Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)(13)
While I could have made it easy on myself and gone to the CDC for a temporary identity card I could use to replace my driver’s license, I headed for the NY DMV. If I went to the CDC, I’d run the risk of running into someone I knew, particularly from the police department.
The last thing I needed was a run-in with Chief Quinn after what I’d done.
After I visited the DMV to replace my license and the bank to replace my debit card, I’d have to swallow every last bit of my pride, stuff it in a closet, and call my parents. I wondered if they’d talk to me.
I doubted it.
A little after noon, I left my former apartment building and headed for the DMV. The twenty-minute walk cleared my head a little and gave me a chance to prepare for inevitable hell. It took two hours to convince the skeptical clerk my home—and wallet—had been torched with napalm. The eviction notice came in handy, as did the doctors and nurses at the hospital. They helpfully corroborated my story but hunted down what remained of my pride and beat it to death in the process.
At least I walked out with a replacement driver’s license in hand. With it, I replaced my bank card with minimal fuss. Too much of a coward to request a balance, I gambled Mary had paid me for my final shift and the rest of my owed hours. I requested two hundred in cash, which the teller gave me without a word.
I almost cried, and it took every bit of my flagging strength to ignore her incredulous stares.
With everything I could do without a home accomplished, I began the tedious task of finding a phone. Why were pay phones so uncommon? I ended up stepping into a hotel and begging the lady behind the desk until she relented and let me use the phone. She kept giving me dirty looks while I dialed my parents’ number.
It’d been years since I’d spoken to either one of them, and I didn’t even know if they still lived in the same house in New Jersey.
“Hello?” my mother answered.
She sounded so sweet on the phone, the exact opposite of me. Maybe the universe didn’t hate me after all. “Hey, Mom.”
Silence. Then again, I was probably wrong. I elevated ‘don’t cry’ to the top of my list of things to avoid in the next ten minutes. “Uh, this is going to sound really bad, but the CDC napalmed my apartment. Is there any chance I can stay with you for a few days?” I hesitated. “Please?”
“No.” She hung up on me.
I should have known. The universe really did hate me, and so did my parents, and I had earned every bit of their loathing. I placed the phone in its cradle and forced a smile. “Thanks.”
I left. Without a credit card, few hotels would let me rent a room for any period of time. If Mary had given me my earnings, I had a hair over six hundred and twenty dollars. What the hell was I supposed to do on six hundred dollars? With that little, I couldn’t afford to pay out the first and last deposit. In a month, the first bill for my hospital stay would arrive, I wouldn’t be able to pay it, and my battered credit rating would tank completely. While the CDC would likely compensate me for my hospitalization, even before I had quit my job like a spoiled rotten brat, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the additional expenses, not without a great deal of overtime.
My mother had been right to reject me. I never left anywhere on a good foot, and I specialized in burning bridges. Instead of asking Mary why she had abandoned me for a ride in Chief Quinn’s car, I had lost my temper and quit. If she wanted to go somewhere with Samuel Quinn, that was her choice and none of my business.
I had no right to be jealous or upset over it.
What I had done to Samuel Quinn put me on the list of terrible people who deserved to suffer. How could I be so vindictive, stupid, and selfish? Why couldn’t I be a normal person, someone people actually cared about?
Even my own mother didn’t want me, and I didn’t blame her for it in the slightest. At eighteen, I’d made my stance clear: I had wanted to earn my way in the world without their version of charity, which meant I’d grow up in the job they wanted me to do, carrying on the Gardener name with pride.
I had chosen to pursue certification with the CDC while working at a coffee shop specializing in legalized narcotics. They hated everything pixie dust stood for and the fact I dared to lower myself to working as a barista. They hated magic.
Then again, they had hated me from the day I had been born, so it didn’t matter. Nothing I could do would make them happy. That didn’t change facts, however.
They’d been right all along. I hadn’t been able to afford a college education on my own, and even with certification, I was too poor to transition from my job as a barista to something else. Ten years had gone by, and I ran the treadmill from one day of my life to the next without going anywhere.
Worst of all, I truly had no one to blame but myself.
My search for a hotel that accepted cash took me to the worst part of Queens, and by the time I got checked in, my coughs rattled in my chest, promising a world of misery for the foreseeable future. On the bright side, one-twenty got me a room for a week, and it even had a microwave and a can opener. A trip to the bodega down the street stocked me with enough soup to last until I needed to check out or extend my stay, and I bought a few bottles of water to be on the safe side.
Even if it took me two weeks to recover, I had enough time to find a job somewhere. One-twenty for a smoke-stained, dingy hotel room beat the alternative. I’d be miserable, but I could manage.