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After making a truly adorable face at the camera, Charlotte sits down and grabs my offered hand. She looks nervous.
“You don’t need to do this, baby,” I whisper. “We can give all their money back.”
Charlotte shakes her head defiantly and squeezes my hand like a vise. “Nope. I’m doing this.” She smiles at the camera and shouts, “Let’s turn me into a pin cushion, baby!”
After waddling down the sidewalk from the piercing place, hand in hand, Charlotte and I slide into our respective seats of my car, ever so gingerly, at exactly 11:18 pm—which means there’s still plenty of time for me to pay the tuition invoice, due at midnight, on my phone while sitting here.
“Check the final numbers,” Charlotte says excitedly. We knew how much we’d amassed when walking into the tattoo/piercing place just before ten tonight, but we couldn’t see the tips pouring in throughout our piercing adventure, and we’re dying to find out how much we’ve added to our pre-piercing totals.
As Charlotte holds her breath, I log into our account and then gasp in astonishment when I behold the final number on the dashboard. “Holy shit. Our final haul for today is over twenty-eight thousand bucks!”
Charlotte whoops and cheers, until I take her face in my palms and kiss the living hell out of her. For several minutes, we kiss and laugh and then babble excitedly about our crazy day. Other than the piercings, which were a tag-team affair, Charlotte did the lion’s share of crazy shit today, becauseshe’sthe one our audience was most excited to watch doing weird stuff. One superfan, Lucille1990, paid a full grand to watch Charlotte being driven, naked and standing up, in a convertible with the top down, fast enough to make her tits and hair flap in the wind. To fulfill that particular request, we borrowed Tessa’s convertibleMercedes, covered the license plates, and drove it to a nearby rained-out, deserted construction area only a few minutes away. Mission accomplished. After that, we made another superfan, Catfish2000, happy as a clam by doing a livestream of Charlotte, naked, mowing Ryan and Tessa’s back lawn. Right after that, Charlotte climbed a ladder, nude, and pretended to hang Christmas lights in April, while I shot her from below. And on and on it went, culminating in the piercings we just completed.
Charlotte pulls away from our kiss and presses her forehead to mine. “You should pay the invoice now, honey, to make double-damn sure it’s time-stamped before midnight.”
“Right you are.” With a huge smile on my face, I log into our account again, intending to transfer the money from there to my bank account . . . and suddenly realize a truly horrible thing. “Oh, no,” I gasp out. “Yesterdaywas the end of the payment cycle. We won’t be able to access the money we made today for another two weeks!”
Charlotte’s face turns pale. “No.”
“Fuck.”
We stare at each other, both of us trying not to hyperventilate.
“Okay, don’t panic,” Charlotte finally says. “We can still make this work.”
“How?”
“I’ve got five or six thousand bucks of available credit across several cards. How about you?”
“I-I . . .” I take a deep breath. “I don’t know. F-four thousand, m-maybe?”
“Okay, that’s good. We’ll withdraw cash from all our credit cards and transfer everything into your bank account now. As long as we pay off our cards before thirty days, which we will, we won’t even have to pay interest on the withdrawals. Plus, you’ve got that five grand that’s already sitting in your account, right?”
I nod. “But even if we do all this, I’ll still need to get my hands on another six or seven grand within . . .” I look at the clock on my car’s dashboard and finish my sentence with “the next nineteen minutes.”
Charlotte runs her hand through her red hair. “Could you ask your brother or mother for a temporary loan? Whoever you ask, you’d be able to pay them back in two weeks. I’d call Tessa, but if I tell her I’ve got some sort of emergency that requires she Venmo me seven grand in the next fifteen minutes, she’s going to get in her car and physically track me down to make sure I’m not being held hostage by a madman. You, on the other hand, can believably tell your brother or mother that some money you made doing whatever side hustle they think you do to make ends meet is glitching, and you need a quick bridge loan to cover your tuition before midnight, and you’ll call your employer in the morning to find out what’s going on. You could say that, and your family won’t freak out and think you’ve been abducted, the way Tessa would think about me. Welcome to male privilege.”
I lean my forehead against my steering wheel for a beat, trying desperately to think of another solution. Some way to do this without involving my mother or brother. But Charlotte’s right. This is our only hope.
“I’ll call my brother first,” I say. “He’ll still be up to answer my call. My mother is probably fast asleep by now.” I push the button, and, thankfully, my brother, Max, answers immediately.
“Hey, Augs,” he says. “What’s up?’
“I’ve got a bit of an emergency, Maxy-pad. I need your help.”
I tell him the thing Charlotte suggested, and he doesn’t hesitate to offer his assistance.
“Do you need more than seven grand?” he asks.
“No, seven will do it. Like I said, I’ll pay you back in two weeks.”
My phone buzzes with a Venmo notification—seven thousand bucks, sent from one Maximillian Vaughn.
“Don’t bother paying me back,” Max says. “If you need this for school, consider it my early Christmas present to you.”
I protest. Tell him I can’t accept that, and he insists he’s having a phenomenal year, thanks to his new, high-paying job, and the success of the company he and his wife, Marnie, recently founded together.
“Okay, we’ll talk about this more later,” I say. “When I’m not watching the clock tick down and having a heart attack. For now, just know I’m beyond grateful to you, brother. Thank you so much.”
