“I live here,” I answered slowly and carefully. I’d never had a conversation with any of my neighbors, but if forced to choose, this wouldn’t have been my first choice of neighbor to talk to. The only reason that I knew this was the garlic-cabbage neighbor was that the scent doubled now that his door was open with his bald head sticking out of it.
“But they arrested you,” he barked out, the bald head and his face infused with red, like he was one grunt away from a heart attack.
“They did, but I’m out,” I told him, not sure why I was saying anything at all to this blowhard.
“The management assured me that they had a strict no convict rule,” he growled, and light bulbs went off in my head.
“You turned me in?” I accused him, my tone mild. At least half of me wanted to thank him for it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” his voice rose, and he eased just a bit more of his bulk out his door. “And if you accuse me of anything again, I’m going to file a restraining order against you.”
“What did I ever do to you?” I asked, more curious than mad.
“All that mad stomping up and down those stairs at all hours is what you did,” he blustered, hands on hips around a stained white T-shirt that stretched over his girth. “Always your nose in your phone. If you had looked up even once, you could have seen me glaring out my window at you every time you go rattling the whole building with your rude stomping madness! And now it’s back!”
“You turned me in for social ineptitude because I stomped up and down the stairs?” I gave him a baffled look. I looked down at the stairs. I hadn’t thought about it. I just felt like I was walking. I took a step and the stairway rattled. It was just a step.
“Stop it!” he yelled at me, shaking one finger.
“I didn’t do anything,” I argued, still calm.
“The apartment complex said they couldn’t stop you from stomping up and down the stairs, but that if I had a complaint about the noise, I should contact the police,” he fussed. “Do you even know how loud you are?”
“Have you heard yourself walk up and down the stairs?” I tried, not trying to fight but truly curious. I was pretty sure it was the stairs themselves, and not my stomping that caused all the noise.
“Of course not,” he insisted. “I haven’t been out since they passed the stupid social laws. Do you know how many crazy people are out there?”
Out there? I thought, but I was kind enough not to say it.
“And no one else thumps as loud as you think I do?” I asked, still trying to find the logic.
“No one else is on the second floor,” he scoffed at me.
I scanned a look from one end of the balcony to the other. Come to think on it, I hadn’t seen another tenant in a while. I hadn’t paid attention.
“I’ve lived here for more than five years and there hasn’t been another person on the balcony since that woman who worked the night shift as a janitor,” he crossed him arms and looked way too much like a cartoon dog to me at the moment. “She and her obnoxious kids moved out just weeks after moving in, thank God!”
“Probably the smell,” I muttered. “I still don’t think it’s possible to go up and down these stairs without making a lot of noise.” Then I thought of my garbage. “How do you get your garbage out if you don’t go up and down the stairs?”
“I have a pulley system from my back window, if you must know,” he turned his nose up at me like I was stupid.
“You’re stuck with me for now, buddy,” I shook my head at him, refusing to alter my steps on the stair even as he scowled at me the whole way. This was different Janet. Besides, how bad could it be to be tossed back into the prison system if he called them again? Could that happen?
I watched him slam his door and had to grab the railing to keep the action from shaking me right off the balcony. Then I laughed and walked back into my apartment. Here I’d been wondering how to get my friends back and all I’d had to do was take out my trash. I checked my phone for the time and then rang up my new driver-buddy. I was getting out of here before garlic-cabbage had me rearrested. There had to be a solution out here that could get me back in there in a better way than getting rearrested.
I waited for the familiar EV car to drive up before daring to clatter back down the stairs with a duffle in hand. I’d packed up what I wanted to keep, just in case I didn’t have to come back. If I woke up to the Mickey Mouse Courthouse again, I think I’d have to get out just to burn down garlic-cabbage’s apartment. I’d looked up the laws and tried to issue a complaint right back at cabbage-head, but there were no-retaliation laws that protected him from it. As long as he shot first, he won.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Overnight trip on the menu?” Winning-smile winked at me. The duffle was pretty small, but it almost didn’t fit in the tiny car.
“Just living on hope, man,” I shook my head at him and buckled my seatbelt around the duffle.
“That’s one way, I suppose,” Winning-smile almost got me to learn his name by saying quietly. Then he smiled again, and it reminded me of my cowboy buddy. Winning-smile was enough since I probably wouldn’t see him again after this ride.
“I’m looking for a place near our meeting place where I can grab a bite to eat and wait out the time until the meeting without breaking some vagrancy law,” I smiled back at winning-smile to see if I could match his wattage. If my stats were all in my head, maybe I had some charm.
“You got more than the five bucks you had an hour ago?” he bantered back, his smile slipping just a tad. I wasn’t sure if that meant I’d succeeded at that smile or not.
“A little,” I answered, waving my phone. “Since I’m not paying next month’s rent anytime soon, I’ve got a last paycheck to spend.”
“So cheap, but not homeless shelter yet,” he joked, and I laughed, thinking how different conversations with real people were.
“That sounds about right,” I agreed, and he puttered away from the curb of my old apartment building. With any luck, I wouldn’t be back. Ever. I tried to believe that I still had that negotiating skill somewhere in the back of my mind because I was about to head out into the shark tank of show business.
----------------------------------------
“Ms. Moseley,” and low and behold, it was Mr. Slick.
“Why am I left with the feeling that I should have known it would be you,” I answered, taking his real hand, and shaking it like a normal person instead of staring at him from across the room. At least this time I’d worn shoes.
“Mr. Comtolle,” he reminded me. “You can call me Mike if you’d like.”
“Mike,” I nodded, and told my libido to shut up.
“Moving?” he asked, eyeing my duffle.
“That might depend on how charming you or one of your competitors is today,” I bantered and maybe I did have skills. Could I have had them all along?
“Then I’m going to have to be extra charming,” he chuckled, his black bangs falling over blue eyes in a way that made me wish I’d gone shopping with Glenda before this meeting instead of dawdling over a cup of coffee across the street. “Ms. Wallins, would you mind taking Ms. Moseley’s bag until we finish our meeting?”
“Not at all Mr. Comtolle,” she smiled, and I could tell she would never have trouble with social ineptitude.
Mike Comtolle escorted me into a small meeting room where the small talk of several people came to a halt at our entrance. Two women and one other man sat at the table, all smartly dressed in the latest lawyer fashion. My sneakers scrubbed the floor like I was the janitor as Mike led me to the head of the table and sat me down. They rattled off names, but I’d be lucky to remember Mike Comtolle and that was only because I’d already immaturely imagined our names merging. Janet Comtolle. It wasn’t awful. I wasn’t serious, but it was a way to force myself to remember a name.
“Water or coffee?” Mike asked me, and I was struck by the image of Mr. Slick waiting on Ms. Scruffy.
“I just came from the café across the street,” I tried for a casual answer, but flubbed it by adding, “if I drink much more, I’ll need to remember how to use a bathroom.”
They were pretty cool about it. They just chuckled a bit. I would have gotten a one-liner bonus for it, but that was more proof that I wasn’t in a VR dream. Mike poured some water for me and slid a chocolate Danish near my left hand. It looked flaky and I wasn’t in VR. If I ate that, I’d look ridiculous with flakes of chocolate and stuff everywhere.
“Thanks,” I smiled at him, trying for casually amused.
“Just to get to the point, Ms. Mosely,” the woman with a perfect real-world smile that had used expensive whitening agents said to me to break the tension. “We are interested in being your agents. We are aware that you haven’t wanted an agent thus far, but we’d like a chance to change your mind.”
“I thought you were a parole officer,” I accused Mike, lacing my fingers over my stomach and leaning back.
“You were rather adamantly against them, so I decided to get creative,” his mouth twitched with a smirk that he hid easily behind a nice smile.
“We didn’t mean that we wanted to trick you,” said the other woman with perfect hair scooped up in a delicate bun held in place by fancy chopstick looking things. “Mike has made it clear that you are far too smart to fall for that sort of trickery. We just want to make sure you saw a good offer before you were deluged with a bunch of mediocre ones.”
“We offered the prison system a hefty finder’s fee for a chance to offer you a parole work-release program,” smiley-woman said. They were a good team, but they reminded me that Tami and Jean were a better one.
“Mike shot me a lowball offer where I would end up a slave to the system,” I accused, not liking the whitewashing act.
“I’m sorry for that, really,” Mike sounded sincere. “The prison system had some nasty conditions for an early release, and I was trying to work them into our package. I can see where it looked like a raw deal. We’d have negotiated you out of it as soon as your program was making money, but without the prison system getting a cut of anything, Dr. Phendal was adamant that you be subject to some nasty side-effects.”
“The halfway house?” I prodded, ticking off a finger.
“It would only have been for the first month, then we could buy out,” he shrugged.
“The prison pods?” I went on, ticking off another finger.
“We’d have updated them,” Perfect-smile nodded. “We’re pretty good at buying off the prison system, but it seems like you did a better job of screwing them than they normally do screwing your fellow inmates. We’re impressed.”
“Not to be rude, but you being impressed doesn’t pay my rent or get me my crew back,” I tried to sound reasonable, but was there a reasonable way to say that?
“Actually, young lady, it does,” the lone other man spoke up, and if Mike was charming, this man was scary, like in a he owns half of Hollywood way.