Page 24 of Runaway
After our second 007 movie night and her relentless grilling of details, Stella had curled up on the couch, absorbed in her tablet, and mostly fallen quiet. I didn't mind. The silence wasn't so deafening when someone shared it. So I'd scribbled more ideas onto paper, mulled over our options, and, in general, had the best night in a while.
Pale morning light tinted the horizon as we quietly walked through Adventura. Both of us had been up early. We normally didn't even attempt to interact before noon, as if both of us couldn't sleep. Most of the time, it was easy for me to put off the enormity of tasks that I took on, but this was different. Never in my adult life had I formed any attachment to a place. JJ and I had literally lived in an old bus for a while. For nearly all of our twenties, we bounced around the globe, living on JJ's climbing sponsorships and whatever money I could scrub up on my early, failed business attempts. When my parents divorced, the house I grew up in was the first thing to go.
Adventura wasmyfirst home.
And now I could lose it.
Which is why I finished my workout by 7:00, showered, had breakfast, and responded to two newHearts on Firemessages. One from a girl named Shanti that was driving through tomorrow, and another from Sunni, who needed some money but really hated to ask. Shanti—that one had hope.
At 7:30 on the dot, I paced the floor to work out the broad logistics of this plan. By the time Stella snuck in through the back door at 8:00 and peered around the corner, as if afraid she'd disturb me, I'd already moved past basic cabin redesign and onto website construction. My sloppy notes covered four sheets of paper. Even I couldn't read two of the sentences.
But this morning seemed to have brought a change in her. Deep lines lived in her brow, and a growly expression covered her face. Was she the kind of girl that got hangry? Because she hadn't eaten yet.
“Regretting it already?” I quipped as I nudged her to the left, toward the commissary. She grumbled something as we approached the door.
“What are we doing here again?” she asked as I pushed open the door and motioned her inside. She tilted her head back to look at the two-story rafters overhead. On the far right were warehouse-sized shelves that stored and separated meals for campers in the summer. Workers organized and stored the food with weekly deliveries. Now, they lay empty, like a skeletal structure forgotten in the zombie apocalypse.
I yanked open a side door off to the left. Steel scratched across the cement floor as it swung toward us.
“Just checking what Justin's kept here so we know how much we'll have to pay for, as you put it,dolling it up.”
She made another sound, her focus back on her tablet, which she clutched like I'd take it from her. As if electronics and I had ever been friends.
A dusty lightbulb did a poor job of illuminating the closet, which was as perfectly organized as I expected. Nothing out of place except dust. A quick scan confirmed all the tools we would need. Basics like hammer, nails, spackle, every imaginable size of screwdriver, and more. Paint cans. Brushes. Rollers. Tarps.
Man land.
I freaking love this closet.
“Listen, Mark, I've put together a rudimentary cost analysis based on your current profit and loss—”
“English,” I muttered.
She sighed. “Me know your numbers.”
My back was to her as I attempted to wrench an old cardboard box off the shelf, which made it safe to grin.
“Tell me more, cavewoman Stell.”
“Okay,” she drawled, “to summarize in Mark terms, you need about $4,000 a month to pay off credit card debt and the mortgage. Right now, you have $1,000 in savings and $15,000 in credit card debt. You have three weeks until both the mortgage and the credit card are due again. You pay $2,000 for the mortgage and a minimum of $1,200 for the credit card.”
Those numbers normally wouldn't bother me. Money was fluid and came and went, but a long, lonely winter awaited me with little to do. There had been years in my life when I grabbed any job I could just to eat, but that kind of work wasn't available in Pineville. Now, I had nowhere else to go.
“Not bad,” I muttered as my finger caught the edge of the box. Dust trickled on my nose and made me sneeze when I finally yanked the box off the shelf. The lid tipped to the floor, scattering dead moths. She eyed them and stepped back to the doorway, which she leaned against.
“Setting aside income from your HomeBnB's to pay electric and food, if you plan to open one cabin—mine,” she added with an edge of tightness that made me grin further, “—you would need to earn $3,000 from renting that cabin in the next 21 days. That requires you to book out the next three weeks for $152 a day.” She hugged the tablet to her chest. “Starting within the hour.”
Marie—Stella—had always had a slice of self-righteousness to her tone just when we were about to start arguing. Her depth of belief in numbers was a sure foundation.They don't lie,she always said to me around gritted teeth.
But outside forces could skew numbers within seconds of discovery. A winning lottery ticket. A new investor. An idea that built with sheer work instead of monetary investment.
That same tone built within her now and gave me a little thrill. It's why I secretly loved to talk to Stella: we always did this back-and-forth. While I dreaded it because I never won, I adored the path to my demise.
“You assumed we need to make $3,000 this month,” I said. “Drop that to $2,000.”
Her frown could be felt through my back. “The only way to do that is to use your savings?”
“Yep.”
