Chapter Twenty

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Callana spent the rest of the day helping the Gina, the Nard, and the Von clean up the apartment, re-shelving books, hanging picture frames, spackling the cracks in the walls, and vacuuming up the tiny shards of glass they couldn’t pick up and eat. Apparently, the “landlord” should have done half of the stuff they needed to for free, but he only ever showed up to collect the rent once a month. So, they made a day out of it. Sadly, that day still had a few surprises up its sleeves.

As she sorted her pile of bottles, placing them in the pantry with all the other snacks, she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. Hmm. Slipping it into her hand, she clacked the buttons on the keyboard in just the right way to get to the text menu, where she spotted five unread messages. She must’ve missed the first few.

6:39 a.m.

Ron (Boss): WTF, u don’t FEEL like coming 2 work?

Ron (Boss): You’d better get ur ass in here ASAP

7:30 a.m.

Ron (Boss): Im not kidding, u need to get 2 work NOW

7:43 a.m.

Ron (Boss): Where TF r u?

7:49 a.m.

Ron (Boss): Ur fired if u don’t get ur ass in here in 10 minutes

10:32 a.m.

Ron (Boss): Ur fired

Callana stared at the little plastic rectangle in her hand, baffled. To be fair, she probably should have given him more notice, but now that she thought about it, the news had called the earthquake a “category 6.4,” which sounded pretty significant. A few buildings in the area had actually collapsed, though thankfully they were just the old, abandoned houses a few blocks down that were set for demolition in the next few years. Still, several people had gotten hurt. And he’d fired her right in the aftermath of that?

“Gina?” Callana called, standing up from the pantry and wandering into the Von’s room where she was vacuuming. It was a messy space on the best of days, but it had taken the brunt of the damage from the quake, with an entire meter-and-a-half-wide chunk of plaster slamming down onto the Von’s green comforter. White dust coated all of the Von’s toys and “miniatures,” which he’d spent hours picking up and resorting on the floating shelves around the room.

“What’s up?” the Gina said, flicking off her old, bulky, steel vacuum cleaner. They usually hid that old thing in the hall closet, but it had gotten a lot more use in the past five hours than it had in years.

“I think I’ve been… fired,” Callana muttered.

“What?” the Gina shouted.

“Here,” Callana said, showing her the phone.

As she scanned through the texts, the Gina’s face got darker and darker. “This is just like him,” she said. “By Brovar, I’m gonna deck him in the fucking jaw next time I see him!”

“Deck?” Callana asked.

“Punch him. I’m gonna punch him.”

Callana cocked her head. “Punch?”

“Okay, yeah,” the Gina said. “I’m gonna… probably talk to him really sternly and say that I’m upset. That—that isn’t what ‘punch’ means, obviously, but it’s probably not a good idea to hit my boss.”

The Gina seemed furious, huffing and shaking her head. “I mean,” she continued, “who the fuck does he think he is? Walking around firing people for asking for a day off? I mean, sure, you asked in a very you kind of way, and you didn’t text him back. But hasn’t he ever heard of an emergency before? There’s been a goddamn earthquake! Why is he keeping the restaurant open after an earthquake? A big one, too! And he didn’t even call! You could’ve gotten hurt for all he knew!”

“It is okay,” Callana interjected. “I do not need a job for the money, I can just make my own.” She pulled an old, wrinkled one-gnollen note out of her pocket and duplicated it to demonstrate.

“No, no, Cal, it’s not about the money,” the Gina said, setting the vacuum cleaner’s handle down on the bed and stepping over the long tube that led back to the machine’s bulky, steel body. “It’s about how he treats people. Sure, yeah, you probably should’ve known better to say ‘I’m not coming to work today’ on two hours’ notice at a place with zero backup staff. But then, he’s the one who understaffs the restaurant. He’s the one who took one look at that message and didn’t think, ‘oh, it sounds like something’s wrong, I should ask if she’s okay,’ and he’s the one who kept his restaurant open after a serious earthquake tore down half of downtown! He knows how much you and I make; he should know we don’t have better options! He can’t just be tossing people out on the side of the road for the first day they miss!”

“Gina…”

“I don’t care that you can make money out of thin air. He doesn’t know that you can do that! The restaurant makes thousands of gnollens a day, and he barely pays his staff a few hundred of that. And everybody knows he cooks a lot more than zapekanka and porridge back there. He could afford to staff the Brovar-fucking restaurant with more than two servers. But then, oh, then he wouldn’t get to have golden hubcaps on his damn station wagon! Do you know how many Asdina tracksuits he owns? And not to mention the fancy watches. He wears three. Oh, I bet you’ve seen the two on his wrists, but I bet you didn’t know he wears a silver one on his fucking ankle.”

Callana squinted. “Wait, why?” Didn’t the watches tell you what the time was? Or so everyone said… they just looked like circles with numbers on them as far as Callana was concerned. More tasty than practical, honestly.

The Gina started pacing around the room, scoffing. “I wish I could call the fucking cops on the guy, but he gives them free ponchikis every morning, and they love him! He’s got half the neighborhood in his pocket, and his food isn’t even good. I meant it when I said they get their eggs out of jugs, Cal. And those ponchikis? Yeah, he makes them with pre-frozen dough he gets from some company his da owns. The line chefs basically just run microwaves all day; they basically don’t cook anything at all!”

“That… does not sound very good,” Callana admitted.

“And now he’s gonna fire someone who, for all he knows, is some poor immigrant girl who asked for one day off?”

“I mean, I am fine,” Callana said, hoping to calm her friend down any way she could.

“Again, he doesn’t know that. He just thinks he can do anything he wants, because he’s a gaudy, rich asshole with a mini mansion and a pet lynx. Fuck. Did you know he owns a fucking lynx?”

“Yes. You just said he did,” Callana said, cocking her head.

“He’s got trophy wives—plural, mind you—he gets the chefs to make him lobster for lunch every day, he huffs coke in the middle of his shifts, and he orders everybody around like a little czar straight out of the 3400s. I mean, it’s 3674, for Brovar’s sake, shouldn’t we be well past this kind of shit?”

Callana wandered over to the bed, dusted off some white powder, and sat on the comforter, listening to the Gina rant, and hoping she’d stop soon. After all, it was getting close to lunchtime, and she’d honestly hoped for a bit more… well… reassurance. Lying back, not minding the plaster dust as it puffed up around her, she stared at the ceiling for a while. The Gina stopped after a while and shuffled up beside her.

“Hey…” the Gina said. “I’m—uh, I’m sorry I didn’t… Are you doing okay?”

Callana shrugged. “I did not do a good job,” she said. “I was awk-ward around the cus-to-mers, and I got fired after three weeks.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, the Gina rubbed Callana’s thigh. “Hon, that doesn’t say anything about you. Okay? It wasn’t a fair shot, not even a little bit. This was him. Not you.”

“I just—” Callana trailed off, blinking up at the ceiling. “I did not like the job. But it did not feel good for him to… say all that. Yes. He is the jerk, and yes, we fuck the police. Yes, so-cie-ty is broken. But I do not want to be on the bad side of so-cie-ty all the time. If I really am… the gay… then I am on so-cie-ty’s bad side. Yes?”

“Y-yeah.”

“And I cannot change that.”

“Not really…”

“Then I do not want to give so-cie-ty a reason to not like me more.”

“Hon…”

“I do not fit in. And that is because I am not a human. But also, because I am the gay, and I speak… weird.”

“I love the way you speak.”

“The cus-to-mers do not.”

“Well, then they’re racist fucks.”

“Racist? I am not a race? There is only one of me on the planet.”

“Doesn’t matter. They don’t know that. They don’t know jack shit about you. With that red hair of yours, you look like a Niminvian—probably since you based your body off a tourist. And I don’t know if you’ve been listening to the news lately, but people don’t have a lot of good stuff to say about Niminvians these days.”

Callana shrugged. “The news is boring. Too many com-mer-cials.”

“Hardly worth watching, either. Propaganda, fearmongering—fuck that shit.”

“Yes! I only watch when the wea-ther-man comes out. He is funny!”

The Gina smiled, giving Callana’s thigh a gentle squeeze. For some reason, Callana felt her breath cut short, her heart thumping louder. Sitting up, she changed the subject. “If I do not have a job, I will… What will I do?”

“I dunno, what do you usually do when I’m at work?”

Callana squinted. “Hmm. Yes. I watch the ‘teevee,’ but that is not fun always.”

“Ever thought about, like, painting? You might like sculpting, too. Oh, or puzzles?”

Cocking her head, Callana pursed her lips. “I used to sleep a lot!”

“Y-yeah, uh, but then I can’t talk to you.”

“Oh. Right! Okay.”

“Ooh, if you like fancy foods, you could learn how to cook! You watch cooking shows all the time, maybe I could show you the ropes!”

“Yes?” Callana asked. Then, she nodded. “Yes. I think… I would like to see the ropes!”

“Awesome! Bruh, after we clean this place up, we should definitely make, like, some kind of scampi tonight.”

“With cham-pagne flutes?” Callana added, grinning.

“Oh, I wish. I hate to say it, but that place last night had some good glasses. Wish I’d swiped one.”

Callana grinned, then reached into the sixteenth dimension until she found a pocket of flesh she sometimes stashed snacks in. Then, she pulled out two long, thin pieces of glassware she’d subtly copied the night before.

“Oh,” the Gina said. “Oh, Brovar, you’re an actual fucking gem.”

Giggling, Callana handed the Gina one of the flutes, before duplicating the original again so she didn’t run out.

“I know.”

 

Well, this sure was a "clean" chapter ;p

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