The finch greeted the dawn with a cheerful barrage of tweets and chirps. The cheerful peeping in the living room slowly brought Susanna to consciousness. She sat up slowly, not really wanting to leave the cozy confines of her bed on a Saturday.
Still, this was the best wake up call. The sunlight streamed around the edges of the blackout curtains. It might be a glorious day. Her roommate, Sara, moved to pull the covers more tightly over her head. Not wanting to disturb her, Susanna crept out of bed and pulled the bedroom door closed behind her. Susanna put on the kettle and, waiting for the water to heat, greeted the little bird in his brass and wicker cage. She tipped some bird seed into his little feeder and checked the water supply. The bird had been a spur of the moment purchase in their first week in the place. She watched him jump about and peck at the seed.
Part of her lamented taking the apartment. She wasn't sure if she hoped that the internship would lead to a job offer. If it did, she'd get her own place. If it didn't pan out, she didn't want to have attachments to a place she would never have chosen on her own. But the three other interns, Jason, Rob, and Sara, had talked her into it. By renting the apartment, Rob and Sara had felt they could save much of their housing stipend, while Jason had argued that then they would not have to eat out every meal. She'd never rented a place on her own before--always her parents had been part of the discussion and planning, but it made sense. And this group were no worse than other college roommates.
The place was dingy, though. The carpets were worn at the edges, the appliances cranky, the building down at the heels. They had an elderly gentleman neighbor downstairs who kept a nasty brute of a dog; upstairs were various apartments. Two Hispanic families, each with three children, and one thirtyish guy who seemed like he must be a junkie. On top of this haphazard world was the landlady, an older woman whose gray striped cat seemed to give Susanna (and only her) the evil eye. This place was a waystation. It made her feel like a tourist, experiencing the place with no commitment to it, gawking at the strange inhabitants.
Susanna sipped her tea and then stepped into the bathroom to shower. The plumbing knocked and rattled before it spat out a sad trickle of lukewarm water. She cleaned herself hurriedly before dressing herself up. Her roommates were still sacked out and Susanna didn't want to tiptoe around all morning, especially since Jason, as usual, was on the lumpy, unsprung couch tucked into the hall's alcove beneath the stairs. Jason was a distraction. Good looking, athletic, witty. She recognized the stench of private school privileged Old Money on him, the sort that looked down on her parents' newer wealth. But she couldn't help that looking at him made her tummy flutter and she didn't want to spend the day pretending not to notice him.
She didn't have the same worry about Rob. He was in the smaller bedroom, no larger than a closet, with its thick door shut to the world. She knew he was attracted to her, but he worked hard to hide it. She knew, somehow, in a tiny, dirty little corner of her mind, that there were a million 'Robs' for a girl like her. If she'd been mean or a bit more self-absorbed, she might have taken advantage of him, knowing he would do anything--
anything
--for her.
She didn't want to spend the weekend with either guy, but she definitely wanted to get away from Sara, whose voice was like fingernails on a blackboard to her. Sara was fat, foul-mouthed, shameless and vindictive. She slept naked, snored like a snow blower, threw her used underwear in the middle of the floor, and basically looked to stick it to Susanna any time she could.
Susanna decided the best course would be to go into the office. On a Saturday the place would be dark and empty. Susanna loved the quiet and the chance to be alone in the big space with just the whisper of air conditioners to keep her company. She drew the apartment door closed behind her, slipped down the stairs, hoping to avoid setting off the dog in 1A. It was a scant couple of blocks to the office. Maybe she could get ahead on the project she'd been assigned.
Rob was awakened by the banging of the plumbing and the screeches of Susanna's awful bird. Crammed onto the tiny, broken, saggy old single mattress, he tried hard to recapture the feeling of sleep. It was the weekend, after all, and the week had been brutal. Some interns got fun little "dazzle" projects and were "hard-press" recruited to join the Company upon graduation. Rob's internship fell into the other category: brutal hazing by teams pushing the worst technical chores onto people who couldn't complain, all in the name of "building work experience".
He considered getting up, but he didn't want to confront Golden Girl Susanna. One look had told him that she was one of "those people"--attractive and smart, stylish, part of the "in" crowd. She might "work hard", but there would always be a thumb on the scale for her. She was clearly very smart and it wasn't her fault that the Company was all-in to give her a good experience, but Rob was used to being "in-crowd adjacent".
A Golden Girl would date the quarterback on the team that Rob was kicker for. A Golden Girl went to Stanford on a full-ride scholarship while Rob worked two jobs to go to State. And a Golden Girl would notice Rob if there was some momentary use she could make of him. The more attracted he was to any given Golden Girl, the more he would be rejected. Which was understandable. Otherwise, the cheerleader class of people would be pawed at by everything that slouched past. He and Susanna were perfectly nice to one-another, but he'd be "that guy" whose name she couldn't quite recall in snapshots thirty years from now. His head knew that there could never be anything between them and that trying anything would just lead to her slapping him down like a fly on a windowsill.
Damn. He was awake now.
He cast about for sweatpants and a t-shirt. He needed to pee, and then he'd need to figure out what to do with his day off. Gently he opened the thick wooden door to his room. The ancient thing was coated in endless layers of thick white paint, which made it stick. It took effort to keep it from waking the whole building when he opened it. This time he managed to ease it open not too loudly and slipped into the bathroom for relief.
When he came out, Jason was up, which kind of surprised him. He figured Jason would stay in bed until at least noon, but there he was, sitting on the sofa, naked except for his briefs. He was stabbing at his phone frantically, which probably meant he was on a mission to score some weed and get baked.
It was hard not to like Jason. He was just good looking enough with an easy affability. He'd lived his whole life off of a trust fund. His major wasn't business or computer science. It was rhetoric, because why not? To him, the internship was kind of a toy--the excuse to go to a big city and spend the summer slumming. He showed up every day to the internship and he must have been doing some sort of project or assignment. But it seemed to Rob that he spent all his time bantering with the various managers. He clearly didn't care, an attitude that, ironically, made his bosses love him. Probably because he entirely lacked the sickening hunger for approval most interns had. There was nothing transactional about a conversation with Jason, because he didn't seem to need or want anything.
"Hey, man," Jason greeted him. "I got a line on some killer ganja. You want to come with?"
"That's alright. I was going to do some laundry," he replied, grappling for any excuse. Mainly he was thinking of avoiding a lost day.
"No prob. I'll bring some back for the house," Jason said.
Rob sat on one of the hard wooden chairs next to the dining table. The little finch's cage was sitting right there, and the little bird kept up a constant stream of peeps and chirps. He stared at the bird and wondered why Susanna had bought it. It made no sense. What would she do with it when the summer ended? She seemed destined for greater things than this dirty, scuzzy apartment and its matching soulless corporate job.
Jason went out, taking his happy, genial patter with him behind the clangor of the front door closing. Rob could hear the slavering monster in apartment 1A threatening murder as Jason passed down the stairwell. Then the front door of the apartment building closed, and Rob was alone with the peeping of the bird.
And Sara.
Sara had been playing possum all morning. First, when Susanna and her fucking bird were making enough noise to wake the neighbors, let alone her roommates. Then when she'd heard Jason and Rob doing their bro dance. She'd resisted going out and facing her shiny, attractive, self-absorbed roommates, the little shits. Finally, except for the
fucking bird
, the apartment was silent. She needed the bathroom. She couldn't stay in bed all day, even on a Saturday. Time to go.
She had slept naked, mainly because this pissed Susanna off, but grabbed her robe in case there was a chill. She headed directly for the bathroom and didn't bother to close the door. Sitting on the john in the dark, she sighed relief as she let herself stream forth. It felt fiercely liberating to be mostly naked and to let go with the door open.
The bird's cheeping picked up.
