Chelsea Wang

"I am not snobbish. I am not out of touch. I will prove it!"

Chelsea Wang was eighteen. Her figure was slender as only Asian bodies can be. The skin on her face was smooth and moist from premium treatments. The dark hair went to the middle of her back. There was a light curl and delicate shine from a recent hair treatment. The hair looked so soft that it tempted caressing it. Her lips had a neat red gloss from a high end product.

"You have to live more low-key. Another 120mph speeding ticket! You keep our family lawyer busy!"

Huan Wang was forty. She had curly hair. The business suit made her look serious. Her face was angry and square. The words spit out of her with velocity. She towered behind the kitchen island with her feet wide. Her fist pumped in the air.

Chelsea softly shrugged, a tentative emotion on her face. She opened her purse to search for her items and laid out these items: a British Columbia driver license, a Chinese ID card, keys to her white Lamborghini, American Express Black Card, a money clip with seven one-hundred dollar bills, and iPhone. She stood up in her 700 dollar wedge high heels and the $1,000 dollar Victoria Secret pajamas set.

"I will live homeless for three days," she declared and walked out of the door.

She walked through the courtyard past her white Lamborghini, her dad's Maserati, and her mom's Maybach. She walked past her Chinese neighbors doing their morning tai chi routine, slow choreographed group movements. She walked towards Downtown Eastside. A man pushed a shopping cart laden with plastic bags seven feet high. A woman with a strung out face, which was obscured by a hood pulled tight, twitched in the corner. Two bare chested, toothless, and joyful men were playing a guitar with three strings and drumming on a flipped over bucket.

"I'm looking for a soup kitchen. Could you point me in the right direction?" asked Chelsea.

"If I had a hammer, I'd hammer all day down that street by the East Side Soup Kitchen," the guitar player sang and pointed towards the ocean front.

When she arrived, there was a line of huddled people stretching down the block. The man in front of her was a round mountain underneath a gray wool blanket. He coughed in bouts of seven. The woman that arrived behind her had red cheeks from alcohol and the hair on the right side shaved off. That woman didn't waste any time putting her hand on Chelsea's shoulder, "Good morning lovely." The woman's hands found Chelsea's hair quickly, which they inspected, "Your hair is so lovely." Then, the woman's eyes looked warm and friendly into Chelsea's, "Can I borrow five dollar? I'll bring it right back to you?"

"I'm sorry. I don't have any money," replied Chelsea courteously.

The woman walked away. Only one foot was wearing a white sandal that had turned dirty gray.

The line took thirty minutes until she entered the soup kitchen. The air was stale. The space was crowded. People taking their plates from the counter left out of the door again without sitting down. A man had thinned hair that he grew out long and never washed. He scratched his scalp at length with unhealthy, red fingers. When Chelsea reached the food counter, a very big woman lifted three helpings of spaghetti out of a pot nearly the size of an oil barrel onto a paper plate.

The woman met Chelsea's searching eyes, "We are out of utensils. Next!"

Chelsea walked out into the street and sat down on the sidewalk. Her feet were in the street. She very carefully lifted up each spaghetti between her fingers to avoid staining her clothing. When she finished, she carefully licked her fingers clean.

"This is not that bad. I can do this," she told herself.

She stayed at Tim Hortons as long as she could. When her head fell asleep on the table, a worker roused her, "You can't sleep her. You haven't ordered anything. You have to leave." So, she wandered the streets of Downtown Eastside in the dark and settled on the deserted kid's playground. A couple of syringes on the ground that had been stomped flat. Next to a bush, she found some grass and made herself comfortable for the night in the cover of a bush. She covered herself with a found tattered newspaper. The occasional sound of a person walking on the sidewalk echoed through the quiet streets.

At some point, she turned around and felt her shoes were gone. A soft dew was on her forearm from the cooling night air. She turned to her other side to rest her head on her hand. Sometime later, she felt a thick pamphlet in front of her chest where her purse had been. The air had turned a shade colder as it crawled up her pajama legs. She let the pamphlet drop to the ground and turned to the other side.

A hand on her mouth startled her. The hand was rough, smelled of earth, mercilessly pressed her lips against her teeth. Two hands pulled down her pajamas. All she could see were dark shadows under the bush and a distant street lamp. The pajama top was unbuttoned. The underwear was torn off. Lips sucked on her nipples. Then, a penis slipped into her vagina. The man with his hand on her mouth, slipped into her asshole. Quietly, the two men worked up a good steam. After five minutes, they both ejaculated inside of her. She could feel the liquid.

"Are you done?" asked the man in front.

They got up and left her naked on the ground. She pulled the trash bag out of the trashcan next to the wooden horse. She dumped the trash out and poked holes for her head and arms. She wore that and went back to sleep.

Three days later, she walked back into her family house, tattered, scrawny, nails chipped, and hair matted.

"Piece of cake," she told her mom and picked up her valuables to drive in her Lamborghini to the spa.