Chapter Three Veronica
Chapter Three
Veronica
Clara bends, inhaling her gin and tonic like it’s the first liquid she’s seen after forty days and forty nights of stumbling through the desert. She’ll allow herself one drink out tonight, and make it last the entire time we’re here.
Our best friend, Jordan, on the other hand, has already knocked back their first martini and is waving down the cute bartender for another as they say, “A thousand an hour.”
I cough out a wet “What?” and work to swallow my sip of beer. “Jordy, I can’t go back to this guy and be like, ‘1K an hour, sir.’”
“No, that’s true,” Clara says, and I think she’s agreeing with me, but then she adds, “You can’t call him sir.”
“A thousand dollars an hour is, like . . .” I shrug, thinking. “What a lawyer charges when their client asks the court if the jury takes Venmo. I did the math, and my rate at PitchSlapped was sixty-five an hour. What if I ask for a hundred?”
“No,” Jordan says emphatically. “Ronnie, this is your chance to take a step up in the income bracket. Imagine you made a million dollars a year.”
I laugh. “Sure. Easy.”
“That’s a million dollars, divided by fifty-two weeks in a year, divided by a forty-hour workweek.” They close their eyes, using their amazing finance brain to quickly inform me: “That’s about $480 an hour.”
This time, both Clara and I choke on a sip.
“So go back and ask him for five hundred dollars an hour,” Jordan says, and in the few seconds of silence that follow, I find I’m unable to immediately argue with this suggestion.
The three of us stare ahead at the jewel-toned bottles of spirits, cordials, and liqueurs lining the mirrored shelves of our neighborhood bar.
I don’t know what Jordan and Clara are mulling over in the quiet, but for me it’s the rent bill I got today in an otherwise empty mailbox, with no sighting of Friday to ease the sting of the continued absence of my severance check.
I’m mulling over how getting asked back for second and third interviews is great, but these companies taking their sweet time in the hiring process is not great.
I’m mulling over my dead and empty fridge, and the fact that it’s a hassle to walk an hour to use the public computers at the library, and the daily sight of the corpse of my beloved office chair still lying prone in my bedroom.
What does it hurt to ask? I think. If Jude wants this so bad, let him say no. Hell, for five hundred dollars an hour, I might even go back to PitchSlapped if they ever came begging.
But damn, let’s try this first.