Part 5: Tabitha
"Owww!" Tabitha White said, as she carefully bit into an apple. She'd been trying to avoid the left side of her mouth, which hurt like fucking hell these days. But something the size of an apple was a bit hard to handle that way.
"Something wrong, Tabitha?" said Virginia Lord, her boss. Her voice gave the distinct impression that she expected nothing was wrong whatsoever.
"No, ma'am," Tabitha said, mentally scowling at her boss. Not physically, though; the fucking bitch probably had a surveillance system in place. There was no money to pay Tabitha a decent wage, or give her decent benefits, or even buy a half-as-shitty chair for her to sit on. But when it came to spying on customers and employees, Virginia Lord would spare no expense.
And it wasn't as if she even had to spare many expenses. Virginia Lord owned this whole damn shopping center, and at least ten other properties besides. Her dear departed daddy had built all this shit up, and now his bored daughter got to pretend to be a businesswoman.
Tabitha wasn't aware of Virginia's credentials, but even a moron (or a history major, like Tabitha) could see that this store was run terribly. Apparently, Virginia wanted to think of herself as not just a businesswoman, but an artistic businesswoman, as well. That meant that she took up a rather sizable part of this shopping center with her own art-supply store.
It didn't seem particularly fair that Virginia would have all of this, and Tabitha, who could do something with this kind of money, had to slave away to afford even a shitty life. She knew that life wasn't fair, but, really, did it have to be this unfair?
To add to all those problems, there was the feeling Tabitha got whenever she compared herself to her boss. Virginia was always perfect. Every strand of blond hair was perfectly coiffed, every bit of expensive clothing was perfectly selected, every part of her body was perfectly proportioned.
When Tabitha looked at herself in the mirror, on the other hand, she saw an absolute mess. Crappy teeth. Stringy, kinky hair. Acne scar-cratered black skin. A face that was too large, and boobs that were too small. Ill-proportioned, poorly dressed, constantly depressed Tabitha White.
The bell on the door rang, and Virginia sprung from her desk to greet her customer. She click-clacked past Tabitha, who just kept trying to get her computer to do anything at all. Meanwhile, her boss exclaimed in perfect delight at her customer, and started perfectly guiding her perfect customer around her perfect store.
Sometimes, when Tabitha was off of work and getting shit-faced on cheap beer, in her quiet, empty apartment, she wondered why she hadn't quit yet. For her, though, the answer was easy to come by, since she was just talking to herself.
To tell the truth, she loved Virginia.
It wasn't a third-grade-best-friend kind of love. It was just that whenever she looked at her boss, bitchiness and miserliness aside, she felt herself glow. It was the sort of love where she wanted to fuck her boss silly.
When Tabitha looked back on her previous crushes, she could see a clear pattern. There was Julie, from her last summer of camp, when Tabitha was 17 and just realizing her identity. Julie had been a class A bitch, but her deep blue eyes, her silver-blond hair, and that fine figure, had made Tabitha melt inside. The rest of the summer, Tabitha had masturbated to her fantasies of Julie being her girlfriend.
There'd been Alice Hodges, the captain of the cheerleaders in their senior year. God, what a stone-cold bitch, with her hard blue-green eyes and wavy blond hair. A couple times, Tabitha had suspected that Alice might like her, too. But she'd always been too timid to ask.
In college, she'd found her first real girlfriend. Lena Schwyz, the haughty Swiss exchange student, who had shown her what happiness had meant. Then, Lena had taken that happiness, and all the love Tabitha had given her, and smashed it. For months afterwards, Tabitha had felt like a worthless dupe, like none of it had been real.
That had led almost directly to this job. When her parents had found out that she was a lesbian, they'd cut her off. By the skin of her teeth, and with thousands of dollars in loans, Tabitha had managed to finish college. Her dreams of grad school were totally impractical, with all of this debt, so she'd found this job.
And here she was now, wasting away in a boring, useless job, with a comically inept boss and not even a few rewards to ease her burdens. Of
course
her teeth would go bad when she could least afford it. She could barely afford toothpaste, much less a dentist appointment.
Well, at least the clock said "5:00 PM" now. That meant she was free to wallow in misery and pain at home now. It was time to leave.
Tabitha stopped trying to get the computer to work and shut it down, instead. She scribbled the time on the work log by the back door, and left before Virginia could find something else for her to do.
She slouched her way down the shopping center, past all the other marvelous boutiques that payed rent to Virginia, and towards the bus stop. Just as she passed by the exit to the grocery store, she heard someone giggling, but she was too tired to pay any attention to it.
That proved to be a mistake a split second later, when she collided with a shopping cart. "Omigod, I'm, like, so sorry!" said a chirpy voice. "Are you, like, okay?"
Tabitha pulled herself to her feet and dusted herself off. "Um, yeah, I'm fine." Now, she found herself facing a bimbo.
There was really no other word for the woman who'd been pushing the shopping cart. She was a blond bimbo, dressed in astonishingly whorish clothes. Those clothes displayed her voluptuous body, her sensual curves, her enormous boobs.
"Hiiii," the bimbo said, extending a hand towards Tabitha. "I'm Crystal, and I'm, like, soooo sorry 'bout that." She giggled. "I'm such a silly person!"
"Okay," Tabitha said, taking Crystal's hand and shaking it. Her tooth, as if responding to the touch, twinged again, and Tabitha winced. "Owwww!" she said, clutching her cheek.
"Oooh, did I make your teethies hurt?" Crystal said, pouting at Tabitha.
"No, no, it was like that before," Tabitha said, waving the bimbo away. "It's not your fault, any of this. I should've paid attention myself."
"Wait, your teethies hurt already?" Crystal said. "You should come with me! I, like, work at a dentist's office! You can get it, like, all checked out and stuff!"
"I can't-" Tabitha began, but Crystal waved away what she'd been planning to say. "Don't worry, sillypants!" the bimbo said. "Dr. Joseph doesn't really care about getting paid. Come on, come on!" She grabbed Tabitha's hands and started pulling her away.
"Oh, okay, I suppose," Tabitha said. She didn't have anything better to do. It wasn't as if she had any friends to socialize with, or places to go. She might as well go have her teeth checked out.
It turned out that Crystal worked in the office park across the street, which Virginia didn't own. Apparently, her father and the guy who had owned this place had been bitter rivals, to the point of attempting to sabotage each other's projects. Virginia had carried over the family grudge against this guy, for whatever reason. But Tabitha had heard recently that it had sold to some new guy.
