Things We Hate

It’s my sixth week of sleeping on Jarret’s loveseat in Brighton where we mostly watch things we hate and try not to kill each other. Jarret’s roommates want me out of the apartment. They glare at me as I pretend to sleep each morning. I lost my tech support job because I am the kind of girl who loses nice things. Even though I can go home at any time, even though I can call my mom and go back to New London and watch her date men she’ll never trust, and even though she will protect me and provide me with food and a place to stay, I will see her for the driftless grownup she is.

“Did you ask about jobs today?”

“Nothing,” Jarret says, “I checked.” He is the assistant manager at the Abercrombie & Fitch in the Chestnut Hill Mall.

I get up and sweep the wood floor. There are cereal crumbs and sunflower seeds everywhere.

“You asked about the whole city, right? Not just your store?”

“Yeah. Nothing.”

He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a spotted banana and asks if I want half. I am hungry and I do, but I don’t want to take anything else from him because he’ll be a dick about it later, whenever it best serves him.

I know there are jobs at Abercrombie; I checked the website twice today.

“Fruits and vegetables are the only things that aren’t branded,” Jarret says. I ask about their stickers, and he says oh yeah, I guess. I take the damp banana peel from him and bring it to the trashcan in the kitchen. Jarret left the last bite in the peel, and I eat it quietly before returning to the living room. I have three hundred dollars in my checking account and it will be four more weeks until I receive my first unemployment check.

“Are you sure there were no openings? I’d do anything.”

He rolls his eyes. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

“More than anything,” I say, because it is the only way to convey the proper amount of passion when responding to a mundane question.

I used to have friends that I would talk about things with. Things that normal people talk about, like opinions and ideas. Everyone moved on after college. They got adult jobs and adult lives. There were thirty of us in the group, and some were the closest friends I have ever had. Now it’s just Jarret and me, and I’m no longer sure why I liked him in the first place.

“Sometimes I want to start smoking just to be annoyed that you can’t smoke indoors,” he says.

I nod. “I know exactly what you mean.”

We walk down the big hill and I wish that I were wearing sneakers. Every step I take makes a loud thwacking sound that is only drowned out by the rumbling of a passing B-line train. I watch the tops of my sunburned feet smack into the sky-gray sidewalk.

There were things I could have done to stop it from happening. I could have tried harder. I could have looked for other jobs. But I thought that Jarret would get me a job folding clothes and help me rebuild myself.

We get to a large liquor store with a broken neon sign that would look nice if it worked, but everything here is trash.

“Do you want to go in?” he asks.

“More than anything.”

There is a bald man behind the counter who asks to see our IDs as soon as the door opens. We are almost twenty-five. Sometimes when we go out together, they scan our licenses to make sure they are real, because we have the same birthday. The day we discovered this, Jarret said it was literally the only thing we had in common other than being white. I said I was half Puerto Rican.

“No way, Michelob Ultra is on sale?” Jarret asks, looking at the white sign over the bald man’s shoulder. “$6...