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NINA
Lifting my hair up, I lie down on the living room floor. My brown locks fan out around me as I stare at the ceiling. The carpet feels good as it scratches at the back of my neck, and I pretend that each carpet fiber is a tiny masseuse, giving me a relaxing massage. It would be nice if that were the case, if I was on some tropical island somewhere or that what I came home to was a dream, but it isn’t. My small apartment has never felt less like home than it does right now.
“She had to have help,” my brother says as he moves into my line of vision. His worn-out red baseball cap blocks out the light on the fan. “There’s no way that tiny girl took everything that she did without help.” His gaze flicks around the room like it might toss him a bone of knowledge.
“Everything.” My lip curls into a frown. “She took everything.”
I’ve been lying on the floor in denial for the last hour, but there’s only so much suppressing of reality I can do. My shitty roommate Vicki moved out and took, or should I say, stole everything from me. She could’ve taken anything, the can-opener, extra toilet paper, my undies but no... she took all the furniture, my laptop, and whatever else she could throw into that garbage pail she called a van.
Sighing, Grady rolls his eyes. “Okay, look, don’t have a meltdown, let’s think about this. I’m pretty sure I have a loveseat in the garage that you can use. It might have a few stains on it, but it’s only temporary…”
I can’t help but cringe. I don’t even want to know what kinds of stains might be on my brother’s loveseat. The thought alone is enough to skeeve me out. Not that I would even know if Grady was in a relationship. He’s pretty private about his love life. I do know that at one point, he was in love with a girl, and then she wasn’t in the picture anymore, and he never talked about her again. I do know he has dates though, lots of them, and dates usually mean sex so…
Drowning in my own depression, I tell him, “It’s not just the furniture, G.” I get up only to realize there is nothing to dramatically flop down on, which only reminds me all over again how crappy Vicki is. So instead, I sit my butt back down on the carpet.
Grady exhales and then sucks in a deep breath before crossing the room. “Okay,” he replies softly, sitting across from me on the floor. “What’s it about then?” Like a good brother, he’s listening intently, prepared to handle all of my crazy. Which if I’m honest, is a lot, and something he should be familiar with by now. I have unloaded my problems to my brother more than once in the past year. I’ve told him he can return the favor, but he’s not taken me up on the offer yet. Grady is a private person, whereas I’m an open book sometimes.
I try not to pout about the situation. After all, I am a grown woman, but it’s hard. I let out an exasperated sigh and press the tips of my fingers to my temple, moving them in slow, gentle circles. “I’m already struggling to pay my bills, not to mention my rent is due very soon. I’ve called my landlord already giving him a heads up, thinking that he would give me a little bit of a break since I’ve always been a good renter, and ya know, I don’t even have a damn couch to sit on.”
“How’d that go?” Grady asks as if he’s truly interested in hearing what my crap landlord had to say.
Snorting, I roll my eyes. “It went about as good as I expected it to. He told me it wasn’t his problem that my roommate was a shitty human being and that my name is on the lease, so I’m the one responsible for the full rent amount.” I continue after releasing a huff of frustration, “Now, I have to come up with the full rent, which is going to be nearly impossible considering the other bills I have.”
Grady drums his fingers against his chin. “Well, you could always stand on the street corner.”
“I’m not even going to respond to that, you dork,” I say, shaking my head.
I’m trying to prevent myself from feeling so completely overwhelmed, but keeping a positive attitude during all of this shit is making it nearly impossible. All I want to do is go into my room, crawl into my bed, and pretend this was nothing but a nightmare.
My brother shrugs casually. “I mean, I can always lend you the money,” he offers.
“No.” I shake my head and look down at the carpet. It’s the only thing I have left. “Besides, you don’t have it either.” Not that I would ever take money from my brother and he knows that. Grady’s currently paying back an insane amount in student loans. While he has a good-paying job at a local graphic design place, anything extra goes to paying off that debt. He doesn’t have the money I need right now, not when he barely has the money he needs.
“You’re right, but I’d be a shit brother if I didn’t offer.” He gives me a soft smile that normally would make me feel better but doesn’t in this instance.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m just going to post an ad on Craigslist and hope a serial killer doesn’t answer it.” I choke on a bubble of laughter. “Hell, at this point, I’d be okay with a serial killer as long as he or she paid their half of the bills,” I say dryly.
Grady frowns at me. “You know that’s not funny, right?”
“Oh, come on. It’s a little funny.”
He adamantly shakes his head. “No, you’ll get someone weirder than Vicki was.” He laughs as if that would even be possible. “You obviously haven’t been watching Investigation Discovery as often as I have. There are some really insane people in this world, they wouldn’t just kill you, they’d keep you in the basement and cut you every day.”
Blinking slowly, I give him a disbelieving look. “I don’t have a basement. And you need to stop watching that crap. I highly doubt I could find someone weirder than Vicki.”
Vicki was unique. We hadn’t known each other when we started living together. I’d been introduced to her at a party for a guy I was sort of dating a year earlier. She seemed a lot more normal before I moved in with her. But behind closed doors, that’s when she truly let her freak flag fly.
She was an odd bird, and at one point, she had people call her, Juniper Moon, her spiritual name, she explained to me. She liked to live her life open-minded, free, and easy. Unfortunately for me, that meant a lot of awkward and sometimes unbearable encounters. She was all about free love and expressing herself sexually. Vomit. Every day that she lived here, I didn’t know if I would be walking into burning incenses and guitar music or a full-blown orgy taking place in the living room. Yes, I did say an orgy, which was basically a bunch of long-haired hippies humping each other. They also enjoyed late-night drum circles after giving themselves to each other in drug-fueled sex parties.
Gagging, I remember vividly the night I had walked in on the nakedness and smell of sex. Forcing myself to focus on the now, I push the picture of a hairy ass thrusting in my face away and think about the present. Like, what I’m going to do now?
Who just moves out and takes everything? I mean, I paid for half of our furniture. My emotions are boarding on a volcanic eruption. That part bothers me the most. My purple wrap-around couch was the thrift-store find of the century. It was clean and in perfect condition without a single stain or tear. It tied the room together so well, and that little wench took it. Like, how in the hell did she even fit it in that damn van anyway?
Huffing out an annoyed breath, I pick at the carpet fibers on the floor. “I don’t think I can find any worse of a roommate than what I already had,” I tell Grady without even looking up at him.
“No, it could be worse,” he insists. “You could get someone who likes to dress up like a squirrel and hump people in town… or you in your sleep.”
Instantly, the picture of a middle-aged man in a squirrel costume, humping people at the park, pops into my head. On any ordinary day, I would have found that hilarious, but today is not that day. As dramatic as it sounds, today is the worst day of my life.
