Yeah.
So, as a teenager, I’d had to fend for both myself and Tara. There’d been no other choice. To this day, I didn’t know for sure if our mother was dead or alive.
Then, Old Man Bertolli had essentially rescued us. He’d even left his home to us. It might not be much, but it kept a roof over our heads.
With him gone, though, I’d been forced to find a new income stream. And I had. Unfortunately, that meant being stuck listening to spoiled rotten Candi Benton every night. It made me want to pull my hair out. Or better yet, hers.
After my special sausage, onion and tomato sauce was ready, I poured it over the farfalle pasta, and brought it out to their long mahogany dinner table. I spooned the meal onto their china place settings, then went back to the kitchen to retrieve some parmesan cheese.
As usual, pampered Candi sat in her cushioned dining room chair with a throw pillow on her lap, a pout prevalent on her face. I didn’t know if the pout was due to the shoe issue or something else, and honestly, I didn’t care. As soon as I finished serving them, I’d be allowed to leave, and tonight I was more anxious than usual to do so.
Over the past two weeks, I’d been able to keep my lips buttoned shut by imagining fun and creative ways to punish Candi.
I started with more innocent things like using food coloring to make her milk a weird color or putting a bouillon cube in her bathroom nozzle to turn her shower into a soupy broth. But lately, I’d been imagining more gruesome events like dumping boiling water in her lap or gouging her in the skull with the family’s butcher knife.
Good times.
“OMG,” Candi huffed out. “Are you seriously giving us pasta again?”
I hadn’t made them pasta in the entire two weeks I’d been there. Not once. If I hadn’t needed the job, I would’ve told her what she could do with her pasta, in elaborate detail. But since her parents were my employers and were sitting right there, I remained silent. I had to bite my tongue to do it. Literally.
“And onions?” she added, staring at me hard. “Onions are so gross!” I’d served onions in their meals at least three times for sure, and the teenager hadn’t said a word about not liking them until that second. Candi lifted her spoon and threw it on the plate, splashing some of the sauce onto the table. She pointed at her dinner and said, “Bring me some of that without onions.”
“You want me to pick the onions out of the sauce?” I asked, incredulous. I’d minced those onions into teeny fragments the size of splinters. Was she out of her ever-lovin’ mind?
I glanced over at Mr. and Mrs. Benton. Mr. Benton had put his fork down while the missus had hers halfway to her mouth, but both simply watched me as if wondering why I wasn’t doing what their daughter demanded.
Wow.
I turned back to Candi, who sneered and said, “I don’t care how you do your job as long as you do it.”
Up to this point, I’d been attempting to push down my aggravation, but at those words, my vision flashed white with outrage. Acting on instinct, I stormed into the kitchen and filled a ladle with the sauce. I rushed back to the dining room and splattered its bright red contents onto Candi, her silk shirt, and the throw pillow she held.
“There’s your goddamn sauce!” I shouted at her, feeling instantly better.
“What is the meaning of this?” Her father flew to his feet, while her mother’s mouth gaped open like a fish, her hands wringing in the air. “This is the most unprofessional behavior I’ve ever seen. Get out. You’re fired!”
“Fuck that,” I told him, my voice still raised. “I quit!”
I marched from the room, went back to the kitchen for long enough to grab my purse, then flew out the door. I hauled ass down the steps along their front walk, my movements tight with anger. I caught a cab back to my place, ignoring the sights and sounds of Philadelphia in the fall, fuming throughout the twenty-minute trip.
Glad to find myself alone—Tara must be spending the night with her boyfriend—I hurried up to my bedroom.
As a kid, I’d learned to say a mantra to help get me through the toughest of times. Sometimes I said it aloud and sometimes under my breath, but either way, it kept me going. I muttered it to myself now as I began to prepare. “Stand tall. Stand strong.”
Other than cooking, my only other hobby involved shooting video. I had my own YouTube channel, and though I didn’t have many followers, I enjoyed letting loose on an open forum. I liked to express myself and have commenters agree with me. I’d become known for my rants; those brought me the most views, so I specialized in them.
And tonight, I had a doozy of one.
One thing I did to maintain my anonymity was wear a mask. The Venetian Masquerade mask covered the top of my face and had the added benefit of making me feel beautiful. It was gold and fuchsia and covered in glitter. I’d gotten it during the Mummers Mardi Gras Parade Philadelphia held the previous February, and I loved it. It made for a lovely disguise.
I opened the aging laptop Tara had used for school to my most recent comments, attached my phone to a tripod, and started, going off like a rocket. While I liked to have interactions with commenters who liked me, there were always some who simply came to troll my channel. I enjoyed going off on those, on raking them over the coals.
Their nastiness gave me more fodder to fill my video with, too. After addressing the trolls, I griped about rich people who knew nothing about what it was like to live in the real world. I next went on and on about spoiled teenagers—Candi, in particular—and I complained about the lack of entry level positions in the job market.
Finally, I did something else that got views, I chose some random local news image at the side of my feed and used it to make up a story.
Sometimes, my stories would be silly, sometimes sad, and sometimes even a little mean. It was all just made-up and imaginary, though. Expressing myself in that way helped me get things off my chest, to release whatever was upsetting me. And better, my stories tended to bring the most positive interactions.