I Like Being Watched

One

Wynn

"What do you mean there were cameras?" I asked, carefully cutting into the unicorn-colored bagel filled with confetti cake frosting—little pieces of flower-shaped sprinkles that were almost cheerful enough to give us both some hope.

We'd made a habit of eating fun, trendy treats when we got together. It made our otherwise underwhelming lives feel mildly more interesting.

Except for the pickle ice cream.

We don't talk about the pickle ice cream.

It was a bright but cold Tuesday morning—the kind of cool that sank into your skin, into your bones, no matter how many layers you piled on.

We were sitting in our favorite coffee shop with its farmhouse-chic decor—painted white hardwood floors with just enough scuffs from high heels and impatient children's sneakers to give it a little character and history, ship-lapped walls in a variety of different rustic stains, and mismatched tables and chairs—at our favorite spot near the window.

We waited an hour to get in, but in our opinion, it was worth the wait. We liked to park for a while, chase away the blues that came with the most useless day of the week, while being able to watch the foot traffic, window shopping off of moving mannequins because we both knew we couldn't afford to buy anything as frivolous as new wardrobe items when neither of us had chosen degrees that guaranteed financial freedom. We found ourselves both recently graduated with crippling student loan debts and very few prospects for paying them off without ending up in some soul-sucking dead-end type situation.

Perry had it worse than I did. What with her track record of never staying at any one job for longer than a few weeks and all. Though, if I were being honest, I was steadily catching up to her, finding that my dozen or so side gigs were simply not going to cut it long term. Hell, it wasn't really even cutting it now.

I loved my mother more than words for always encouraging me to follow my passions in life, but with the cold hand of grown-up responsibilities holding me in its unyielding grip, I was starting to wish she'd maybe told me that yeah, it was great for me to fiddle around with art in my free time, but that it would be wise to get a degree in accounting or law or freaking library sciences. Something, anything that made me any kind of money.

Bless her hippie heart.

Unlike her, I didn't have a stable, sensible sort of man who worshipped the ground I walked on, who happily let me fiddle around in my craft room while he lovingly took care of all the less fun parts of life.

Like paying the light bill that had started calling four times a day. And when they went past three, they were about a week away from blanketing your world in darkness. The fact that I knew this—and had a cheap candle collection at hand for the possibility—really just showed where I was existing, socio-economically speaking.

I was half-tempted to take pictures of my feet doing weird things and selling them to the foot fetishists on Instagram.

And I was only half-joking about that.

"I mean there were cameras. Like... everywhere."

Perry, well, she was one for dramatics. Which was fitting, since she had majored in it, spent her weekends clutching her chest in Shakespeare plays on off-off-off Broadway shows or screaming in D-horror movies made on a shoestring budget that made shaky-cam found footage films seem high quality.

To people like Perry, very little didn't require big eyes or stunned gasps or, well, very overblown embellishments.

"Everywhere... where?" I asked, figuring she simply meant on the perimeter of the house to deter criminals. Or mailmen from tossing your packages from the window without getting out of their little trucks.

"Well, there was one in the kitchen, the dining room, the den, the study, the billiard room, the conservatory..."

In case it wasn't clear already, Perry had been working in a small ecosystem that dared to call itself a single-family home. Twelve-thousand square feet for one full-time resident, one part-time resident, and a couple house workers who came and went on their own schedules. What one person could do with twelve-thousand square feet was beyond me since I struggled to fill up a very generous nine-hundred square foot apartment.

"You're sure they were cameras? Rich people have those little motion sensor things mounted in the corners of rooms to set off their alarms when they are not around," I reminded her.

"Oh, he has those too!" she told me, bright silver-blue eyes going big.

I really hoped she made it big someday. Or at least landed a steady gig on a popular TV show or something. It would be a real shame if more people didn't get to see her unique face full of sharp angles light up when she was speaking. I'd never met someone with such expressive eyes, or brows that seemed to have conversations all by themselves, or a mouth that pulled off a pout like I hadn't seen outside of old black & white movies, or her long, shining black hair that was practically its own character on her very body.