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Chapter Two
Zel
Dad: Wear your best dress.
Ididn’t put too much stock into the text when he’d sent it earlier this afternoon. I just went back to scrubbing the toilets at my current cleaning assignment. Pissy ass toilets where the homeowners’ twin seven-year-olds liked to play a sick game where they “rain fire” on an “enemy fortress”. You got it. Said enemy fortress is the toilet bowl, the back wall, and the damn floor.
However, now that I’m using the hand of a suit-clad driver to climb out of the backseat of an all-black SUV, the text pops into my mind again.
More urgently than it had before.
Why exactly did I need my best dress instead of just a nice one?
“Dad, we can’t afford all of this,” I murmur as my father saunters around from the opposite side in his best tuxedo – something I’ve only seen him wear twice in all my life.
“Enough, princess.”
My eyes flicker up the all-glass, dominating skyscraper of a building that looks more like a place for living rather than a place for eating. “First, there was the Luxury Uber-”
“Ma’am, this isn’t-” the driver’s sentence stops short when my father clears his throat and steps directly in front of me so that we’re face to face.
“And now, this ritzy place for dinner? What’s going on? Are you trying to break bad news to me? Is it Mom’s condition? Did Tomas go back to jail again?”
“Zel,” his ivory-colored fingers tuck a few tresses behind my ear. “Let me ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“How many young ladies your age put themselves through college, while working a full-time job, huh?”
The custodial assignments that I have aren’t necessarily a full-time job, although in the summer months, I can pile on extra work.
And I do.
College is so fucking expensive.
“Um…,” my honey-colored finger absentmindedly twists around a chestnut strand of hair, “probably more than you’re thinking.”
“Oh. yeah? Do they do it on top of visiting their mothers at the full-service care facility every day?”
He has a point, but it’s not the point.
I’m one second away from saying “you can’t afford this” yet find myself unable to finish the sentence since I’m still not entirely sure what this is. We’re nowhere near the bottom of the bucket like Sammy’s Shrimp Shack, yet we’re way above our occasional splurging at Red Lobster.
Dad bends his arm for me to take, light brown eyes we share the same shade of, shimmering with a hint of secrecy.
I loop my arm though his at the same time I ask, “There’s a restaurant inside?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of? What do you mean sort of?”
“I made a bet…”
My head drops, and I shuffle back a few paces away from the glass door we were headed towards. “No…” The black high heels that I gifted myself for my high school graduation scrape unforgivingly across the pavement. “No. No. No, Dad!” I snap my stare back up to his and whine, “You promised mom no more horseraces or cock fights or Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments-”
“Princess, it wasn’t that type of bet.”
There’s no stopping my head from tilting to the side in confusion.
