“Yeah,” he sighed. “Three years ago today.”
“That sucks.”
“In the most unholiest of ways,” he agreed.
A dark sedan turned down the street. The headlights lit us both up, and for a second I could make out all those sharp angles of his face again. I pushed the hood of my sweatshirt down over my forehead.
The car stopped in front of him and the driver’s side door opened. A big dude unfolded from the car quickly.
“Ricky, I’m drunk.”
“Yeah, boss,” he said. “Good thing you called.”
“I didn’t,” my drunk friend said and pointed at me. “She did.”
Ricky didn’t even acknowledge me, just moved closer to get under his friend’s arm. “Let’s get you home, boss.”
“Here, I’ll help you,” I said, as I stepped closer to the man, wrapping my arm around his other side, but Ricky was moving him faster than I could, so I pulled away after a second.
Right before Ricky was about to dump the guy into the car, I lifted my hand.
“Hey, you going to pay me or not?”
Both men turned to look at me then. Then drunk dude reached back into his front pocket where he’d stuffed those bills he’d pulled out of his wallet.
“Here you go, Good Samaritan. Keep up the good work.”
He held out his hand, the bills in between his fingers. I slipped them free, took a few steps back and gave him a small salute.
“Take care. Sorry for your loss.”
That was a thing people said, wasn’t it? I didn’t wait around to see if he acknowledged my sympathy, just tucked my chin to my neck, made sure my hoodie covered my face and walked off in the opposite direction.
It wasn’t until I got back to my motel room, locked the door, pushed the chair up under the doorknob, because a girl could never be too careful, that I reached into my pocket to see what my pay day had actually been.
I’d been prepared to steal. To take. To grab what I could because sometimes not having money was so fucking hard and I could get really, really mad about it. Until I remembered how absolutely unoriginal I was. Time and energy wasted on things like anger were unproductive.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. A couple of fives? Two twenties seemed to be too much to hope for. When I unfolded the bills though, I realized I was looking at two one-hundred dollar bills.
“Shit,” I muttered, even as I slid my hand into my other pocket and pulled out the shiny gold, overly expensive, wrist trinket, that, given modern society’s obsession with putting a clock on everything, seemed absolutely unnecessary. “If I knew you were going to give me this kind of money, I wouldn’t have stolen your watch.”
ONE
ANNA
The day she had a case of mild dyslexia.
Five Months Later
I openedthe heavy glass door to a small lobby to find a smattering of people already waiting inside the generic space. In unison, everyone turned their head to look at me.
“Hey,” I said, with a small hand lift.
I was immediately assessed and dismissed in seconds by the group, as they all went back to staring at their phones.
There were only four chairs inside the lobby, two on either side of a round coffee table. All of them were filled.
So yeah, I was standing.
