left in the kitchen cupboard was old and stale, and my wonky coffeemaker from college didn't do it any justice on top of that. If I hadn't needed the caffeine so badly, I probably would have just dumped the pot down the drain after the first miserable sip.
There were few things that made me madder in this world than shitty coffee.
On top of that, it rained the whole way to the phone store. As soon as I got inside, it stopped immediately. I hadn't heard from Jack or anyone else, and with my broken phone, dialing numbers was a formidable task, nearly impossible. I had tried to call the cell phone store, but after ten minutes of mistyped digits, I gave up.
Although it was tough, I regained my composure and tried to relax. "Is there anything else I can do about this?"
The employee nervously eyed the line of customers that was forming behind me. "At this point ma'am, not really. You could get a cheaper phone or get a temporary prepaid phone from somewhere."
Ugh. I really liked this phone, the primary reason why I got it. Timothy had tried to convince me to order one of those fancy protective cases—he was always obsessed with new gadgets; I think he was more excited about them than he was about me—but I had forgotten to follow through with the plan. His bitching about how expensive they were in the retail phone stores had definitely contributed to my lack of action. Ordering stuff online was easy but also easy to forget to do.
I snatched up my phone and thanked the employee for his time, tossing in an almost inaudible I'm sorry for my behavior at the end. He seemed like he was probably used to people acting like I did.
I checked at a couple of other places, pricing out prepaid phones because I most likely wasn't going to be able to find a job if I couldn't type any numbers into my phone. The problem with getting a prepaid phone was that my contacts wouldn't transfer over, which would mean hours of trial and error as I tried to manually decipher the mangled digits on the cracked screen.
Time was definitely something that I had—but that still seemed like a waste of it.
After arriving back at the apartment, I sat down on my bed and started pulling up job listings on my computer, feeling more and more helpless the more I clicked. I really hated starting over, especially since I had been in such a great position. Starting over after you had just started over was tremendously miserable.
I would have to figure out the new subway schedule and plan my days differently. I would have a new boss and co-workers. I would have to find a new nearby coffee shop.
I didn't want any of that right now. Why couldn't things go back to how they were?
I liked how things had been before I got into this mess. Yeah, I felt like kind of baby for whining about this—everyone changed jobs now and then; it wasn't that big of a deal—but I couldn't control how I felt in my compromised state.
My phone buzzed once, just a text. I figured I'd barely be able to read it, but I decided to check anyway. It was from Jesse:
Him: Rent is due tomorrow. Don't forget!
Yeah, I wished that I hadn't even picked up the phone to check it, because now, I really wanted to smash it into oblivion and take it off life support. How could all of this be happening at once? On Sunday, I was in a dreamland, not concerned about anything at all in the world. Jack had calmed me, assuaged the things that had troubled me.
Now, I was swimming on my own and in the sky above me was a fucking electrical storm. I didn't even have a lifejacket. It was obvious that as soon as my legs stopped moving, I was going to drown—if the bolts of lightning didn't kill me first. I held back my tears of frustration.
The first thing I did—well, first thing after diffusing the smash the phone bomb that almost went off—was log on to my bank's website and check my account balance. After typing in my username and password, the urge to cry crushed my willpower like an elephant stepping on a mouse.
Either the decimal point was in the wrong place, or I was fucked. I knew it was the latter.