Catastrophe Queen

CHAPTER ONE – MALLORY

There were three things I needed to be written on a t-shirt for every stranger who passed me in the street.

Red was my nail color.

Dry shampoo was the greatest invention since humans evolved.

I was, without a doubt, the biggest walking disaster since… well, humans evolved.

Of course there were a lot of other things I could say to describe myself. I could eat an abnormal number of tacos in one sitting. I had the gravitational center of a bouncy ball. My tolerance for alcohol was world-record worthy, and if I ever wanted to regain any of the dignity I’d lost thanks to a cracked sidewalk right before senior prom, I’d never wear a heel higher than three inches again.

Even three inches was pushing it.

I much preferred zero.

In fact, I preferred not to wear shoes at all. If I was wearing shoes, there was a better-than-average chance I was leaving the house.

If I was leaving the house, I was socializing.

And let me get this straight right now: I was not a socializer.

You could keep your fancy-schmancy parties and your loud-ass bars and clubs.

I wanted my bunny slippers and my pajama shorts with penguins on.

Yes, I was a closet eighty-year-old, and no, I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about that.

In my not-so-humble and far-too-frequently-expressed opinion, I was a twenty-five-year-old grandma without the burden of grandchildren, and I was totally okay with that.

I mean, I could barely keep myself alive, so there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be able to keep two generations of my offspring living and breathing without some kind of divine intervention.

Don’t believe me?

I was living with my parents. And we weren’t talking just left college, drowning in student debt, can’t live on my own kind of living with my parents.

No, it was three years post flying the nest, lived on my own like a boss living with my parents.

And why was I back at home?

Well, that was a fun story.

See, my apartment building had a fire. The origin of it was currently unknown, and while I’d swear that I wasn’t responsible, there may or may not have been a chance that I’d forgotten to turn off my flat iron that morning.

Again, I may have turned it off.

Maybe not.

Regardless, my first-floor apartment had been so badly burned that I’d had no choice but to move back in with my parents.

It wasn’t so bad. Not really. They charged me minimal rent so I could save as much as possible to get back on my feet because I’d also been let go from my job, and I didn’t have the restrictions teenage-me had.

What did I have?

Well, images of my parents doing things no child should ever witness burned into my retinas.

And we weren’t talking walking around in underwear or anything like that. No, we were talking about sex toys on the coffee table, a suspender belt over the back of a dining chair, and actual sex on the sofa.

I wished that were the whole story, but there was, like, ninety percent of that iceberg under the surface, full of memories that I didn’t want to pull back up, thank you very much, Satan.

Long story short, there was now an alarm on Alexa in every room of the house so they’d know I was ten minutes from home.

Yet, I was still dawdling and walking in the direction of Starbucks instead of my house. I’d just left the only interview I hadn’t managed to screw up in the last two weeks, but I still wasn’t feeling too hot about my chances.

Probably because I had a pair of dirty underwear in the leg of my pants that I’d discreetly managed to tuck into my sock mid-interview under the guise of an itchy ankle.

That, and I wasn’t exactly the most organized person in the world. It wasn’t a great situation to be in when you were applying to be a personal assistant, but I figured I could do it, even if it was for the boss of a real estate company.

I hadn’t even met the guy. I knew nothing about him except for the fact his name was Cameron Reid, and he ran his family’s real estate company. His current full-time personal assistant had decided not to come back from maternity leave, and he didn’t like her temporary replacement, so she’d been called in to do interviews.

Meeting Casey Owens probably should have been my first clue that, no matter how well the interview went, I wasn’t a fit at Reid Real Estate. She was tall, slim, and she didn’t have a hair out of place.

I was… relatively tall, packed a few extra pounds on my ass, and discovered I’d forgotten the curl the back of my hair five minutes before she called me in.

It reminded me of the time Andie went for her interview in that devil-slash-Prada movie. Or Ugly Betty. All those tall, beautiful, perfect people, and then, there’s you.