Under the Stars and Stripes (Under Him)

“What’s up?” Justin asks as he saunters— and I do mean saunters— our way.

“Do you think that you can start posting some ads for models willing to work for cheap and a resume booster on social media and job post sites tonight?” I ask him.

“Sure I can,” he says. “Anything else? I have no idea what I’m going to do with my life without you two nagging me to death about making sure the shit stains are scrubbed out of your underwear.”

I failed to mention that he’s also very sassy.

“Ha, ha,” Tony says with feigned amusement.

He then sticks his tongue out at Justin as if he’s a child.

“Yeah, actually, if you could start scheduling those models to do camera tests and sending over headshots and portfolios as soon as they come, that’d be great,” Tony tells Simon.

“How far out should I make the auditions?”

“We’ve got three days off, so let’s put them to good use. They can start coming in as soon as tomorrow.”

“All right,” Justin says as he walks away. “But don’t call me over the next three days! Texts only!”

I shake my head.

“We pay him way too much money,” Tony says.

“Well, we could fire him and use that money to pay back the city,” I reply.

“Nah,” he says, while crossing his arms and shaking his head at Justin from across the studio. “He wasn’t too far off base about the underwear. We’re useless without him.”

Chapter Three - Brittany

They say home is where the heart is.

I, however, would counter that that particular saying is actually… how do I put this delicately? Umm… complete bullshit.

“Dad, please do not scream at me like I’m a child,” I say to my father in the midst of… well… him screaming at me as if I’m a child.

“Well, maybe if you didn’t run your life the way that a child would, I wouldn’t have to raise my voice at you like you’re a child!” he shouts, before taking a swig directly out of a Jack Daniels bottle, like a character in a Tennessee Williams’ play.

“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset. It’s not like I have a lease with you,” I remind him, which actually sort of surprises me.

He went through all the trouble of charging me a nonrefundable $300 security deposit when I showed back up a few nights ago after telling him I’d have to start staying with him for a while. It only makes sense that he would have drafted a nice, iron-clad rental agreement. But he hadn’t. Probably because he kept getting too sauced to remember to do it.

“You knew the terms of you coming home when you asked if you- actually!” he suddenly exclaims. “You didn’t even really ask, now did you? You just sort of assumed it’d be okay because you’re a spoiled child who has never had to do anything for herself!”

“What about the fact that I’ve been living on my own and paying for school on my own for the last two years?” I ask him. “Doesn’t that count as doing something for myself?”

“Don’t back-talk me!”

He puts down the bottle and steps closer to me. This is something that he does when he’s trying to intimidate me because he incorrectly thinks that I’ll concede. It might have worked when I was a child, but it isn’t going to work now.

He comes within a few inches of my face.

Very calmly and matter-of-factly, I say, “Dad, I gave you $200, and I told you that I would get you the other hundred in a few days. I don’t think that’s so unreasonable, considering that the entire reason that I had to ask to move back in temporarily— and trust me, it will be just a temporary arrangement— is because I lost my job due to a completely unexpected pandemic rather than through any fault of my own!”

“Oh, that’s— pfffft!” He blows a raspberry, which is a telltale sign that he is highly intoxicated… at 10 o’clock in the morning, mind you. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You and that little friend of yours, Sasha—”

“Sarah…” I correct him, rolling my eyes.

“Whatever! Y’all have gone out more times in the last two days—”

“Gone out?!” I laugh. “No, Dad. We’ve been packing our apartment. We haven’t gone anywhere except from our former home to the homes of our parents.”

My dad has never liked Sarah. And for no good reason, other than the fact that he doesn’t like me to have friends, and sometimes he has the habit of just pretending they don’t even exist.

The fact that he’s known her since we were in elementary school and still thinks her name is Sasha just goes to show how mentally unstable his alcoholism has made him. But I also think he just likes to purposefully forget her name or get it wrong, as if he’s making some kind of statement about how little my best friend on the planet means to him and how little he thinks she should mean to me.