A group of friends out for a smoke break flicked their butts away and grinded them beneath their heels before heading back inside the bar. The door opened and a wave of loud music and an even louder swell of laughter and chatter swept out onto the sidewalk before dying away the second the door clicked shut again. I was left alone. In silence.
The windows were foggy with the hot breaths of everyone packed in tight inside, but I could still make out Aubrey behind the bar. Her high ponytail swished to and fro as she slung pints of Guinness this way and that. In the crowd of people dancing beneath the old disco ball, I saw a poof of black curls. Candace was maybe five foot on her tip toes, but if you added in the height of her hair and tossed in for good measure her fiery, loud personality, the girl was the tallest thing in the whole goddamn bar. Noah was busy putting those golden biceps to work keeping the peace between two wasted kids.
From outside the window, I smiled as I watched them interacting with each other, laughing and joking. The music and noise of the bar thudded against the glass, but it felt far away, like I was listening to the sound of the ocean in a seashell miles away from any shoreline.
I’d walked all this way with the intention to go inside and yet here I was, standing frozen outside the bar, eyeing the door warily. I was at the part where I had to ask for help and I suddenly just couldn’t do it.
I was at the part where I had to admit to my friends that I was struggling, that I was in trouble, that I was fighting to stay above water. I was the part where I had to reveal I had no more money. I was the part where I had to accept their money, their couch, their assistance in getting me back on my feet. And I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
It wasn’t that I doubted whether they would help me. I knew that Aubrey, Candace, and Noah would each give me their very last dime if I needed it. It wasn’t that at all.
It was me.
I didn’t want to be the poor friend. I didn’t want their pity. I didn’t want them to think of me as helpless. I knew how people looked at my parents when they slowed up the line at the grocery store with their food stamps. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that to be me.
As I stood there alone, despite my friends being mere feet away, I knew I couldn’t do it. I knew I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t ask them for help. I wouldn’t accept a handout, not from them. They’d never look at me the same.
I stepped back from the foggy windows so none of them would accidentally catch sight of me. I cracked open my purse, retrieved the business card and chewed at my lip. Without giving myself a second to reconsider, I rushed to the edge of the sidewalk and waved my arm to hail a passing cab. I threw myself into the back and passed forward the business card with the address.
“Fun night out?” the driver asked.
I snorted. “I’m afraid it’s only getting started.”
Delaney
A short way outside the city, the cab turned onto a long stretch of gravel road lined with immaculately trimmed trees that looked like rigid soldiers guarding the mansions tucked away behind massive wrought iron gates. Their imposing brick facades loomed into the night, blocking out the moon and making me shiver. This was a whole new kind of money from what I knew.
Where I lived in Texas you were rich if you had a pool in your backyard and a master bathroom with one of those big tubs with the jets. But you could fit six of those prefab suburban houses into just one wing of these monstrosities. The road narrowed even further where we turned off. After a silent minute of nothing but the crunch of gravel beneath the tyres and my imagination whirling with scenes from Eyes Wide Shut, we pulled up in the large circular drive of a mega-mansion that made the mansions back farther look like a shack with a puddle of mud for a pool out in the middle of nowhere Texas.
“Lucky girl,” the cab driver muttered as I handed him what was left in my purse, eyes fixed on the blank stares of the stone lions on either side of the grand front steps.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” I replied, fumbling for the door handle. “These uber rich are all cannibals.”
The cab driver shrugged. “Maybe he’ll give you a nice meal before he eats you,” he said. “Maybe with a nice wine. Or brandy.”
“Like when they put an apple in a roasting pig’s mouth?”
The cab driver eyed me in his rear-view mirror. “Exactly.”
I grinned. “Gotta die somehow, I suppose.”
He chuckled. “That’s the spirit.”
I thanked him and he drove off with a wave. I adjusted my purse on my shoulder and glanced back at the long, dark drive through the thick trees. If he were one of those rich people who liked to hunt humans after he got bored of slaying rhinos and elephants, I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting away in these heels. I sighed. Best to hope for a gentlemanly cannibal then.
Standing at the base of the wide stone stairs, it took craning my neck all the way back to see the top of the peaked iron spires that stabbed the night. That must be where he roasts his victims. He spears them through on those copper weathervanes and lets them cure in the sun till they’re jerky for him to gnaw at.
A maze of gardens stretched in either direction at the sides of the house. In the centre of the circular drive a large fountain drenched four half-naked marble Greek goddesses. I considered maybe he’d turned other women stupid enough to arrive alone to his mansion in the middle of the night into statues with his black magic. After all, you didn’t get to be this filthy rich without selling your soul to some devil, take your pick which one.
I was used to the blaringly loud hip-hop music from my neighbour next door and the high-pitched whines of my upstairs neighbour fucking her husband’s brother, so the silence as I made my way up the stairs seemed unnatural, like I was in an entirely different world. Light from the stained-glass windows on either side of the iron double doors threw shades of indigo and ruby and tangerine across my face as I reached for the doorbell.
Before I could press it, the door opened of its own accord. I stepped back in surprise as the woman from outside The White Room came out with mascara-streaked cheeks. An old man in a fine suit had his arm around her shoulders. I turned at the sound of another car arriving in the drive.
“He’s such an asshole,” the woman wailed, taking up the handkerchief the old man retrieved from his breast pocket and offered to her in one deft move as if he’d done it a thousand times.
“Yes, dear,” the old man said, patting the woman’s back as he guided her down the stairs. “He is indeed an asshole.”
The woman blew her nose noisily. “You tell him that. You tell him he’s an asshole.”
“I shall convey the message, ma’am. Rest assured.” The old man held open the back door of the expensive-looking black town car.
The woman clutched at the old man’s pin striped lapels. “How can he be so horrible after being so… so…”
With a wail she crumbled against the old man’s chest.
“He’s rather complicated, I suppose,” he said, patting the woman’s shoulder.
The woman shook her head. “He’s a goddamn asshole!”
“Yes, yes, that is perhaps a more succinct way of putting it,” the old man said.
He helped the woman into the car and moved to step away. She snatched his wrist and pulled it imploringly to her chest.