Painless (38 page)

Of course, when you handed the note to the teller, they also stepped on the floor alarm button and the cops showed up, but I was fast on my feet. I could be gone before the SWAT team arrived and guns started going off.
 

Besides, this was San Diego. Did they even have SWAT teams in San Diego? The security guard at this bank was an old guy. I’m pretty sure he had a banana in his holster. I would be fine.

And I was only going to ask for $10,000 to cover my tuition. Not a penny more. I liked to think of it like a scholarship, because no one expected you to pay scholarships back.

The person in front of me was a bulbous man in a sloppy windbreaker and saggy slacks. He kept clearing his throat every five seconds. I think he had a hairball. I was waiting for him to squat down on the marble floor, head hanging between his shoulder blades, and hack it up like a cat, but he never did. He just kept hacking.

Eventually, the teller called Hairball up to the counter. He pulled out a stack of cash, which he counted out in front of the teller, coughing after every fifth bill he laid down like clockwork. I think he was making a cash deposit. I didn’t understand why he was counting it. That was the bank’s job. But he insisted. It took forever. He was hacking so often, I was getting the urge to clear my own throat. Were there toxic spores in the air? Whatever Hairball had, it was catching.

I was getting more and more nervous by the second because I was next. For a minute, I considered leaving, but didn’t. I had to go through with this. As soon as Hairball was gone, I was asking for that ten grand.
 

About ten hours and a million hacks later, Hairball was finished. I stepped up to the teller window and opened my mouth to speak.

What came out was a hack. Stupid Hairball. It really was catching. I cleared my throat several times. When I finished, the teller was looking at me like I had tuberculosis. I probably did. Thanks, Hairball Hackmaster.

“Ahem,” I hacked a final time. I wrung my hands together. I was going to do this. I needed ten grand. My heart was pounding. It was time to ask for my money.

“Can I help you?” the teller asked like she was about to call the Center for Disease Control so she could have me quarantined.

My throat was tickling again, but I willed it to relax. “Yes,” I said hoarsely, “I need to speak to someone about getting a loan?”

“Certainly,” the teller fake smiled dryly. “I’ll have one of our loan officers speak with you. If you could take a seat over there,” she pointed to the far corner of the bank, “someone will be out to talk to you shortly.” She couldn’t wait to get me out of her breathing space.

“Thanks,” I said and sat down in one of the chairs. My throat was still tickling, but I refused to start hacking again while I waited.

It was ten in the morning, and I’d decided to cut classes today and try to solve my money problems. I mean, what was the point in studying if I couldn’t pay my tuition bill when it came due?

Sadly, I hadn’t been able to find a single job online, and the scholarships weren’t looking any more promising. I still hadn’t told Christos about losing my museum job. It had been two weeks already, but the last thing I wanted to do was bother him with my money problems. With all of the paintings he needed to finish for his next gallery show weighing down on him, he had more than enough stress already, and it was eating away at him. His continued drinking was proof.

When the loan officer finally called me into his cubicle, I was bummed to discover I needed a cosigner for a $10,000 loan.

Great.

Where was I going to find a cosigner? My parents? Ha! That was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. Christos? I couldn’t ask him. It was one thing to live in his house rent free, another to make him liable for a huge chunk of change. I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t ask my friends. They didn’t have any money to spare.

Maybe I needed to head to Las Vegas on the weekend and pour some money into the slot machines? Oh, wait. I didn’t have any money to blow on gambling.

Wasn’t there some kind of college hooker organization that represented young college women like myself, and only paired you with hot guys? Nah, I think I read that in a romance novel somewhere. It couldn’t possibly be real. Besides, I had a boyfriend.

I was out of options.

Sane ones, anyway.

I sat in my car in the parking lot outside the bank and cried while I leaned my head against the steering wheel. My hair draped around my face and stuck to my wet cheeks. When I was out of tears, I drove to UTC, the shopping center just east of SDU. I walked from store to store, asking about jobs, just like I’d done with Romeo a few months ago.

No one was hiring.

Not even Hot Dog On A Stick. I considered waiting around until one of the hot dog girls took a break so I could knock her out and steal her multi-colored uniform. I was so desperate, I would gladly wear one of their clown outfits and re-subject myself to smelling like hot dogs if it meant I had some money coming in.

Since UTC was a bust, I drove to Mission Valley and hit up the Fashion Valley Mall, Hazard Center, and the Westfield. I filled out several applications and left them behind with promises from the managers they’d give me a call if anything opened up.

When I went home that night, I was exhausted. I had job searched for nine hours straight. My feet were killing me.

I checked the studio for Christos but he wasn’t there. I trudged upstairs and found him passed out in our bedroom. He reeked of booze. He was getting sloshed every day now.

When in Rome.

I was so tired and hungry and frustrated and disheartened from my failed job search today that I decided to get sloshed myself.

I drove to the grocery store under the cover of darkness and bought an armload of ice cream. When I got back to the house, it didn’t take long for me to stuff myself so full of ice cream that I was sloshing when I walked into one of the downstairs bathrooms. I unloaded my freshly consumed ice cream in private and prepared for round two. I walked back to the freezer and pulled out another pint.

Mmmm, ice cream.

Gag.

I ate two more pints before I’d had enough and went to bed.

===

A few days later, between Sociology 3 and American History 3, I spent several hours studying in the Main Library. When it was time to head to my history lecture, I closed my laptop and headed for the stairwell door.

There was a huge staircase that spiraled around the square cement tower that supported the fourth through seventh floors of the Main Library. From the outside, the Main Library resembled a squat cement squared-off oak tree with a narrow base that supported the four floors on top.

Going down the stairs inside the three-story base always reminded me of descending into a giant crypt, like in the pyramids, but without cool hieroglyphics on the walls. It was gray and dreary.
 

Too bad I wasn’t going to find any gold sarcophagi at the bottom of the stairs, or whatever other treasures grave robbers always found when they broke into pyramids. Oh well.
 

At least it was exercise.

When I walked out of the stairwell next to the elevators, I passed through a corridor that had glass cases on both sides. The cases contained an ever-changing collection of museum style exhibits of all kinds of things: old antique books, ceramics, folk art objects, or sometimes actual art. Today, I noticed that there was a new display in several of the cases.

To my surprise, when I read one of the placards, I discovered it was original art from the Dennis the Menace comic strip.

I stopped to look at the art more closely. I had only ever seen Dennis the Menace art in the pulpy newsprint paper my dad looked at every morning. Up close, the original inked art was magnificent. The lines were so precise and crisp, yet stylized and very geometrical. I would never have made an observation like this before I’d started studying drawing so intensely six months ago. I used to just think of Dennis the Menace as a cartoon with cute drawings. Now I had something vaguely profound to say. I was so proud of myself.

Maybe I
had
found treasure at the bottom of that library staircase.

“Hank Ketcham is amazing, isn’t he?” Justin Tomlinson asked.

“Oh!” I gasped. I’d been so engrossed in the art, I hadn’t noticed him walk up. “Hey, Justin.”

Justin wore a sporty lightweight leather jacket over a V-neck print tee, and skinny jeans. He looked like he was ready to walk up to the podium at the Grammys and accept an award for best male vocalist.

“The library just got the art in this week. I’ve been dying to see it in person,” he said.

Art? What art? I was busy admiring Justin’s impeccable fashion sense. He was stylish and hip without over doing it. I bet he had his own personal dresser and style consultant. His hair was carefully mussed in a sexy way that looked easy and relaxed but probably took an hour to arrange.
 

One look at Justin and my profound art observations had flown right out the window.

“What do you think of it?” Justin smiled.

His hair? It was amazing. His smile? Even better. “Uh…”

Justin frowned, “The art? What do you think of the art?”

“Oh! The art! Yes! The art is amazing!” I think it was common knowledge that guilty people ended every sentence with an exclamation point. Not that I was guilty. I wasn’t guilty of anything. So what if Justin was adorable?

Justin slowly nodded with an odd look on his face. I think he didn’t know what to say because he was trying to decide whether or not I was clinically insane.

I wasn’t sure what to say either, so I nodded back at him. Nod, nod, nod. I could go on nodding all day like a Bobblehead doll if I had too. Nod! Nod! Nod! Big smile! Lots of teeth! So not guilty of finding Justin adorable! NOD! NOD! NOD!

“Why do I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of a Dennis the Menace comic strip?” Justin asked.

Because we were? Except in this case, it was Denise the Menace, and I was Denise.

I shook my head, trying to get a hold of myself. That just made the bobbling worse. Hold still! I grinned so wide my cheeks hurt. I had a moment to realize that although I had an amazing boyfriend, some men had cuteness powers granted by the devil. It wasn’t my fault Justin was dazzling me. Any woman who took one look at him would go Bobblehead the second they saw him.

“So, uh,” Justin stammered, sounding uncomfortable, “did you do any more wombat sketches?”

What was a wombat again?

Okay, I’d had enough of my brainlessness. I bit the inside of my cheek, shocking myself out of my boy crazy stupor.
 

Wincing, because now the inside of my cheek really hurt, I said, “I was going to ask you, did you guys vote yet?” It had been a few weeks since I’d given him all my designs for Potty the Pot Smoking Wombat.

“Not yet. Some of the other artists are still working on ideas.”

“That’s good,” I nodded. Nod, nod, nod.

STOP NODDING!!

My cheek hurt too much to bite again, and I wasn’t going to bite the other side, so I sighed, rolled my eyes, and said, “I wanted to submit a few more before the vote.”

“Do you have them now?” he asked.

“Uh, no. I’ve been sort of, ahh…busy lately?” Guilty people also ended their sentences with question marks. Or was it broke people whose parents were pricks? I forgot. One or the other.

“Well, get any new drawings in to me as soon as you can.”

Yeah, I was into him. NO I WASN’T!!

Justin continued, unaware that I was schizophrenic, “I’ll probably take a vote at the end of the week.”

“Okay,” I smiled, doing my best not to bat my eyelashes. It was Justin’s sexy devil powers that made me do it.

“By the way, have you and Romeo come up with any ideas for comic strips yet? We’re already putting together the next issue for print. The deadline for submissions is right around the corner.”

“We have a few, but we’ve both been pretty busy. Romeo always has theater major stuff taking up his time.”

“Well, even if you guys don’t make the deadline, Romeo still seemed like a good guy. Lots of funny ideas. You should totally bring him to the next staff meeting.”

“Okay,” I nodded. I meant, tilted my head to indicate agreement without nodding, nodding, nodding.
 

STOP!!

“Anyway,” Justin said, “I’ve gotta run to class. Email me any new material if you come up with something?”

“Okay.”

Before walking off, he flashed a grin and said, “Laters!”

Wait, he had ended his sentence with an exclamation point! And the one before that with a question mark! Did that mean he was feeling guilty? Or was it just me feeling guilty? Well, ‘Laters!’ was only one word and didn’t count as a sentence, right? Did Justin like me? Or did it mean I was crazy?! Maybe both?!?

Oh, um, hmm. That might complicate things for me. Him liking me. And me being crazy.

GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF.

Note the absence of guilty exclamation points. That was my sane voice telling my cray cray ones to shut up.

Sigh.

I needed a lobotomy.

I walked outside into the fresh air hoping that would help clear my head and that Justin was long gone so he wouldn’t think I was stalking him.

I wasn’t stalking him! Was I?

I promise I wasn’t!?!

Where was that lobotomy? I heard you could use an ice pick through the eye socket and it worked fine.

Groanballs.

Anyway, I really hoped Justin wasn’t being nice to me just because he was interested in me. He wasn’t a jerk like Hunter Snakeley, but he was the editor of The Wombat. I didn’t want him fudging the vote in favor of my wombat drawings just because he thought it might make me like him. And I didn’t want him fudging the vote against me if he thought I didn’t like him. I wanted to win fair and square.

Wait, I just remembered Justin had been the one who approached me in the first place last quarter. He’d been drawing stalking me for who knew how long. You didn’t stalk someone you weren’t interested in, did you?
 

Groan!

Why was my life so complicated?!?