Page 100 of Pucking Good Girl

“Nope,” the manager insists. “Your name tag says Genevieve, and that’s what I’m going to call you.”

Gen’s shoulders sag, and that’s when she turns around.

In all fairness, I understand why she wanted to be called Jennie. With her long, dark hair tucked into her baseball cap and not one stitch of makeup on her face, she looks different enough that it would be hard to recognize her if it weren’t for her voice.

And when I say different, I don’t mean worse. Gen might not have the best personality out there, but she’s extremely pretty. Maybe even more so without several layers of makeup to hide her classically beautiful features.

“Gen?” Sam gasps. “What are you doing here? I thought you were… away.”

With away, Sam means incarcerated. Without the expensive lawyers her father’s money could have bought her, she was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail.

As far as I know, Victor got a longer sentence, and he’s serving it somewhere in Southern California.

After everything she’s been through, Gen hasn’t lost her trademark withering glare. It’s obvious that she has no intention of telling us how she ended up working the concession stand at the college arena.

But her manager is more than happy to fill in the blanks for us. “Genevieve is doing community service. It’s part of the conditions for her probation.”

“Really? So after all you’ve done, you got away with just six months in jail? That’s all?” Sam voices the same feelings I was trying to keep to myself.

Gen’s gaze hardens. “You say it like it’s a good thing.” She bites out. “Jail sucks. They feed you so many carbs and nothing there is organic. Three months into my sentence and I had gained fifteen pounds, and my skin was drier than the Sonoma desert. I don’t know what they put in the water there, and the commissary doesn’t sell any decent moisturizers. Ugh.”

“You don’t say,” Sam rolls her eyes. “It sounds tough.”

Gen’s tone is a curious mix of annoyed and defeated. “It was literally the worst. It’s like they’re trying to punish you or something.”

“They are trying to punish you. It’s part of why criminals end up there.” Sam offers.

It’s crazy that Gen doesn’t seem to get the whole cause-and-effect aspect of the correctional system.

“Regardless, I was fat, had bad skin, and I couldn’t sleep. The bedsheets there are like zero threads of cotton. It’s like sleeping on sandpaper. And no matter how much I begged him, my daddy refused to help me.”

Again, Sam gives voice to my thoughts. “Can’t really blame him after what you did.”

“Christmas was the worst ever,” Gen continues. “I was stuck in hell while my family was in St. Lucia. I got so depressed that I couldn’t eat a thing for days. The guards thought I was on hunger strike and called my family. Whatever, the food sucked anyway, so it wasn’t like I was missing that much. But turns out that was the way of getting my daddy’s attention.”

This time I can’t bite my tongue. “Seriously? Gen, hunger strikes are a serious thing. Political prisoners have been using it in the past to⁠—”

“You’re missing the point,” Gen fires back. “My daddy thought I might really harm myself, and he used some of his connections to help me and to get my sentence suspended and have me put on probation.”

I give up on her. The only things Gen ever takes seriously are her own needs. Nothing else matters, not the people around her, not the law.

“Congratulations,” Sam’s tone is sarcastic. “You got a free get out of jail card not because you deserved it, but because the guards mistook your entitlement for a mental health issue. This is everything that is wrong with the world we live in. So after everything you did, you learned absolutely nothing. You still think that you can manipulate your way out of anything.”

“Manipulate?” Gen articulates every syllable as if that word felt foreign to her and didn’t come as naturally as breathing. “Into what? This?”

Gen and I will never see eye to eye on anything, but once again, I can’t keep my mouth shut. “He got you out of jail, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what’s worse, this or prison.” Gen bites out.

“Oh, right,” Sam rolls her eyes so hard that it must hurt. “God forbid you have to do one hour of honest work in your life.”

That seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. “Work?” Gen seethes. “You get paid to work! As part of my early release, I have to do nine hundred hours—nine fucking hundred—of community service. So I don’t get paid a cent to be here.”

“Beats picking up trash by a highway.” Sam argues.

“I would rather do that. This is hell.” Gen’s eyes well up with furious tears. “I look like shit. I lost my trust fund for good, and my daddy refused to help beyond renting me a room the size of a closet and paying me a stipend that barely allows me to afford the basics.”

Knowing Gen, the basics are probably what most people would consider a life of luxury. “Can it be that bad?”