Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

Maria and I don’t look anything alike. I’m short, and I only ever wear sneakers. She’s a hair over six feet tall and she wears heels all the time, except when she goes to the gym. She has glistening hair, cinnamon with frosted highlights and a wave. She always looks put together. She never gets carded.

My mom still gets carded, and she’s in her forties.

“Hey,” she says as she approaches my desk at work. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything is weird,” I tell her. “Really, really weird.”

“Let’s blow this joint.”

My boss gives me the okay to go, and I grab my bag. There’s a bit of wind blowing inland when we step out into the last remaining sun. I pull my coat around me.

“So,” I finally say. “How would you feel about moving?”

She looks over at me and her face falls. “No,” she says in a flat voice. “No, Tina. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how bad things are back home. But we can’t go much farther down, you know?”

My hands are shaking. She takes one and we start walking aimlessly.

This is the first year that Maria and I have roomed together. Her sophomore roommates were a disaster: the kind of disaster that involved yelling matches, a multitude of undone dishes left in unsanitary places, and an illicit mealworm farm. She agreed to move in with me, because—in her words—a shitty apartment was better than a shitty roommate. Maria has enough screwed-up drama with her family. She doesn’t need it anywhere else in her life.

She’s never said anything about moving out—yet—but it was my budget that determined where we lived, not hers. I’ve always suspected that deep down, she regrets living with me. Now I’m sure of it.

“I know how you feel about taking help,” she says, “but you are not going home and you are not getting evicted mid-semester. We can make this happen.”

Before I can explain, she turns to me. “Here,” she says. “I got you a present.”

She rummages around in her shoulder bag and takes something out. White flashes at me; thin plastic glints in the dying sunlight. I take it from her.

It’s my favorite sweater. Wrapped up in plastic printed with the name of some local dry cleaner. I turn it over, examining it. The sleeve is pristine, clean and white. Just like new.

It probably cost her five times as much to clean the sweater as it did for me to buy it in the first place.

“I knew it would come out,” she says. “You just needed to bring it to the right place.”

For some reason, that makes what I have to say seem so much worse. She knew what my sweater meant to me, how much hope I let myself invest in it. And… And the gesture is so sweet, but it’s just not the same. It has never been about having a clean sweater. It was about believing that when I wore it, I couldn’t get dirty.

I’m better off without that illusion anyway.

But she doesn’t need to hear that, not when she went to all that trouble. “Thank you,” I tell her, and I give her a hug.

“See?” she says. “Whatever’s happening, whatever is going on—it can’t be that bad. We can make it work. So tell me, Tina. Why do you think we have to move?”

“I didn’t mean that we need to go somewhere worse,” I tell her. “I was thinking somewhere better.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Better in what way?”

I don’t actually know. I have no idea where Blake lives. Even thinking about this, even taking as tiny a step as telling Maria, scares me.

“Somewhere the heat works?” I venture.

She turns to me. And then, very slowly, she smiles. “Oh my God,” she says. “This is not a my-world-is-ending kind of thing, is it? This is a I’m-so-happy-I-can’t-express-myself kind of thing.”

I don’t answer.

“You’re the only person I know where I can’t tell the difference. What happened? Did your dad find a full time job?”

“Not that.”

“Sudden inheritance from an unknown relative?”

“Weirdly,” I tell her, “some random stranger mistook me for one of the other many Tina Chens in the world.”

“Really?”

“No, not really.” I let out a breath. “In a way, it’s like I got…an internship. An internship that pays really well.”

“That’s awesome! I swear to God, I will break our lease in one hot minute.”

Yep. Definitely not happy with our digs.

“Luckily,” I say, “we don’t even have to do that. This internship comes with a built-in subletter.”

She pauses. “Okay, what kind of internship does that?”

“The most fucked-up internship in the history of all internships.” I let out a breath and I tell her everything.

In a lot of ways, Maria and I are nothing alike. But we’ve been friends ever since our freshman floor arranged a girls’ night out.