“You just wear a suit to hang around your house all day?” I ask Renzo, purposefully testing him with my attitude because I find myself fundamentally repulsed by arrogant white men who think they’re on top of the world because of the money and status that they inherited.
“I’m not a farmer, Geralynn. I believe in dressing for my job.”
“Being a landlord isn’t a job. You’re technically a parasite.”
“I told Nicki I would no longer discuss politics with you. Welcome. She’s waiting with half a bottle of wine at the kitchen island.”
Nicki sent out an “SOS” text halfway through my shift today, which is the only reason I fought my bad mood and low energy after today’s humiliation to trek all the way out here to the lake house where she’s effectively a prisoner. If she’s even let Renzo into her emotional tribulations, it must be pretty bad. If she’s moved on from a joint to alcohol, bad might not even begin to describe it.
“What’s going on with Nicki?”
Engaging with Renzo is a total mistake, but I stumble forward recklessly because I hate hearing about my best friend in trouble.
“It really isn’t any of your business,” he says. Renzo’s voice drips with disdain and I want to ignore him, except it’s not enough for him to respond rudely, he has to sneak in a personal dig next. “Nicki should keep better company.”
“I just asked a question.”
“It was annoying,” he says. “I would much rather listen to… anything else.”
He’s still looking at me intensely for someone who finds me so deeply annoying. I roll my eyes and look at my phone.
“Whatever, we don’t have to talk, Renzo. I can just wait for Nicki in silence next to her asshole brother.”
“You’re a janitor, right?”
Heat burns around the edges of my ears. I feel guilty for the shame I feel, especially because it’s so familiar. I learned pretty early on in elementary school that most other people thought there was something wrong with cleaning work. My mom worked as a janitor at another elementary school across town. When the word got out from a transfer student who joined my class in fourth grade, nobody ever let me forget it.
They called me “mop bucket”, an insult that evolved and followed me to the only place on earth worse than elementary school – middle school. By the time I started high school, I was a pariah. Anybody who knew about me would quickly find out about my so-called reputation and all the colorful rumors that came with it.
It’s just a job, not who I am. But there’s something painful about doing the same work my mom did, knowing that I spent months applying to jobs with utter desperation to end up somewhere better. I didn’t want to be “mop bucket” anymore. I wanted to push out all the insults that I grew up with and make myself believe that I was better than those ignorant kids.
I don’t actually think of myself as a worse person just because I clean for a living. I don’t. But hearing Renzo call me a “janitor” with such derision brings back painful memories and puts me on the defensive even more than I was with him previously.
“I work at the TC Center downtown.”
It’s the commercial building that I clean. He snickers and the cruelty makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“A janitor, like I thought. Do you know how hilarious that is?”
“What’s funny about it?” Making bullies explain their jokes always disables them on the spot, right? I’ve never had to faceanyone as entitled or arrogant as Renzo. He doesn’t just stick to surface level insults, making it so much harder to stop his attacks from cutting deeply.
“I bet you tried,” Renzo says. My stomach turns. “I bet you tried so hard to be something better, but you just ended up cleaning shit for a living.”
He chuckles, twisting in the knife. There’s something disturbing about standing next to a man who genuinely thinks of himself as superior. It’s a deep, primal unnerving sensation that Renzo is dangerous and he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt me if it suited him.
“I’m just here to talk to Nicki.”
“Good luck,” he says. “She’s making a fool of herself.”
Renzo leads me through the front door into the mansion’s large foyer. I pass through the arch way with the disguised metal detector nervously. I know there are cameras everywhere in this house to keep Nicki safe, although I suspect this is more about ensuring she doesn’t run away.
I can hear music playing from Nicki’s JBL speakers in the kitchen. The sound is distinct from the speaker system Renzo has throughout the house. He would never allow Taylor Swift on the big speakers. Nicki belts out the lyrics to one of the older Taylor Swift songs, You Belong With Me.
She’s so painfully off-key that I mistakenly try to share a human glance with Renzo to show my concern. He scowls when I make eye contact with him.
“Get her to shut up,” Renzo says. “And my offer still stands. I will pay you to stay out of my sister’s life. She needs friends on her level, not people no better than slaves.”
My mouth drops open. Nicki appears in the doorway behind her brother, distracting me from my response and giving that racist bastard enough time to escape and disappear.
