He hasn’t replied by the time I get to the airport, so I call him. His voicemail box is full. I turn my phone to airplane mode.
***
I get to New York and the cab gets T-boned at the intersection six blocks from my brother’s building. I’m not hurt, but the driver is disoriented and gets taken away by ambulance. After sitting there for fucking ever giving a report to the cops, I decide to leg-it to the condo.
It starts fucking raining.
When I get to the doorway of the building, half drenched, a guy steps out of the shadows and for a second I’m ready to swing a fist, thinking I’m about to be jumped. I got jumped once when I was here as a teenager and that fucker even stole my sneakers.
This time it’s a gangly junkie with sores on his face. The guy makes a funny noise that I don’t soon enough realize is him gagging before he leans forward and heaves hard, puking on the concrete and spraying vomit on my shoe and the side of my suitcase.
Fuck sakes.
This swanky building has a security desk, but the desk is empty. It’s late evening but I would’ve figured there’d be someone here around the clock.
By the time I get upstairs, I’m ready to chew broken glass. I just want a hot shower and bed, but then I hear the music from the hallway as I put the key in. What the fuck? Music playing in Aiden’s supposedly empty condo?
I open the door and there are about thirty people in my brother’s apartment with Rage Against the Machine blasting from the stereo.
I’m standing in the doorway with my laptop bag slung over my soggy self cross-body, with my dirty suitcase and puked-on shoes and take in the scene ahead of me.
And then my shoulder is bumped as someone pushes their way in.
The guy who pushes his way in is the guy that just puked on my shit. And my eyes take in a guy in a security guard costume smoking a huge bong on the couch, a girl dressed like Harley Quinn spilling a drink on the rug while she dances, and another guy off to the side near the fridge with a snake wrapped around his neck.
The volcano that’s been brewing inside me?
It erupts.
5
Jada
I’m on my way back from a horrific experience assisting a magician at a birthday party. I’ve never been a magician’s assistant before and don’t expect after tonight I’d ever do so again.
What a nightmare.
I took the gig because it paid two hundred dollars for a Sunday and this is two hundred dollars that I need. Desperately.
I got the gig through a legit employment agency, the one that I used when I got the job for Aiden Carmichael and they rush-couriered me a uniform. That uniform got my Spidey senses tingling, but I proceeded.
Unfortunately.
At least it’s over and I’ll have two hundred dollars tomorrow.
I put on the trashy outfit and off I went… to a banquet room in a family restaurant an hour-long commute on public transit away. I had put track pants on to cover the offensive-looking clothing, but those track pants went missing when I went to leave so I came home like this.
I figured as a magician’s assistant, I’d be at a wholesome kids’ party. Nope. It was a fiftieth birthday party for a guy with fifty to seventy-five or so of his closest friends, and two thirds were male.
And… it was a disaster.
One of the party guests even got handsy, resulting in the magician I was assisting getting extra obnoxious, not to even defend me, just putting in digs about society and misogyny and being snide about the #MeToo movement as he casually referred to the way my butt cheeks wanted to peek out of the booty shorts I had on.
The outfit resembles something Columbia, the short-haired redhead in the top hat from The Rocky Horror Picture Show would wear. Short and glittery black booty shorts on top of black fishnets, a black and silver tuxedo shirt with cleavage, fingerless long black cocktail gloves, a black bow tie and I’ve got on lots of makeup on my face as per the directions. My dirty-blonde hair is up in a bun at the back of my head and there’s a smallish top hat fascinator hat pinned to my hair. Add that my lipstick is black and I was told to go heavy on the black eyeshadow as well as paint my fingernails black and I look like a nightmare.
The magician was a similarly dressed clown with white clown makeup and black lips, a black clown nose, black fingernails, too - and he wore a very Victorian tuxedo.
The whole thing was strange.
Half the people couldn’t be bothered to watch his magic show and that ticked him off, making him get louder and agitated.