Soft Shock (2 page)

Chapter Three

Monday
afternoon, Marci was ready to be in a bad mood. Her
pain
killers
were wearing off, and it had been one hell of a day. She kicked
open the door of her apartment while balancing her books and a greasy bag
containing her burger and fries in her arms. Yeah it’d been a burger-and-fries kind
of day. She couldn’t wait to add some bacon to these cheese fries and chow
down. While still juggling everything in her arms, she misjudged the distance
to the couch. She stubbed her toe on the edge of it, dropped her books and
early dinner—or midafternoon snack, she hadn’t decided which
yet—onto it, and swore.

“Hello to you,
too, Sunshine,” Veronica, who went by Ronnie, said from the desk on which her
computer sat in the far corner of the living room. Ronnie insisted that she
needed a desktop.

Marci grumbled
a reply with a sneer pulling at the corner of her lips while grabbing up her
greasy brown paper bag and heading for the kitchen.

Ronnie started
in on a rant about the hot water heater still being busted and how the landlord
hadn’t returned any of her calls. Then she brought up Tyler and how he said he
wasn’t coming home until Marci apologized. Tyler. That boy was always
self-generating drama of one type or another. She didn’t even know what she’d
done this time. She told Ronnie as much.

“He said you
weren’t there for him when you needed him.”

“If he’s
talking about last weekend, first of all, he didn’t need me. He had a room full
of people there just for him. Second of all, I was there until nearly the end
of the night. The word ‘friend’ does not mean twenty-four hour lap dog.”

“You ran off
with some guy you’d just met at his birthday party.”

“And?” Marci
stopped in the middle of the small kitchen; she could easily see Ronnie from
where she stood. The apartment was a three-bedroom loft, which meant plenty of
open space. “I bought him a birthday drink or three. I was there for most of
it. And that guy was hot. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have hit that.”

Ronnie
shrugged. She flipped her long, dark brown hair over her shoulder. She was
spilling out of her navy blue V-neck T-shirt, which was nothing new.

Marci walked
over to the stainless steel fridge, ready to grab her bacon. She’d asked them
to hold the bacon at the restaurant because she only wanted
her
bacon. She was very particular about
her bacon. She had some pre-cooked, and she couldn’t wait to rip it up and
sprinkle it over the cheese fries, maybe add some to the burger. Except—something
was wrong. Slamming the door of the fridge closed, she whirled around to face
Ronnie. “Who ate my bacon?”

Ronnie hunched
over her keyboard and stared intently at the computer screen as if she was
learning the secret of the true meaning of life from it. “What bacon? I don’t
even eat bacon.”

“Well, somebody
ate it, and it wasn’t me.” Marci’s stomach gurgled sadly at that thought.

“I don’t know
who ate your bacon, okay?”

“Are you sure
about that? Because all I
know,
is when I left this
morning, I had bacon. Now I have no bacon. So, while I was gone today, somebody
who was not me must have eaten my bacon.”

Ronnie finally
looked up from the computer screen. “Well, maybe…Jeremy ate it. But I told him
not to eat it all.”

“Jeremy. Your
worthless, freeloading friend I said I don’t want touching my stuff anymore
when he comes over Jeremy? That Jeremy at my bacon?”

“I’m sorry,
okay? He was hungry, hadn’t eaten all day. He said he was
gonna
make a sandwich. I didn’t watch everything he took out of the fridge. I guess
he ate it. I’ll buy you some more bacon, okay?” Ronnie’s Jersey accent was
coming out the way it often did when she was agitated. “What’s the big deal?
There’s other stuff to eat in there.”

“Forget the
bacon. That’s not the point.”

“Chill, Marci.
What
is
the point?”

“I almost died
this morning. This was after I got stuck in the line at Java Time and had to
listen to this guy complain for five minutes about the guy in front of him
taking too long to order his coffee. Five minutes. Do you know how really and
truly long five minutes can be?”

“Sure. Five
minutes trying to run on the treadmill? Forget about it.”

“The guy who
was in line in front of him was acting like he’d never been to a coffeehouse
before. Give me this
one,
no give me that, what’s in
the other one? Are you sure there’s no dairy in the soy latte because I’m
lactose intolerant.
And on.
And on.
Then the guy behind him, the one who was in front of me, slowed the line down
even more by going on about the good old days and customer service and I don’t
know what else. I was about to have an aneurysm because I just knew I was going
to go from being early to class and doing a little last-minute prep for my
presentation to being late and having to use the first five minutes of my
forty-five to set up the friggin’ power point. I finally made it out of the
coffeehouse and was on my way to class when this idiot—cute idiot, but
still a dern fool riding his bike on the sidewalk, and you know how I hate that—reamed
into me and spilled my own coffee all over me. Then he insisted on taking me to
student health and making sure I was okay.”

“What a
monster,” Ronnie deadpanned.

“Can I finish
please?”

“Go right
ahead.” Ronnie gestured in front of her to indicate that the way was clear for
Marci to finish her story.

“Thank you.
Then?
I got reamed out by my professor
. She tells me I
can’t make up my presentation. And I don’t even get in the door good, and here
you come. Jeremy ate your bacon, Marci. The hot water heater is still busted,
Marci. Don’t you care about Tyler at all, Marci? Can I please get five minutes
before you rip into me? Five minutes?”

“I’m
gonna
let all that go because sounds like you had a rough
day,” Ronnie said. “But don’t go ripping my head off, girl. And I’ll get you
some bacon. I’m going grocery shopping tomorrow.”

Marci sank into
the couch, closed her eyes, and put a hand over them. “I’m tired and I’m angry,
and I’m just going to stop talking now.”

“Good idea.”

Marci heard
footsteps. A moment later, she heard the microwave going and
stomach-rumbling
smells of burger and grease filled the air after that. When the ding signifying
the microwave was done sounded, she heard the door open and close.
Then more footsteps.

“Here. Eat.
Should make you less cranky.”

Marci looked up
and saw Ronnie holding a plate with her burgers and fries on it. She had a
glass of pineapple juice in the other hand. Marci grinned and took the plate
and glass from her.

“I don’t
deserve you,” Marci said before biting into the huge, juicy, savory burger
she’d been dreaming about attacking since she bought it on her way home
earlier.

“I know,”
Ronnie said.

“I’ll call the
landlord tonight. I’m in the mood to deal with him now, believe me.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Tyler started
this,” Marci said in between bites of her burger. Without ever letting go of
the burger, she reached for her bag, which contained her painkillers, with her
free hand.

“I gotta be
honest here. I’m done being the go-between for you two on this.”

Marci popped a
pain pill and chased it with pineapple juice. After swallowing, she said, “Fair
enough.”

#

Saturday
morning, Marci woke to a dull ache in her chest—much better than
yesterday. She soon discovered she wasn’t going to have the convalescing luxury
of sleeping in, though. She pulled the covers over her head once she discovered
that the dirty looks she was giving Ronnie were having very little effect on
her.

“Ronnie, I love
you, but if you don’t pull those curtains closed, I’m going to have to kill
you.”

“That’s gonna
be hard to do since you seem glued to that bed.” Ronnie sat on the corner of
the bed. She was dressed plainly in jeans and a white T-shirt. Her dark hair
hung wet over her shoulders. No makeup. Ronnie didn’t do early mornings much
better than Marci did. “I just got out of a cold shower. Don’t think I’m
jumping for joy over here.”

“New hot water
heater has been ordered and should be in by Monday. Landlord promised.”

“Let’s hope.
Anyway, we’re volunteering today with the Hope Center this morning. You said
not to let you oversleep, right? We said we’d be there by seven-thirty.”

The Hope Center
owned a thrift store downtown that used volunteers only to run the cash registers
and stock the shelves. The Hope Center ran strictly on donations, volunteers,
and the sales they received from the store’s merchandise. They used the funds
they raised to provide temporary food and shelter to people who had nowhere
else to go while they developed job skills and tried to improve their lives.

Marci groaned.
“But it’s so early.”

“Don’t care.
Get up,” Ronnie said. “I’ll toast us some bagels while you’re getting ready.
And we can grab coffee from Java Time on our way.”

“Okay.” Marci
sat up slowly, gingerly in bed. “I guess it’s a deal.”

“Better be.”

About an hour
later, Marci found herself standing in the back room of the Hope Center Thrift
Store holding a plastic cup of coffee—iced coffee. Even though it was a
crisp, cool early October morning, she wasn’t able to bring herself to drink
hot coffee so soon after her little incident. She’d also made sure they went to
the Java Time close to the apartment and farther away from campus, knowing now
that Owen worked at the other one. She definitely wanted to avoid an awkward
run-in with him if at all possible.

A couple of
volunteers wearing bright blue Hope Center polo shirts and who were just a
little too awake and cheerful for 7:30AM were going over the basics with them.
They wanted Ronnie, who’d volunteered there before, to help train a group of
new recruits—five women from a nearby battered women’s shelter who had recently
moved into the Hope Center dorms and would be working shifts in the thrift
store soon.

Marci was on
in-kind donations. In-kind donations were far more prevalent than monetary
donations for the Hope Center. Besides,
asking for and collecting
monetary donations was handled mostly by the Hope Center’s full-time employees
.
The exceptions were the two phone-a-thons held in the fall and spring each year
that required many volunteers to call community members and field calls from
those interested in giving.

That Saturday,
Marci was taking in new donations of clothes and furniture and whatever else
people brought in, sorting and inventorying donations, and getting them ready
to go out front for sale.

“Now where’s
Tyler?” One of the overly chipper volunteers looked down at her clipboard.

As if on cue,
Tyler straggled in with a hoodie pulled over his head and large sunglasses covering
most of his face. He held up his hand and mumbled something that sounded like,
“I’m here.” His blond hair fell over the top of his sunglasses. His bangs had
grown long enough to hang in his eyes now, and that was his new look
apparently. He claimed he’d had better luck at auditions since growing his hair
out. Black skinny jeans clung to his narrow hips. That boy was impossibly
skinny. Red boots covered the lower part of the tapered legs of his jeans. The
new red leather boots he’d bought himself for his birthday. Like Marci, he clung
to a cup of coffee. Except his was hot coffee in a paper cup.

“What happened
to you?” Marci asked.

Ignoring her,
he asked one of the blue polo-shirted volunteers, “So where do you want me?”

Curly
blonde-haired, overly enthusiastic about life, woman-with-the-clipboard chirped,
“You can help Marci out back here.”

Tyler’s face
moved in Marci’s direction, but most of his expression remained hidden from her
thanks to his large sunglasses. The disgruntled set of his mouth gave her a
good idea of how he was feeling, though.

“You two be
nice to each other,” Ronnie said as she walked past them.

Marci and Tyler
both looked at her without saying anything. After Ronnie and the polo-shirted
volunteers went to the manager’s office down the hall that doubled as the
training location, Marci got Tyler up to speed on what they were doing with the
donations.

Tyler didn’t
say anything the whole time she talked. In fact, she wasn’t even sure he was
looking at her with those glasses on.

“Can you take
the glasses off, please? You’re not a movie star yet.”

She could see
his jawbone working the way it did when he was annoyed. “Oh. So you’re not done
being shitty to me. That’s good to know.”

“Is this really
all because I left your party early? Like, maybe an hour early? After being
there all night?”

“You knew that
guy what, 30 minutes? An hour?”

“Longer than
that.”

“The point is,
you met him that night, and you abandoned me for him.”

“I did
not
abandon you. And what about all the
times I’ve let you borrow my car for auditions in New York? Or driven up to New
York to get you and bring you home because you got drunk, passed out, and missed
your bus or train home on Sunday and didn’t have money for another ticket? And
all the bad breakups I’ve seen you through?”

“You haven’t
been there much for me lately.”

“I haven’t been
there much for anybody lately. School is kind of killing me this semester.”
And it just got worse
. “But you know I
love you. I care about you.”