Great start to the semester,
Emma
* * *
“Holy macaroni!”
My eyes bugged out, and my jaw was dangerously close to hitting the comforter on my bed as I clutched the sides of my laptop. “Ninety-nine freaking dollars!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and muttered a quick prayer under my breath to whichever god would listen, before opening them a little more tentatively. My eyelids fluttered, and I scrutinized the picture of an exact replica of a certain Aurora Ipsilon I knew quite intimately—just without the teeth marks.
“What kind of pen is worth ninety-nine dollars?” I asked the empty dorm room in disbelief, but Mr. Elephant—the trusty elephant plushie I’d had since primary school—just stared back at me from my mountain of pillows with noticeably less incredulity. “What a rip-off—it didn’t even taste that good.”
That was a lie; it tasted like sunshine and happiness.
But my heart sank, and the guilt for ruining Noah’s pen quadrupled. I wasn’t exactly well-off. My parents kept a tight leash on my recital earnings, and the only reason they’d approved of Westcroft was the scholarship I’d received.
There was no way my side-gig of tutoring kids in piano would pay for such a work of art. The sessions were sporadic, and that money went straight to food… and coffee. How was I supposed to afford a pen that cost more than all my shoes added together?
A soft click of a key in the door interrupted my musings, and my roommate strolled in, soaked in a post-workout sweat.
Teresa Ruiz was a force to be reckoned with. Her 5’10” frame made me feel like a hobbit at 5’2”, and she somehow fit in three workouts a day during summer courses while I considered a walk to the cafeteria a hike. It didn’t help my self-esteem that not only was the girl an All-American soccer star who played a handful of other sports on the side, but she was majoring in Criminal Justicejust in casethe National Women’s Soccer League didn’t work out.
And to think last night I’d been proud of twisting both sides of an Oreo apart without breaking up the creme in the middle.
It was double-stuffed, to be fair, but I digress.
“Hey, Emma.” Teresa smiled as she tossed her gym bag to the floor and kicked off her sneakers. Our dorm was a modest double room with two twin beds on opposite walls, matching dressers, tiny desks we never used, and two bookcases already cluttered with knickknacks. The shared closet was smaller than the one my mother used for her scarf collection, and the room perpetually smelled of honey berry hula Febreze to cover up what we suspected was moldy carpet, but it was more of a home than Kansas ever was. “Did I hear you yelling about buying penises?”
I blinked back at her. How thin were the walls in this joint?
“I wish that’s what I was replacing. Then I’d be getting a bargain,” I said, grumbling as I scrolled through the list of pens for sale. But then I would’ve had to do something to the original one to replace it.
Great, now I was thinking about teeth marks on Noah’s—
“Well, aren’t you grouchy today?” Teresa laughed and pulled out the ponytail her dark brown hair usually lived in. My own blonde locks reached past my shoulders and couldn’t decide if they were curly or straight, but Teresa had at least four inches and a bucketload of shine on my hair. “Let me guess, the coffee cart was out of sugar?”
Little did she know, I carried individual sugar packets in my backpack just in casethatatrocity ever happened again.
“No. I’m just low on cash and letting myself wallow for a bit.” I snapped the secondhand laptop shut instead of giving in to my growing desire to hurl it across the room.
“Low on cash, you say?” she asked with a smug-sounding hum. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left your backpack on the floor so much.”
A purse on the floor is money out the door.
I sent her an unimpressed look before glaring at my bag sitting innocently on the floor, but my gut was yelling the same thing. What if I’d done this to myself? It was stupid to test that superstition. What did I have to gain from it? “It’s considered poor sportsmanship to rub things in, just so you know.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it. Have you checked the job posts on campus?” She slipped on a pair of flip-flops and grabbed her shower caddy. “Or I could ask Mr. Everton if he has an open spot in his catering crew. His pay isn’t great, but it’d be fun to work together.”
It took effort not to grimace. Mr. Everton was a caterer Teresa worked for on weekends when she didn’t have a game scheduled, but the hospitality industry wasn’t my cup of coffee.
“You know how clumsy I can be. The last thing I wanna do is spill champagne or snails all over a guest.” A flashback of tripping in front of Noah bombarded my sensitive memory, and I wished it wasn’t frowned upon to donate perfectly good underwear to Goodwill. Maybe I would just burn it instead.
“First of all, we’re not catering the Oscars,” she said with a laugh, heading for the door. “There’s some ritzy stuff occasionally, but the majority is birthday parties and class reunions. Besides, we can just put you on buffet duty.”
I glanced at my discarded laptop, knowing there was still an open tab with a picture of a super expensive pen laughing at my face.
“Let me think about it,” I said. I used my big toe to nudge the pink ankle sock off my foot. Teresa shrugged before disappearing out the door, and I fell back against my pillow in defeat.
