible there.”
“You know how difficult it is to find good artists?” Brandon asks.
“About as hard as it is for good artists to find work?” I guess.
“One of the companies that I sit on the board for is a production company that makes films and TV series. If you like, I can put a good word in for you and see if they’ve got any projects coming up that they are looking for help on. It’s not exactly your discipline, but it might be a bit more exciting than a comic book store.”
I’ve been looking for years for any kind of paid work as an artist and it turns out all I had to do was wait until my globe trotting mom found a billionaire to solve the problem for me.
“You’re kidding, right?” I ask, my eyes flitting suspiciously between the two of them.
“I can’t promise they’ll have anything suitable at the moment”, Brandon says, “but if you think you might be interested, I’ll get you an interview set-up and you can go from there.”
The words, as foreign to me as they are normal to Brandon, begin to dance around my head. Production company, storyboard, interview, go from there. These are the kind of dynamic words that belong in board room meetings of billionaire businessmen, not in the lexicon of an out of work, former comic store employee whose art portfolio for the last six months consists mainly of huge cocked twins in menage style orgies. I’m way out of my depth already, and at the moment this is only a suggestion.
