Page 2 of Sweet Shots

Swallowing hard, I force my eyes open, and the weight of a freight train smacks me right in the chest.

My account isn’t just empty—it’s negative. By more than five thousand dollars.

I’m going to be sick. Oh my god, I am going to be so sick.

I lower myself to the couch, gripping the arm of the chair for dear life, afraid I’m going to pass out.

This has to be a joke. A sick, terrible joke.

My phone rings, waking me.

“Hello?” I answer, still half asleep and confused.

“Mikah, it’s Nova. Lorna needs to see you in her office first thing tomorrow.”

A weird tickling feeling goes through my chest, and I jerk upright, remembering what happened to me earlier. Someone hacked into my accounts—no, not just that. It seems they stole my identity. All my money is gone. I’m broke. I’m in debt! Oh my god, I’m in debt… I’m going to throw up.

“First thing?” I say, trying to stay calm, considering she’s my boss’s receptionist.

“Yeah, it’s important. Don’t be late.”

I blink a few times, trying to wake myself up. “Can I ask what it’s about?”

Lorna never wants tosee me in her office.I pretty much have free rein to do what I want. I make my own content, put it up on their host website, they take a percentage. The end. I’ve filmed some things at their warehouse before, some solo stuff and quick shots with other people, but I prefer to work out of my home. It’s what I’ve built my platform around, what my fans like, and most importantly, whatIlike. It’s all perfectly crafted around voyeurism, which far more people enjoy than they are willing to admit.

“Lorna will explain everything tomorrow,” she says, which has a pit forming in my stomach, even though there is a smile in her voice.

Lorna’s going to fire me. I’m not sure why she would. I haven’t done anything wrong, but it’s obvious I’m on a bad luck streak. After everything that happened this morning, why wouldn’t I get fired? Things in my life have been too good for too long. There’s no way my life would stay so simple—why would it? The universe doesn’t love me that much. I was born with bad luck hovering over my head—a Friday the 13th baby and a full moon! If that doesn’t say I’m cursed, I don’t know what does.

We get off the phone and I lay back down, covering my face with my hands. The only thing I want to do is go back to sleep, where I can forget all this nonsense that’s going on. But I have this awful homesick feeling that happens every time something bad happens in my life. It’s like the negativity around me is begging for more, knowing this isn’t the life I belong in. Thatit’s all fake and on a time limit. My bad luck is trying to find its way home; trying to remind me I shouldn’t be here and instead go back to where I came from. It’s a sickening feeling.

I scroll through my call list and press on Zach’s contact. He answers on the second ring.

“Long time no talk,” he answers, and I hear the smile in his voice.

“My life is falling apart,” I mutter, fighting back tears and staring up at the ceiling.

“Considering you’re there and not here, I’d say you’re doing just fine.”

Always the positive one, he is.

“Someone stole my identity, took all my money, who knows what else, and my boss needs to talk to me tomorrow.”

He whistles, following it up with a, “Yikes.”

I groan. “My life is ruined!”

“Oh, stop being so dramatic, Mikah. I’m sure you’ll get it figured out. You always do.”

“Not the point.” Though I know it’s true.

It’s true, but it’s tiring. I’m sick of fixing my life all the time. I just want to live it. Fighting to survive is exhausting. When is it going to stop?

I’ve been fighting to survive since the day I was born. I nearly died being born addicted to crack because it’s my mother’s drug of choice. I’m lucky I don’t have any long-lasting effects, I understand that, but that doesn’t cancel out all the awful shit I’ve had to deal with in mylife.

I’m not sure how I survived as a baby or a toddler; I got into her stash more than once when I could barely walk. How the hell did she get to keep me? I’ll never know. She had a new man every week, and as I got older, they got meaner, intimidated by me for whatever reason. They’d threaten my life and hit me, sometimes more than they’d hit her. It was always my fault, of course. My mother blamed me for everything. I’m not sure if home life was worse than school, since everyone picked on me because I was trailer park trash with a whore mother, even though half the kids in the damn school lived in the same park. I was an easy target because my mother made it so. So, when I found a way out of that place, I left and never looked back.

Zach is my one and only friend, and he’s still there, so I call but won’t visit. And when I have shit days like today, something in me tells me I should just go back and live the life I was meant to. That things won’t look so bad if I’m there.

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