“Yes. One is currently talking to me and the other is not.”
“Oh . . . what happened?”
“I started with boyfriend number one. Then I dumped him for boyfriend number two. I like the second one a lot better than the first. But then I cheated on two with one and now two isn’t talking to me.”
“You cheated on your second boyfriend with your ex?”
“Yes.” The man was able to follow a rather circuitous train of thought. “Exactly.”
“Cheating with your ex doesn’t count.”
“Now, that’s a very enlightened attitude, Salvador. Unfortunately, boyfriend two didn’t see it that way.”
“So really you have only one boyfriend . . . number one.”
“Sort of. We’re not going together anymore.”
“So, you really don’t have any boyfriend. Why won’t you go out with me?”
“Because boyfriend one really wants me back and I’m just too damn lazy to cultivate yet another personality.”
“Are they big guys?” Salvador flexed his muscles. “Could I take them down?”
“Number two is thin and wiry.” She thought of Ben picking up Weekly and tossing him in the trash cans. “When he gets riled, he’s pretty strong. Number one is a big, big guy. He plays football. He’s kind of a take-no-prisoners guy.”
“He was in prison?”
She patted Salvador’s cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow night. Thanks for your help.”
“We could make beautiful music together, Gretchen.”
She winced at the sound of her sister’s name. “I don’t know about music, Salvador. For the here and now, let’s just settle on making some decent tips.”
Chapter 12
The next day, Ro not only got the job, she got the tutorial. How to check people in, how to check them out, how to assign them a room, how to move them if they’re unhappy in their rooms, the smoking and nonsmoking rooms, adjoining rooms, discounts for repeat customers, corporate discounts, and on and on.
“Do you get a lot of repeat customers?”
“Most of them are repeats,” Tomas said. “We give good discounts.”
“Yeah, right.” Her heart started racing. “Like if one of the repeats wants a certain room, do you have a way to access the back files to see what room they had?”
“Absolutely.”
“How do you do that?”
Tomas looked at his watch. “We’ve been at this for a while. We’ll do it another time. If you ever get to work the desk.”
“I can dream,” Ro said. “How far do the files go back?”
“Since they were computerized—probably twenty-five, thirty years ago.”
“Okay. That means you have a lot of names in the computer.” Tomas looked at her and laughed. She laughed too. “Dumb question.” She saw a suit who’d patronized the bar yesterday looking for her. “I’d better run.”
“Congrats on getting the job.”
“With your help, Tomas.”
“I did put in a good word for you.”
“I appreciate it.” She winked at him.
He winked back, but he didn’t have the gesture quite down. It came off like a tic. It was going to be a long haul, but she was in for the long haul.
Working hard and late, Ro now understood sleep. The job got her home around eleven thirty. With homework and unwinding time, she went to bed around one and woke up at seven to go to school. She became chronically sleep-deprived and that meant she dozed whenever she had a spare moment. More than once, someone shook her shoulder in calculus class. When her teachers asked, she told them she was fine, although everyone knew she was lying.
Her biggest nap was during lunch. She rarely ate because snoozing was much more satisfying. As a result, she lost a few pounds, which allowed her to indulge in cookies and potato chips from the Jackson stash. Her complexion went to seed but that’s why makeup was invented. She took catnaps seriously, so she tried not to be annoyed when JD woke her up one lunch period.
“Hey, babe.”
She picked her head up and rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”
“We’ve got ten minutes more of lunch until the bell rings. It took me a while to find you. Mind if I eat my lunch?”
“No, go ahead.” She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a tuna fish on soggy rye, then put it back in the paper bag without eating it. “How are you?”
“I’d be a lot better if you wouldn’t avoid me.”
JD’s bites were bigger than her head. He had two sandwiches, which he was wolfing down in record time. “I’m not avoiding you, JD. I’m just tired.”
“Yeah, about that. Why are you so tired?”
“I got a job. I work late.”
He stared at me. “You got a job?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“How about because you don’t need one.” He regarded her face. “What kind of a job?”
“Something low level and minimum wage that is commensurate with my skill level.”
“You’re punishing yourself, right?” She didn’t answer. “You know that you and Vicks wouldn’t have lasted more than a few months anyway. It was doomed from the start.”
She was too tired to argue Vicks’s merits. They were getting harder for her to remember. “Whatever.”
JD said, “Quit the job and come back to your former life.”
“Well, it’s this way, JD.” She yawned. “As popular as I was last semester, that’s as unpopular as I am this semester.”
“That’s ridiculous. Go back on the cheerleading squad. I miss you.”
“Not going to happen. Shannon hates me. She thought that once we broke up, she’d be your girl again. It was bad enough to lose you to me. But now that we’re not even dating and you’re still not coming around, she’s really furious. And of course, that’s all my fault. And where Shannon goes, so do Chelsea and Lisa. So now they hate me. And Weekly hates me because secretly he’d like to bang me. But he’s too scared to stand up to you, so he devotes his life to making my life miserable. And Mark Salinez . . . he doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“I’ll beat him up.”
“JD, you can’t just beat people up because they’re pushy. Leave Mark alone. He’s harmless.”
“Whatever you want, baby. I’m here to protect and serve.”
“Since I’m not Miss Popular anymore, I thought at least I could sit with my brother at lunch. But Haley hates me right now. So, by extension, Griff is totally pissed off and hates me. Worse still, Haley is being a bitch to him. And Vicks, of course, won’t even answer my phone calls. You are the only one who’s still nice to me. You and Lilly. I swear that girl is from a different planet.”
“Ro, let me take you out to dinner. We could both use a little R and R.”
“I’m working, JD.”
“What are you doing? Like a counter girl at DQ?”
“O ye of little faith!”
“I’m just saying that for anything decent you have to be over eighteen.”
“And so says my driver’s license.”
“You got a fake ID?”
“What’s the dif?” She smiled “You’re not going to rat me out, so I’m safe for the moment.”
“Just quit!”