Chapter Five
Then — Six Years Ago
November
This is my first semester post-grad. I’m a functionally broke grad student who works as a TA to help pay my bills. I mean, I have money in my savings account. Way more than enough to get me through college. I refuse to spend it unless absolutely forced to.
Everything I have in savings is going toward earning my master’s degree. This means I have to take what I can get in terms of on-campus housing, if I don’t want to pay out the ass for an apartment or be forced to move in with a roommate off-campus. Meaning I’d need a car—another expense I don’t want to shell out money for.
Because I took what I could get, I have a roommate who, on some days, I wish I could jettison off the dorm roof. David is a third-year engineering major, and a major tool. I know I’m damned lucky to be in a dorm room in the first place. The original student assigned here withdrew. I was able to snag it for a fraction of the cost I’d otherwise pay for on-campus housing, because one of the department heads went to bat for me with a friend of theirs in the admin office.
Not sure yet what I’ll do next semester, but Ireallyhope I don’t have to dip into my savings. One of my professors has offered to let me rent a room from her. Unfortunately, she doesn’t live within walking distance of campus, and she’s not on the bus line, meaning I’d have to buy a car. Something else I really don’t want to do right now.
Today, my roommate stands in the tiny efficiency kitchen that takes up a corner of the room we share, with the fridge standing open. He’s staring into it like it holds answers to secrets of the universe.
“What are you doing?” I finally ask, because I know this game.
It goes faster if I play it by David’s rules.
Well, if I let himthinkI’m playing it by his rules.
He’s still staring into the fridge. “I’m just totallygobsmackedthat we don’t haveanythingto eat.”
“Stop being so fricking pretentious,” I snap. “Besides, we’d have something to eat if you’d go to the store every once in a while.” He has a damn car his parents pay for.
His rich attorney parents, who give him a more than adequate weekly allowance.
Yet he eatsmyfood and bitches there’s nothing in the fridge.
I’ve learned to keep non-perishable food in a locked tub under my bed, or else it disappears down David’s gob.
Which I’d love to smack, and hard. Except he’s way bigger than I am.
He has the audacity to look wounded as he closes the fridge. “Pretentious? How amIpretentious?”
“You’ve never been farther south than Tampa, and you damn sure aren’t an Aussie. Stop trying to talk like Billie.” Billie resides in the room across the hall from us and is authentically Australian.
I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed and almost hoping David tries to approach me to see if I have food to share.
I’ll shank a bitch over my Oreos.
“So shutyourgob,” I add without looking his way, “before I smack it for you.”
“Bitch,” he mutters.
“That’sQueenBitch, honey,” I snap back.
He rolls his eyes. “I’m going down to the cafeteria.”
“Thatiswhere they keep the food, genius. Since you’re too cheap to shop for your own and resort to stealing mine. Which I can’tafford, by the way. You still owe me nearly forty bucks formyfood you’ve eaten, fricking cheapskate. Hit an ATM while you’re out and give me my money or replace my food.”
Yes, I keep track of how much it cost and how much he owes me. Never let it be said that I’m not a petty bitch.
He storms out in a huff. Now that he’s gone, the cycle complete, I can focus again. Right now, I’m working on a design plan. I’ve been given an unpaid student internship at a local interior design company. They’ve foisted one of their problem-child clients onto me, since I’m free labor.
But I’m determined to pull it off.
The client has an impossibly low budget, impossibly high standards, and are impossible to work with, according to a couple of the company’s admin assistants I bribed with gourmet cookies to give me the 411 about them.
