I shake my head. “Jesus, how much have you had to drink?”
Ashley draws back as if I slapped her. I might as well have. Drinking used to be my way of coping three years ago – not sure if I’m allowed to preach about it. That and my bike.
“Are you… are you taking her side?” she almost shrieks as a reply. “Did you see how she was? She was going to attack me.”
“And I’m thinking I shouldn’t have stopped her.”
Ashley is hurt. Her bee-stung lips tremble. “Why did you, then?”
“She would’ve gotten fired and you’re not worth it.”
An actual tear slides down her cheek.
It’s not that I deliberately want to hurt Ashley. She hasn’t done anything that she wouldn’t have done back in school.
It’s just that I don’t want anything to do with her or the old crowd or all the things we did back at school.
“Ashley, look –”
“You’ve changed,” she cuts me off, looking at me like I’ve grown two heads or something. “I can’t believe after all those years, you’d defend her. Her. Cleopatra. Do you even remember how much we hated her? How she didn’t belong with us? The way she talked back? And she’s not better now. She’s a freaking maid. A maid, Zach. Nothing about her has changed.”
Yeah, nothing about her has changed.
Blue is still the same. Loud, spunky… bright. Brimming with so much life that it’s hard to look at her.
But still I looked.
I watched her get humiliated for years. I watched her get pushed around, get insulted, laughed at.
For years, I was her bully.
I’m not a fan of words or letters or anything. Never have been.
But bully is the word I hate the most. I hate it so much that it might be a living, breathing person.
A person I want to strangle and choke the life out of.
“I’m not defending her. I’ve never defended her,” I say to Ashley. “I’m just letting you know how things are.”
“What did they do to you at Oxford?” Ashley muses.
“That’s the thing. I never was at Oxford. I’ve never been to the UK. I was in New York, crashing on strangers’ couches.”
And realizing that the world is a much bigger place than my dad had me believe. A place where people look at me like I’m worth something, even though I’m only a high school dropout.
My dad will shit a brick when he hears of this, that I outed the secret. The prodigal son wasn’t at Oxford but squatting in buildings like a homeless bum.
You’re not trying hard enough, Zach.
You really are dumb, aren’t you?
You’ll never amount to anything if you can’t even spell your name right.
But that’s nothing new, is it? He’s been shitting bricks ever since he found out his perfect little son has long, deep cracks.
I know the staff’s still here, watching everything. At The Pleiades, it’s hard to keep secrets. I make eye contact with a brown-haired, mousy one. “Escort her out. She’s a little too drunk to walk on her own.”
Ashley calls out my name and I spin around to face her one last time.
“Don’t ever come here uninvited. And don’t harass the staff. You’re not gonna like how I react the next time. Just a fair warning.”
With that, I leave.
I thrust my hand down my pocket and wrap my fingers around the bottle of laxative. I have a headache coming on; I need a fucking cigarette.
But guess what? I can’t have any. Because someone stole them from me.
My fingers tighten around the bottle in frustration.
Fucking thief.
I don’t get fired.
Mrs. S hears about my nightly adventures, however. She lets me go with a warning. It’s a shock but I guess I know the reason.
Pity.
Pity is the reason. I see it reflected in everyone’s eyes. Maggie, Leslie, Grace, even Ryan. They all have been giving me sad, sympathetic smiles.
It’s like my parents died all over again and I have to go to the morgue to identify their bodies. And then, it’s like the bank took away my house again because of all the debt and missed payments. Now, I have weeks of begging to do until they give me another chance to somehow make a partial payment.
It’s history repeating without actually repeating itself.
So I’m happy just to be sent on my daily duties. Only Tina’s assigned to work alongside me and in order to shift the pity, I tell her about Ryan’s asking me out.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
And that’s her reaction when I tell her that I refused to go out with him.
“Nothing.” I shrug, pushing the cleaning cart as we walk down one of the hallways in tower two. “Nothing’s wrong with me. I can’t go.”
“It’s not even a question, Cleo,” she says, stopping and putting her hands on her hips.
“Do you know you look like a mom when you do that?” I ask.