Credit Scores and Cohabitation
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AfterThe Mystery of the Curiosities
POV: Sebastian Snow
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After the events of the Curiosities case—most importantly, the part where former flatfoots Lowry and Brigg planted a homemade explosive device in my building andblew it up—I’d been crashing at Calvin’s too-small-for-two studio and surfing Pop’s couch for nearly two months.
Which was two months too long, if you asked me.Notthat I wasn’t grateful. If I hadn’t had either of them to provide a roof over my head, I’d have probably racked up an unbelievable hotel bill, a debt I wouldn’t have been able to afford, while I’d spent every spare moment I had on what seemed to be a totally fruitless search for a new apartment. But, I mean, minus the hotel-debt part, that was the exact situation I was in. Which sounded nuts. I lived in New York City, a place that nearly nine million called home. How on God’s green Earth could I not find a new apartment?
Heh.Well. There’s a reason Pop hadn’t moved in forty years.
The rental market in this city was so absurd that once you managed to plant your flag in a kingdom to call your own, it’d take anactual bombto make you give it up. Realtors and brokers were always looking for the wealthiest potential client, so for your average Joe like me, who just wanted a decent apartment in Manhattan and not some multimillion-dollar penthouse on the Upper West Side, they tended to run the gamut of shady, rude, condescending, or outright noncommunicative.
And with the trust-fund babies moving to the East Coast, rent was shooting into the stratosphere, which made searching for an apartment for two without breaking the bank even trickier. Although, Calvin’s preferences regarding apartments were shockingly little, which sort of explained why he’d been content to live in that closet-sized studio for half a decade.
Pet-friendly.
Laundry in building would “be nice.”
And… that was it.
Me, on the other hand, being the neurotic asshole that I was, really struggled with change. I was dead set on finding a place in the East Village so I could still walk to and from the Emporium every day. A walk-up or multiuse—nothing with elevators or doormen. No ground floor apartments either. They got too warm in the winter with the way water radiators tended to disproportionately heat the building, and I refused to listen to thebangof the front door as tenants came and went at all hours. And no laundry in-building was an automatic no for me. A do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars kind of no. I wasnotschlepping our clothes to the laundromat every week.
Anyway. I knew my own requirements would shrink the pool of eligible rentals, but the last two months had been nothing but surreal disappointment. And a lot of real estate agents didn’t like working with sole proprietors either—extra paperwork for them. So they’d simply tell me our combined income wasn’t what the landlord was looking for, which was the biggest steaming turd of a lie someone has ever had the gall to say to my face. Then there was the one Realtor who had stood me up on multiple viewings that I’d spent hours organizing. And yet another who had showed us a place we were totally in love with, only to rent it to some suit before our credit scores had even checked out. I’d reached rage-tears level of upset after that one, and even Calvin reamed the agent’s ass over the phone when we realized what had happened.
Apartment hunting in New York sucked.
“What’re your plans tomorrow, kiddo?” Pop asked, bringing our plates to the sink.
I was scrubbing the pan I’d cooked dinner in and said with a shrug, “The same thing I do every Monday. Line up apartments viewings during the day and then cry into a pint of ice cream at night.”
“I know you really want to stick to your old neighborhood,” Pop began, “but at this point, maybe expanding the search radius would be for the best.”
“Someone has to die sooner or later.”
“Sebastian.”
I huffed and scrubbed harder. “There’s lots of apartments in the East Village. It’s just… there’s something fucking stupid about each of them.”
“I think you’re being a little picky.”
“No, Dad. I’m not.” I pointed the brush at him. “The place I saw this morning was above a pizza shop. It was about nine hundred degrees inside because of the brick ovens, smelled like day-old marinara, and I swear to God every resident was a college freshman. I don’t want to be the only adult in the building.”
“All right, fair, I wouldn’t want to live there either.”
“And I’m entirely convinced the place on Avenue A is owned by the mob.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.”
“As the Realtor was showing me the kitchen, I could hear the guy upstairs screaming about Tony owing him ‘his fuckin’ money.’ He doesn’t strike me as the kind of neighbor who would appreciate living in close quarters to a cop, and I don’t want Calvin or I wearing cement shoes.”
Pop sighed.
I rinsed the pan, picked up the hand towel, and dried it off. “I really liked the place on Thirteenth Street, but that asshole landlord camethis closeto saying gays need not apply, and I’m not paying rent to someone like that.”
