She smacked it silent, a manic look on her face. “Guess what, dumbass, you’re late for work.”
“You definitely have anger management issues, missy,” I said.
She glared. “Get up! C’mon. You need to get out of here!”
I dodged a droplet of yolk, not quite understanding her frenzy as I rolled to my feet. “You know, you’re supposed to cook that. Not just carry it around with you.”
“Oh, thank you, genius. Well, I would be cooking it if you hadn’t overslept and forced me to abandon my post.” She scurried down the hall to the kitchen. “Barry’s coming for breakfast.”
Barry. The latest in a series of one-woman emasculations by Amanda Gates.
I pulled on my scrubs with a frown. “I thought that was one of those things you offered to be charming but it was never actually going to happen.”
“That’s what I thought too.” She sounded furious. “But lo and behold, I get a call this morning, and guess who’s on his way over?”
“Barry?” I asked wisely.
“Oh, get out.” She kicked at me with a slippered shoe as I grabbed for a yogurt on my way past the kitchen. Missed! I’d have to swoop around for another pass.
“Oh—and don’t forget to take our car. You need to drop it off at the shop at lunch to have it ready by the time you get out.”
Our car. That was generous of her. It was her car. Her car that her parents had gotten her, but she promptly deemed as ours. In the first two weeks, we’d trashed it like teenagers, filling it with music, candles, food, makeup, clothes—basically every bit of junk you could
imagine. Now it was running on fumes. Little bits of it spitefully falling away a week at a time. Good news was, I supposed we could realistically live off what was inside if we ever got desperate.
“Yeah.” I yanked on my shoes, making another grab for the yogurt. “What’s wrong with it again?”
“I don’t know.” She waved a hand dismissively and returned to her smoking eggs. “It’s the timing belt, the ignition fuse, the spark plugs—one of those. Whatever it was the nuns stole in The Sound of Music.”
“Got it.” I rolled my eyes. “That’s what I’ll tell them.”
I was halfway out the door when she whirled around, flinging curlers and bits of egg everywhere. “Bex?” she called. “What…what do you think he’ll think of me?”
My eyes swept the chaotic room and landed on my panicked friend. “He’s going to think you’re a multi-tasker.” I heard something hit the other side of the door as I hastily pulled it closed. “That’s a good thing!”
Still chuckling at my cleverness, I opened the top of my hard-earned yogurt only to realize I’d forgotten a spoon.
“Miss White.”
I froze with one foot still in the air—a cartoonish image of guilt.
Teller Hamburg (real name), aka my landlord, strolled casually out of his office on the second floor. His pointy little rat face was the portrait of “unassuming,” but I was sure he had been waiting in there for me.
“Miss White,” he smiled greasily, eyes sweeping me as he got closer. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days, but we keep missing each other.”
“Imagine that,” I murmured, hugging the wall as I tried to inch past him.
With a flourish I could tell he’d practiced, he pulled out a weighted sheet of faded cream paper and dropped it into my hands. I brought it to my nose for an automatic sniff.
“Is this parchment?”
“It’s your eviction notice.”
My mouth fell open as I scanned quickly through the document. Sure enough, due to a month and a half of back rent and “blatant impertinence,” I was being asked to leave. My face reddened as I stuffed the notice angrily into my purse.
“Blatant impertinence?” My eyebrows rose dangerously.
Hamburg smiled. “Legally, I can’t throw you out for that. But as long as I had you on the back rent, I saw no need why I shouldn’t slip it in there as well.”