Page 10 of Lethal in Pink

The last day of the semester is always a bit bittersweet for me. It takes me out of the world I’m busting my ass off to escape. As soon as I can get my dad out of prison and I graduate and pass the bar exam, I’m officially done with the underground per my contract.

And I can finally be free.

Don’t get me wrong; working for the underground was my choice. After my mom died and my dad went to prison after taking the fall for a bad job, I knew I had to do something to survive. The underground was the only lifestyle I knew and it offered me a way to pay for law school, cover my dad’s legal fees, keep a roof over my head, and still have enough left over to live a decent life and save for a future where I no longer have to worry about a body count or a cover story. The underground gave me structure when my world fell apart. It gave me purpose. It gave me a way to survive.

But it’s not who I want to be forever.

The walk to Beaned & Brew’d takes exactly four minutes. The path cuts across the quad, past the Elias Blackthorn Memorial Garden with its neatly trimmed hedges and the bench where, according to campus legend, three Supreme Court justices have sat at various points in history. I have never verified this claim. I probably should. It’s the kind of fact that lives in the gray area between truth and marketing, and those are some of my favorite kind of facts.

The coffee shop appears at the end of the path, its exposed brick walls warm in the mid-morning light, and the smell of roasted beans hits me before I even push through the door—rich, nutty, caffeinated salvation wrapped in the warm embrace of a building that has never once asked me to prove I deserve to be here.

The barista behind the counter—a girl with a nose ring and hair dyed a shade of purple that walks the line between intentional and accidental—looks up and her hands are already moving toward the espresso machine before I reach the register.

“Brown sugar vanilla latte, made with coconut milk and extra whip?” she says, not quite a question.

I nod. “You’re a national treasure.”

“I know,” she says, and there is no arrogance in it, just the flat certainty of someone who has made this exact drink for this exact customer approximately one hundred and seventeen times this semester.

I’m probably not even over exaggerating.

I pay. I wait. The drink arrives in a paper cup with a lid that doesn’t quite sit flush, and I take the first sip standing at the counter because some pleasures cannot be delayed.

A small moan escapes me.

The espresso is rich and slightly bitter beneath the sweetness, the vanilla and brown sugar in exactly the right proportion, the whipped cream melting into the surface in lazy, delicious spirals. It is, objectively, approximately forty-three percent better than the version I make at home, and the difference is worth every penny of the six dollars and twenty-seven cents I just spent.

My window seat is open. The one by the far wall, with the clear sight line to the main path between the law building and the quad. I set my tote bag on the chair, slide into the seat, and pull out my binder. From the front pocket, I extract my practice essay.

I have no finals left.

No deadlines.

Nothing I technically have to do today, or tomorrow, or for the next three weeks of winter break.

I uncap my pink pen anyway and begin the practice essay simply because I want to.

The coffee shop fills around me. A group of undergraduates claims the large table by the door, their conversation a blur of weekend plans and complaints about housing. A professor I don’t recognize sits in the corner with a stack of blue books and a red pen, her expression suggesting she has already regretted several life choices.

The door to the coffee shop opens and closes. The bell jingles. Someone orders a drink with four syllables and an umlaut.

I look up twice. Once to check the time on the wall clock and once when a barista drops a metal pitcher and the sound echoes off the brick walls like a gunshot in a canyon.

My pen keeps moving. Page three becomes page four and then page four becomes page five. The essay grows, sentence by sentence, argument by argument.

By the time I reach the bottom of page six, the coffee is gone and the whipped cream is nothing but a sweet memory clinging to the inside of the cup. The undergraduates have left. The professor is still grading, her red pen moving with the grim determination of someone committed to seeing this through to the bitter end.

I cap my pen. Sit back in my chair and read through what I’ve written.

It is good. Better than good even. It’s the work of someone who does not know how to produce anything less than excellence, even when excellence is entirely optional.

I allow myself exactly seven seconds of satisfaction before I gather my things, drop my empty cup in the trash, and head to my car.

My apartment welcomes me back with the scent of vanilla and cherry blossom from the diffusers I set this morning. I hang the dry cleaning I picked up on the way home in the walk in closet, strip my current clothes, throwing them into the dirty bin, and then I change into leggings and an oversized Blackthorn sweatshirt that has a coffee stain on the right sleeve. The stain is shaped vaguely like Florida, and I have decided this is acceptable because nobody can see it when I’m alone in my apartment and also because sometimes even I need to not give a fuck about something.

My fingers slide across the back wall until they find the seam and the panel releases with a soft click, revealing a hidden pinked out weapons cache room.

The room is in a 10’×10’ layout with reinforced walls and a ventilation system that runs separately from the apartment’s main HVAC. The shelving is lined with soft pink felt, which I know is ridiculous for a weapons cache, but I refuse to apologize for having an aesthetic.