The Girls of Number 1057 (2)

2

The blue fuzzy slippers dangling off the eaves above the porch weren't really a concern in Lori's mind but were indeed a bewilderment. She should have expected something more upsetting considering they had left Dylan alone with the apartment for a whole three days. Carrying a box of tampons with her purse she headed toward the main door of the building. Before she could extract her keys from her bag a handsome brown haired, blue-eyed hung-over looking fellow barreled out of the door nearly knocking her over. He squinted at her, stumbling into the bright April sun mumbling an apology and grabbing for the door to hold it open while Lori walked inside.

"Thanks..." she muttered but the tackler turned gentleman was already walking down the sidewalk to the parking lot. As Lori checked her mailbox she glanced through the window in the door as it drifted closed behind her. The disoriented neighbor of hers was walking back and forth across the parking lot apparently looking for his car with seemingly no idea of its general whereabouts.

"Idiot." Lori concluded before turning and entering #1057, her home sweet home. The immediate view of the apartment showed no signs for concern, a surprise considering the results from previous occasions when Dylan was left with the apartment.

Dylan is by no means destructive, but does not deal well with boredom. What is it they say about idle hands being the devils playthings? Dylan's idle hands were Home Depot's best customers. When Lori went home for Easter last year she came back to half of the apartment having fuschia walls. The painting job looked professional quality and there was no mess left behind but Lori felt an over-whelming feeling of being a guest in Barbie's dream-house.

Not wanting to insult Dylan's work or make her feel that her time was wasted, Lori chose not to express her dislike of the new color scheme and since Val probably wouldn't care if Dylan had drawn giant pink swastikas on the wall, the new décor stayed. That is until memorial day weekend when Dylan was again solo in the apartment and took it upon herself to return the fuschia walls to their original drab eggshell color. When Lori got back from her family vacation in Massachusetts she asked Dylan what motivated the change.

"It was going to be too expensive to have my car painted magenta," she had explained bluntly and Lori, obviously delighted by the change, accepted her answer, bogus or otherwise. Val never commented and quite possibly never noticed.

So when Lori walked into the main area of the apartment and saw that everything was clean (per Dylan's usual obsessive compulsive style) and the walls were all a consistent color she assumed Dylan had led a quiet, peaceful weekend alone. She set down her purse and hung up her keys on the hook up with an "L" above it next to the main door.

After grabbing beer out of the fridge and inspecting the mail Lori headed down the hall to her bedroom. The main area of the unit, which included the kitchen to the right of the main door and a living area to the left, was at the West end of the 1500 square foot apartment. Dylan's room was at the far East side as her window needed to have due east access to the sun to prevent her from ever sleeping past 9:30am. Val's room shared a wall with the kitchen, which put her directly across from the bathroom, as was decidedly best as it meant it was less likely that the other two girls would have a chance to see Luke getting up to go to the bathroom in the nude in the middle of the night. Lori's room was then between Val's and Dylan's sharing the Eastern most wall with Dylan and the Southern most with Val.

Well aware of the apartments layout herself, Lori walked to the second bedroom on the right with ease. It was then that she discovered Dylan's weekend may not have been uneventful as Lori had thought.
Sitting on Lori's naked mattress was a brand new package of pale blue Ralph Lauren 300 thread count sheets and a matching packaged comforter cover along with a note taped to the plastic zippered casing:

Lori,
I had to burn your old sheets.
Hope you had a good weekend.
Love,
Dyl

***


"Short of the black plague I don't see what this guy could have had that would warrant burning my sheets!" Lori's voice boomed through Dylan's cell phone while she stood outside in the back alley behind her work smoking a cigarette.

"So does that mean you don't like the new sheets I bought you?" Dylan asked sounding disappointed "because I kept the receipt just in case."

"That's not the point," Lori sighed over the phone "it just seems...why would... and how did... I don't know, I guess everything is fine. When are you coming home?"

"I get out at seven and I was thinking of picking up some TK for din-din. Are you down for some Pad Thai?" Dylan was referring to Thai Kitchen, their favorite Thai food joint. She rarely if ever had the inclination to cook so she was the queen of take out and always tried to rope in others so as to make herself feel less piggish. Luckily for Dylan, Lori was in a boxed meal mood as well.

"Yeah that sounds good. I guess explain the details of your adventure later over Southeast Asian cuisine" Lori conceded.

"Fantastic!" Dylan put out her cigarette and flicked it into the sewer "later love." She shut her cell phone and tucked it into her pocket before walking back inside; back into the war-zone, as she called it.

When Dylan finished high school she was more or less entirely clueless as to what she wanted to do with herself. She considered herself a creative and borderline artistic person so with everyone in her family (including cousins, 3rd cousins twice removed and possibly her great uncles dog according to family myths) pocketing college degrees, Dylan headed to school. After studying everything from painting to web design and attempting to engage in a deep meaningful art folk conversation, she was still confused about school. Although Dylan did like to delve into the deep and thought provoking she got sick of monopolizing her conversations. Adding that on to late nights up working on projects she barely cared about and bullshitting her way through papers and getting 4.0's for reasons she didn't understand progressively killed her motivation for the program. After two years she decided she needed both a creative and artistic outlet that had a social aspect to it.

She graduated from Francis Moore Academy for Hair and immediately took a job in one of their salons. She was excited to be in a field she loved but even before she had finished her first year she was tiring of her coworkers and her work environment. The exciting workplace gossip quickly turned to petty high school catty-ness and as soon as she expressed her dislike of it she became the subject of it. Although she had completely ostracized herself from her coworkers she maintained a good clientele and focused on improving her performance at work. Lately her motivation there was hitting an all time low.

"So Dylan do you think it's completely ironic that you are spending the majority of your day promoting all natural earth friendly products and selling them with your ‘save the world' smile then going out back to pollute the air, litter in the alley and give yourself lung cancer all in one fell swoop?" Anna was Dylan's one spirit of sanity at work and shared her attitude of Francis Moore and it's employees. Anna worked at the front desk making it hard for Dylan to vent to her as often as she would like, but the little exchanges they had at least helped Dylan survive the day.

"Look who's jumped on the tree-hugging bandwagon!" Dylan exclaimed matching Anna's sarcasm.

"Oh Please," Anna dropped her judgmental act "I'm only coming back here to see if I can bum one off ya! It's been insanity up front today and that midget who calls herself my daughter has a two mile no-smoking radius. Let me indulge in a guilty pleasure without the sass, will ya?"

Dylan smirked and handed her a cigarette and lighter before Anna ran out the back door through which Dylan had just entered. Anna's two year old daughter Sarah was everything a mother could hope for in a daughter. Although Anna often joked about Sarah being a pain in the ass, Dylan had never met a more devoted parent who managed to so perfectly balance being a mom, having a full time job, and miraculously having a social life with only a few signs of schizophrenia.

When Dylan saw Sarah and Anna together she realized how badly she wanted that white picket fence life. A husband grilling out in the backyard who calls his daughter "princess". Who kisses his wife before she leaves for work and the second she gets home. Who crawls into bed with her and his princess, reads a bed time story, and then snuggles with them both while drifting off to sleep. That fairy tale romance had been Dylan's dream for so long but she knew that she was nowhere near being normal enough in relationships, maybe even independently, to have that kind of dream come true right now.

No Dylan had a ton of issues and definitely needed to sort herself out before bringing a man into the picture. It was probably partly due to all the terrible choices in men made by Dylan in the past that she was so messed up! Well that and her family, and her OCD, and her bipolar, and her vitamin D deficiency, and her anxiety, and ADD, and well... everything else her therapist loved to tell her she had. She didn't deny that part of her problems were probably chemical but she still wasn't a fan of the arsenal of pills, vitamins and supplements she took daily.

Yet another reason not to date or sleep with a boy - the morning after would be unusual to say the least.
That was some nice sex we had last night, wasn't it? Want to date? Oh but before you answer let me take my 37 pills for my various mood problems and personality disorders and chase them with OJ. No, there isn't any vodka in it, but I do like to get hammered on occasion and act the exact opposite of how I normally do. So how is June for a wedding? That way I can start popping out our babies by the spring!

For imagining that rant alone Dylan was definitely positive she wasn't in the right place to be dating. Plus boys were trouble, always. They mess with your heart, your brain, maybe even your kidneys if you believe in urban legends. Boys were definitely bad and, Dylan concluded while grabbing the slip for her next waiting appointment, completely out of the question.

She looked at the paper then back up towards the half full lobby and waiting area.

"Thomas?" she inquired to guests sitting around the room "Thomas Chapman?"

"It's Tom," said a sexy mans voice behind her causing her to spin around nearly slamming into the handsome stranger's outstretched arm, "hi there."

"Hi, I'm Dylan," she discovered words while shaking his hand and looking him from the top of his dirty blonde hair, over his sharp business suit clad body, down to his loafers, "come on back."

She smiled giddily leading him to her station watching the other girls gawk obviously jealous of the gorgeous man trailing behind her.

Hmm, Dylan thought to herself, what was I just saying about men again?

***

"It's still fucking freezing for April!"

Val had just walked in the door to the apartment and immediately sought out Lori to vent her weather related frustrations. She didn't have to look far as Lori was curled up in the tiki chair across the living room with the TV showcasing the hottest new Reality TV smash hit. Val instantly abandoned her frustration and quickly put down the cookie tin she was carrying and leapt to the couch. Reality TV was the joined guilty pleasure among the three girls and was not to be talked over. The two girls watched as the women on TV escalated into a physical fight over the man whose heart they were competing for. When the fight transitioned to a Proactive solution commercial chatting was allowed.

"Hey!" Lori said as though Val hadn't already been sitting there for Five minutes, "how was your weekend?"

"It was great, how did it go with your parents?"

"Meh, I haven't talked to them since I somewhat abruptly left the session. I feel a bit bad about it, but oh well. I'm getting frustrated." Lori shrugged and rolled over in the chair to look back at Val. "No Luke with you?"

"He's at work - probably a good thing. We were getting on each other's nerves after a non-stop weekend together," Val frowned and got up, walking over to the chair where Lori lay curled up in a ball. She leaned over and gave her a hug, "I hope your family realizes how amazing you are for everything you do."

Lori smiled and hugged her back. "You have to say that because you're my best friend."

"That's true," Val teased as she took off her coat and walked to the kitchen, hanging her coat on the hook by the door as she did, "But I would have said it even if I wasn't. You know how blown away Dylan and I are that you're going so far out of your way to do this for your parents. We'd both be crying, whiney messes. You're incredible Lori!"

"What is it in the tin?" Lori always had a difficult time accepting complements and quickly changed the subject instead.

"Bleh! Stupid oatmeal raisin cookies! Dylan will probably eat them but she'll have to go through and remove every raisin first."

"Not right now, but I might have at ‘em later. Dyl is picking up Thai Kitchen. Did you eat dinner? I'm pretty sure we'll have plenty."

"Sounds good," Val muttered as she opened the fridge in hopes of a beer. Discovering a fresh case of Oberon she snagged one and shut the door noticing a picture on the fridge she hadn't looked at in a while. The beach in the background contrasted with the Bright colors of the bathing suits the three girls wore while kneeling in the sand. On the for left Dylan's steel grey eyes squinted into the camera's view while she made a goofy big smile that was definitely testimony to the fun being had . Her chin length hair was brushing across her face per its usual and the funky purple streak in her bangs stuck out against the rest of her dark locks but matched her white halter bikini with purple polka dots. Lori's big gorgeous flowing curls slipped down over her shoulders and took up a large percentage of he photograph, drifting towards Dylan's hand where it rested on Lori's upper arm. Her Chestnut brown eyes, which matched the color of her hair, were covered by an enormous pair of Gucci sunglasses that cost twice what she had paid for her olive green bathing suit. Val's sun burnt arm connected around the elbow to Lori's and her brilliant laughing smiles showed none of the pain that Val remembered that sun burn providing. Luckily this picture didn't really capture the way her black bikini top had accented the pinkness of her skin and her sunglasses, even bigger than Lori's had covered some of the red blotches on her cheeks. You could see a little of her Rudolph-esque nose but some of her long straight blonde hair had managed to succeed in masking it slightly by haphazardly falling across her face.

It was more or less accurate to how the girls looked today, although Dylan's hair changed monthly (currently being a lighter brown with some blonde high lights, still around her chin in length) and Val had sadly lost those sunglasses the day that picture was taken, and her sunburn was luckily not permanent. It was a little over a year ago when they were vacationing in Puerto Rico over new years. The picture made Val smile and remind her of the good friends she was lucky to have.

And as if it were on cue at that moment Dylan busted through the door carrying bags of Thai Food and exclaimed "You guys are so lucky to have me as a friend!"