“There you are!” said a young girl. No, not a girl. A woman in her twenties, who felt extremely girl-ish and yet quietly intimidating, like she was cataloging every cringey thing about me. “Doc B, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
He held up the light bulbs, like they were an obvious explanation.
The girl looked to me, confused by my presence.
“This is my granddaughter,” Ruby said. “She stopped over last night on her way through to... Where is it you were going?”
“Yeah,” Eli chimed in unhelpfully. “Where is it that you said you were heading, Vera?”
I saw what was happening here. Ruby wanted me out, and Eli was a little too entertained by the thought of me getting caught breaking a rule.
I stood and let my blanket drop from my lap. “Hi, I’m Vera. I was visiting, but I stayed for a little longer than expected and Eli here was just telling me about the visitor policy, so—”
The woman held her hand up. “Morgan,” she said curtly. “Residential director.” She turned to Eli. “Josephine quit.”
“What?” he asked. “How could she quit? She hadn’t even started.”
Morgan shook her head. “She quit. She called and said she couldn’t leave behind her job on the high seas, so now I’m down a maintenance tech and an activities coordinator.”
“We’ve been down an activities coordinator for a while,” Eli reminded her.
Behind Morgan, Ruby rolled her eyes, which I took to mean she had thoughts on the activities calendar here at Starlight Palms.
“The people are revolting, Eli—I mean, Dr. Buckley.”
“Morgan, I’ve told you several times. You can call me Eli.”
She shook her head. “It’s too weird. You’re old. Basically old enough to be my dad.”
“Maybe if I had been a teenage father,” he said.
But Morgan had already moved on. “Someone pinned an activities calendar to my door with the wordsdo betterwritten across it.”
“It is all rather boring,” Ruby muttered.
“My numbers for knitting circle this morning were negative three residents,” Morgan said.
“Negative three?” I asked. It wasn’t really my place, but I had to know how that was mathematically sound. “How is that even possible?”
“Three people showed, but when they found out I didn’t have a pattern for beer coozies they left,” she explained.
Marlon trotted around my feet. I was wearing the gym shorts I’d stolen from Brody’s giveaway pile and the free blood donation T-shirt that I had washed precisely enough times for it to be exactly threadbare enough. I had nowhere to go and no form of income. It was a real no-money-no-prospects-Pride-and-Prejudicemoment. I couldn’t bear the thought of heading back to LA with my tail between my legs. There was so much I needed to do, but none of it could happen without a job.
“I can plan activities,” I blurted.
Ruby shook her head. “Vera, you do not have a social bone in your body.”
I waved Ruby off and walked over to Morgan, who had turned her focus on me. We both smelled of desperation.
“I was a celebrity assistant for nearly two decades,” I told her. “For Brody Turner. I planned charity events and parties and did so much creative problem-solving. And egos! I am so good at gently managing egos, which I’m sure you have in bulk at a place like this.”
Eli crossed his arms over his chest and looked up to the ceiling, like he had something to say but was literally biting his tongue.
Morgan glanced to Ruby and then back to me. “We do have... personalities.” She mulled over her options for a moment, before saying, “Come see me in my office this afternoon.”
“Where’s your—” I started, but I could already see her brain moving on to the next crisis.
“We might have the start of a chlamydia outbreak on our hands,” she told Eli. “We need to get on this before it gets worse.” She began to head for the door and then whispered, “I suspect patient zero is Louise.”
