When I let myself in through the back room, the pizza oven was still warm, so I fired it back up again. I needed to get myshit together, but first I had to make a pizza. To knead my fingers into the dough and let myself get a little angry at it.
I wandered into the office and flipped through some mail as my computer came to life. Waiting for me were two emails from Ian. Just as I clicked on the latest one, something above me rumbled.
“What the hell?” I whispered before grabbing my dad’s housewarming gift when I first moved in, a baseball bat I kept behind the door of my office.
I held the bat up, ready to whack an intruder, as I crept up the stairs.
It sounded like the TV was on. In fact... not only was it the TV, but the very familiar sound ofMario Kart. What the—?
I swung the door open.
“Eat my dick, goatmafia33.”
“Topher?” I asked.
But he didn’t turn around. Because he had on my huge-ass noise-canceling headphones. He lay sprawled out across my extra-long camel-colored leather couch with a half-eaten pizza on the ottoman that had to have one of every topping we offered.
I shook my head. That’s one way to compromise the integrity of my impeccable crust.
Like the good uncle I was, I tiptoed behind him and slowly lifted a headphone off his ear. “Boo.”
Topher shot into the air and spun around, hurling my Nintendo Switch controller right at my head. It hit with athudbefore landing on the hardwood floor in more pieces than it should have been.
“What are you doing here?” Topher asked. He wore a pair of polka-dot boxers, one of the many free shirts I’d gotten for sponsoring some local 5K, and my flannel robe, which swallowed him. “And with the office bat? Whoa. Also what happened to your tooth?”
“Um, what are you doing here is the better question,” I told him, “And this is my self-defense bat for, ya know, intruders.”
“I’m not an intruder,” he said innocently.
“Uh, you sure look like one to me. And the tooth is a long story.”
I took a quick look around to see the state of the rest of the apartment. The sink overflowed with dishes and the Slice, Slice, Baby boxes were piled high enough to make a cardboard mansion.
Bread peered up from her cat bed on the window ledge and then leapt toward me. I scooped her up and let her nuzzle my beard before turning back to Topher. “Are you squatting in my apartment?”
He cringed. “Why do you have to say it like that? Bread needed the company!”
Knowing Bread, that was hard to believe.
“Remember how I dropped last semester and you took the hit for me?”
“I definitely have not forgotten.”
“Very cool of you, by the way,” he said. “Well, I might have promised my mom that I was taking a summer-mester. And I was about to sign up, but I got this really cool opportunity to invest. So I took the money for classes and I invested it.”
“You invested your federal student loan money?” I asked. Icouldn’t tell if this kid was a genius or not, but lately I was leaning toward not.
“It wasn’t federal student loan money,” he corrected. “It was a private loan.”
“If you’re going to scam your student loan money, shouldn’t it at least be government money? And who gave you a private loan?”
“The Vasectomy King of Kansas City himself.”
“And what did you blow your stepdad’s cash on?”
“My friend Riley had this great idea to put hot tubs in the back of pickup trucks and drive people around downtown... like a horse and carriage but without the animal cruelty. And plus hot tubs.”
I pulled out a dining room chair and slumped down into it as my body finally began to feel the shock of the last twenty-four hours. “Let me guess. Your mom found out?”
