7

Along the way to our apartment, I walked past a store with a mini popcorn machine on the display. It looked too adorable with all the red vintage color and wheels, and it was on sale. With the lovely popcorn maker, we could enjoy the fresh popcorn in minutes!

The next thing I knew, I was carrying the popcorn machine home. In the back of my mind, the little voice told me this was why I was poor, but I tried not to pay too much attention to it.

Karmen opened the door for me. She was in a towel, and her body glistened with water as if she'd just finished taking a shower.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Hmm...our groceries?" I said, feigning the obvious financial mistake I'd just made.

"Azra, don't tell me you just bought a popcorn machine," she said. Well, she already knew it from the picture on the box, so there was no need to explain.

"But it's too cute!" I said. "Look! It also comes with the wheels! And we do need some popcorns for Netflix and chill, don't we?"

"How much is it?" my best friend said. Normally, Karmen wasn't the type to worry about spending money, but now it seemed she couldn't underestimate the power of being broke anymore.

"It's only thirty dollars," I said sheepishly.

"I work my butt off at the deli so that we can have a roof over our heads," she complained, sounding more and more like a mom. "And you spent...wait...is it only thirty bucks?"

"Yeah!" I perked up.

"Oh, wow, that's cool!"

"I told you." I grinned at her and went to install the popcorn machine on our kitchen counter. I asked Karmen to put the corn in while I sorted out the groceries into the fridge. Afterward, we were watching the machine in fascination.

At the same time, Elise came through the door.

"What are you guys doing?" she asked.

"Elise, come and see this," I called out to her. Elise came over. We crowded around the machine. It started running and making a little humming sound as it dispersed the heat. Then popcorns started bubbling out from the kettle. We were like children happy to see the funny course of the production.

"Isn't it cool?" I giggled. The popcorns came out nice and hot and buttery, but the problem was the machine wouldn't stop running, and we found out pretty quickly that we had put too much corn in it, so now it started flooding over to the kitchen floor. Then the machine made a weird noise before spitting out bright sparks instead of popcorn. We jumped up with a yelp.

"Azra, turn the damn thing off! Turn it off!" Karmen yelled. Elise was clinging to her as she screamed. I panicked and pulled out the plug. But it messed up the electric socket and the current went haywire and exploded into a mushroom of white smoke. Elise jumped onto Karmen's arms in shock. The towel that wrapped around Karmen came loose and dropped to the floor, but at the same moment, the power went out. Everything turned pitch-black like a cave. I realized it wasn't just our apartment. The whole building also suffered the outage.

"Oh uh," I said in the dark. The three of us just stood there with our mouths hanging open as Celie burst through our door ten minutes later.

"Who did this?!" she bellowed, shining the flashlight at our faces.

We all pointed to the popcorn machine.

The chaos took place afterward, and it lasted about half an hour to die down. Mad didn't do it justice to describe how our landlady was. When the power got back up, she handed us a bill for the damage. We had to pay $350 for a new socket and burned wires. Celie had warned us that if we ever made one hassle in her building again, she'd start handing us our suitcases and throw us out.

"Look at the bright side," Karmen said. "At least we've got enough popcorn to last us a whole month."

~*~

When the stress and anxiety and self-hatred and all those good procrastinator's feelings built up, you tend to find stuff you don't normally do. For the first time, I realized what total slobs my two best friends were. In the bathroom, I found all sorts of things lying around, from hairbrushes to bags of cotton wipes.

Their rooms looked like a tornado had just hit. Elise had left the bed unmade for days, and Karmen turned everything into a bomb site, sheets, and pillows all over the place. This was the same girl who thought a few wrinkles on her clothes and less-than-perfect contours were a disaster.

A whole morning of tidying up had killed my job search. But who wanted to live in a pigsty? In the great summer of independence, here I was doing household chores! Voluntarily!

"Living with girls, they said," I muttered as I vacuumed the carpet. "It would be fun, they said."

My mom mailed my favorite scone from our bakery. It would have been perfect if she didn't forget the distance we had. The bread cake was like a block of granite. The Jogging Grandma brought it up to us, don't ask me how. I'd have invited her in for a piece, but it would have shattered her dentures.

"Elise could make a model of Stonehenge from these," I murmured to myself. Karmen was irritable because Clarice didn't reply her text messages. I told her she must be too busy posing before the camera to read fifty million messages she sent.

Karmen shrugged. "She can't avoid me forever. Sooner or later, she'll get back to me. Patience is the key."

Before I knew it, she was bouncing around the apartment, laughing and singing, when Clarice agreed to go out with her Friday night.

"Eat your heart out, Princess Peach! You've seen the last of this girl!" she giggled. "She finally understands what she's missing."

Eliska Novikova must have ice water in her veins. She took it all in calmly, no bugging, insults, or sarcasm. But on Saturday night, she went out on a date with, guess who?

I was even more shocked than Karmen. Who did Clarice Kingsley think she was? Did she honestly believe there was nothing wrong with dating both my roommates at the same time?

Eaten up with jealousy, I despised her. If there were a dozen people living in our apartment instead of three, she would probably be going out with eleven of them, leaving me high and dry!

Stupid Clarice and her model's legs. And on top of it all, I had to prevent the war between her two girlfriends.

"You should both dump her," I said. "She's playing head games with the two of you."

"If Elise breaks up with her first," Karmen said.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Elise shot back. "Clarice all to yourself?"

"She's not going to you," Karmen said. "I would never let her go even if it means I have to marry her or kidnap her."

All this disturbing bickering was going to cause us trouble with Celie, who seemed to especially scorn the soap opera that was our lives. Who ended up with Clarice would no longer be an issue if we got kicked out.

On Sunday morning, we sat for breakfast in the deli. There we found Celie in a state of wild despair.

"Can you believe it?" she was raving. "That snake, that woman! Why her and not me?"

"What are you talking about, Ms. Celie?" Elise asked.

"You haven't heard? No, you don't want breakfast now. You'll throw up when you hear this."

I sighed. "Okay, what happened to your business rival?"

"Monica, that witch who already has a fortune from her tenants and customers," Celie started, "She's just been awarded a Michelin star! And what do I get? Me, who slaves every day in the restaurant, gives to charity, and is nice to everyone? None!"

"What's to stop you from applying for one of the stars?" I said.

"Ha! If I could afford a Gordon Ramsay, I would," she said.

"Actually," said Elise seriously, "to qualify for such an award, you would have to invest in improving the quality of your place, which you are clearly unwilling to do."

"Miss. Novikova, on the scale of annoying between 1 and 10, you're a 12," our landlady said. "I'm too busy doing real work. A layabout too lazy to get an honest occupation doesn't have a say to me and neither does the jobless."

"Hey!" I said. "I'm looking for a job!"

"Oh yeah? How many interviews did you go to this week, Miss. Kononovich? Five? Seven? None, maybe?"

"Listen!" I seethed. "I've been cooking, and cleaning, and shopping, and that are important stuff! A house doesn't run itself." What was I saying? This was my mom's speech, right down to the tone. I stopped before I got to the part about how unappreciated I was. Celie just snorted and waddled off in the direction of the counter.

That morning, we ordered two corned beef on rye - cut in three.