“Wonderful,” Lyla answered. “When can you move in?”
“Yesterday. Seriously, though, I need to be out of my apartment ASAP, so the sooner the better. I don’t have much, just a few suitcases of clothes and a couple of boxes.”
Lyla nodded and continued. “Our last roommate moved abroad. All her old furniture’s still in the room, so it might take us a minute to offload it, but then we can prorate the rest of the month. Unless you’d want us to leave it for you?”
The repo men had already come to collect pretty much everything of value from the Upper East Side apartment and Hamptons house, including almost all the furniture. After spending the last few nights in a sleeping bag on a parquet floor, even the Murphy-style kitchen-table bed in the ninth-floor walkup was starting to sound pretty damn good to me. Anything my new roommates were willing to provide would be a total godsend.
“That’s perfect. It would be a real help if you could leave it.”
“Awesome, you can move in tomorrow, then!” Lyla exclaimed.
“That’s great. My shift doesn’t start till four, so I’ll be here in the morning.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and looked up at Lyla. “I already have your number, should I get the two of yours?” I asked Oak and Sevyn.
“Oh, here.” Oak proffered her hand, her lime-green manicure meticulous.
I stared at her outstretched palm, her fingers kind of dangling there. I took them in an attempt at some kind of awkward limp handshake.
“No, no!” she exclaimed with a laugh and pulled her fingers from mine. She stuck her thumb in the air and said, “My nail. I had a QR code inlaid into the gel polish with all of my socials. If you open your camera, you can scan it and voilà!”
“Are you kidding me?” The words escaped my mouth before I could even stop them.
“No! I kid you not! It’s all the rage. It’s like a portable business card, but even better.”
“Aren’t business cards already portable? Never mind.” I stopped my line of questioning. I was clearly an alien on this planet of Gen Zers, and I had a lot of learning to do if I was going to keep up.
Oak lifted her hand again, and I opened my camera app and scanned her thumbnail, which instantly populated all of her social media handles into my phone under her contact info. Dude! That was kinda cool.
“Okay, so we will reach out to our landlord immediately to let him know, and barring any issues with the background and credit check and whatever, we’ll see you tomorrow,” Lyla said.
I stuck my finger in the air to pause the conversation. “Oh, I almost forgot I um . . . kinda had a bit of a run-in with a temperamental detective and sorta got arrested for assaulting an officer. The case was dismissed, though.”
“Honey, please. I had a similar arrest like four years ago at a Women’s March in DC that turned a bit hairy. Par for the course, am I right?” Sevyn offered in a self-satisfied tone and extended her hand for a fist bump.
“Great! I think this will be . . . great,” I said, even though I wasn’t actually sure if this was going to be an epic train wreck or the experience of a lifetime.
Chapter Sixteen
Having gotten the hang of my new commute over these last few weeks, thankfully, even with recent delays on the M Train, I managed to make it from my new apartment in Bushwick to Times Square for my shift. A look of relief washed over Charlie’s face as soon as he spotted me. “Oh good, you haven’t morphed into Elphaba yet. After your last shift, I had to wipe green fingerprints off half the place settings.”
“You know I make double the tips when I sing ‘The Wizard and I’ in full makeup.”
Charlie tilted his head to the side. “You wouldn’t have to do the makeup at all if you’d just get up the nerve to sing ‘Defying Gravity’ instead. If memory serves, that number’s your real moneymaker.” This was maybe the tenth time Charlie had mentioned this in just as many shifts, and I was running out of ways to dodge his urging. He didn’t know a thing about the moo heard round the world and the complicated history I had with that song, so he thought he was being helpful.
“We’ll see. So, what can I do around here?” I asked, desperately trying to change the subject for the second time today.
Charlie tossed me a cloth from inside his apron pocket. He motioned to the rest of the booths that still needed a wipe down, while he placed freshly laundered linens atop the clean tables.
“Can you take sections one and two today? Paula has a callback and won’t be here ’til the late afternoon,” he said.
“Oh really?” I lifted my head, shifting my focus from wiping the table. Apparently, my voice was unable to hide my disappointment.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Paula was supposed to be the Joanne to my Maureen in our ‘Take Me or Leave Me’ duet.” I pulled my set list from my back pocket and scanned it over. “It’s fine, just means I’ll have to rework the Rent medley.”
“If you need me to stand in, just let me know,” Charlie offered genuinely. “I thought I filled the Anne Boleyn hole in the SIX megamix pretty well, if I do say so myself.”
I laughed at the memory of Charlie with two space buns slapped over his ears and a bedazzled B choker around his neck. Truth be told, his rendition could’ve given Tom Holland’s iconic Lip Sync Battle a run for its money. “Teamwork makes the dream work, right?” I teased. “Is there anyone you won’t play?”
He tapped his upper lip and thought for a moment. “My line in the sand was Little Orphan Annie. Actually, no,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, “I take that back, a seven-year-old’s birthday party came into the restaurant a few years ago, and the mom offered two Benjamins if we could throw together an Annie mash-up. And for two Bennies in our tip jar, you can bet your bottom dollar I was out there belting out ‘Tomorrow’ like there wasn’t one, red wig and all. I don’t know how many other men would be up to the challenge,” he joked.
“Not to mention have the range to pull it off,” I teased back, tossing the damp dishrag into the linen bin.
“But that’s the gypsy life, though, right? We all help each other out, have each other’s backs, cover for one another when we have a real gig or audition. Everyone here understands the dream, and we hustle hard so we can each pursue our own version of what that looks like. That’s why I’m still here all these years later.”
Carrying over a bin of clean silverware and a stack of paper napkins, I slid into one of the booths and began rolling them together into sets. “So, what’s the dream now? Still composing? If I remember right, you were writing a show of your own. Did you ever finish it?” I asked.
Charlie scooted into the booth across from me and grabbed some forks and knives to join in. “I finished that one, and three others to varying degrees of success, but nothing Lin-Manuel Miranda–level yet. My biggest hit had a three-week run at The Public a few summers ago, which was pretty awesome. And I’m working on something now I think might have some potential.”
“That’s incredible. You’ll have to tell me a bit more about it sometime.” It was refreshing to talk with someone who really understood how the desire to create lived like a supercharged layer just beneath your skin. I’d set my eyes on being an actress ever since I was a little girl in Miss Mildred’s basement theater class, singing and dancing in front of anyone who would watch and listen. That same drive I’d felt since the age of five may have been dormant for a while, but with each shift at Mimi’s, I was realizing it wasn’t entirely dead like I’d thought, just hibernating.