Renting the Mafia Enforcer

1. Stella

STELLA

The green is wrong yet again, and I’m starting to take it personally.

I’ve been mixing this color for six days.

Six days of scraping the palette knife across the canvas, leaning back, squinting, hating what I see, and remixing.

At this point, I think the painting knows I’m struggling and is enjoying it.

The green I want lives inside a wave right before it curls—alive, glowing.

Every time I get close to it, it dries one shade too flat.

It’s there, and then it’s gone. Like the paint is ghosting me. I’ve been ghosted by a color.

This is where I am in life. My apartment smells like oil paint and hay and the faintly sweet rot of a banana peel I threw out two days ago but is sitting in the can because—surprise—actually taking the bag to the dumpster is more than I can currently handle.

I can’t even handle mixing paint, which happens to be a large part of what I do for a living.

Stepping foot outside and forcing myself to smell whatever is coming from the dumpster?

Too much. Way too much. Especially since last time I was out there, I’m pretty sure I interrupted two raccoons in the act of making sweet love next to an open pizza box.

Who among us hasn’t been turned on by really great pizza?

My stomach growls loud enough that Socks’ ear twitches from his cushion in the corner. Even my rabbit is judging me at this point. “I know,” I tell him. “Give me a second.” As if my hunger is his personal issue.

The kitchen is four steps from the easel because my entire apartment could fit inside a midsize sedan.

I open the fridge and right away the cold hits my face, and I feel the ancient motor vibrating in my fingertips while I peer inside at the abundance of mayo, a bottle of mustard, and a jar of pickles with three survivors bobbing in brine that’s gone slightly cloudy.

That’s it. That’s the whole fridge. The complete grocery inventory of a twenty-one-year-old woman with a near-perfect standardized test score. All I have to show for it is a stalled painting and a bunch of condiments.

But okay, hold on. Pickles are cucumbers, right?

Cucumbers are a food. If I slice them thin and lay them flat, they’d have enough structural integrity to function as bread so long as nobody was watching.

A mustard-mayo sandwich on pickle bread.

I’ve done worse. I’m not exactly proud of myself, but it’s true.

I unscrew the jar and the vinegar smell punches me right in the sinuses.

It’s enough to wake me up, and for an unfortunate moment, I see myself in all my glory.

Standing barefoot on a cold tile floor with a wet pickle in one hand.

Even Socks, who has seen me do some profoundly questionable things, is looking at me from his cushion on the floor and wondering if this is indeed rock bottom.

I’m honestly not sure of the answer. I do, however, put the pickle back.

The easy answer is ordering in. I already have my phone in my hand, thumb hovering, muscle memory pulling me toward the Thai place four blocks over.

I’ve never been there in person. I’ve never seen it with my own eyes.

We have a relationship built entirely on the app and mutual trust. Yellow curry, low spice, extra rice—I could identify it blindfolded in a lineup at this point.

I’m also pretty sure I’m putting the owner’s kids through school, and if there was a punch card for loyal customers, I’d have a free meal coming to me by now.

I’m about to tap the order when I catch my reflection in the window above the sink.

My red hair is in a knot the way it’s been for the past few days.

There’s a smudge of blue paint on my jaw, which goes very well with the grayish complexion of someone who’s been living on screen light and fridge light for much too long.

The guilt hits like a fist punching me in the sternum.

I haven’t left this apartment in four days. I mean, I walked to the mailboxes on Wednesday, but the mailboxes are inside the building. That doesn’t count. Before that was the grocery run where I had a full panic spiral in the cereal aisle and left with nothing but Frosted Flakes and shame.

I’ve read enough about this—at two and three in the morning while curled up in bed and scrolling through articles—to know four days is the tipping point. That’s where choosing to stay in becomes unable to leave.

So. Groceries. Outside. I can do this.

First, I need to check the wind.

I always check the wind. It’s the first thing I do before I even commit to the idea of walking through the door.

Anything above fifteen miles per hour means I’m not going out.

I can’t explain it. I’ve tried. There’s something about a force you can’t see.

Being small in a world being loud and not knowing where the push is coming from. Fifteen is the line.

The app loads. The wind is currently eight mph. I let the air out of my lungs, and my shoulders drop from where they’ve been camping near my ears. Eight is nothing. That’s barely a breeze.

After I wash the paint from my jaw, I pull on my sneakers.

Socks watches me go through the steps. He’s a lop-eared rabbit, the color of dryer lint, and his emotional range runs from silent disapproval to asleep.

I love him more than I love most humans I’ve met, though that’s not a very high bar because I’ve met very few humans lately.

Most people roll their eyes at the term “emotional support animal,” and I get it, but those people have never had their walls close in at three a.m. while their lungs forgot how to work.

When that happens, and my brain starts telling me I’m actively dying, I pick him up and hold him to my chest. He gives me this full-body, inconvenienced, old-man sigh.

Somehow that sound and the weight of him and his warmth put everything back in its place.

He’s not a pet. He’s the one thing standing between me and completely losing it for real.

“I’m going to the store,” I announce with a firm nod. “I’m getting real food. No pickle bread. This is a triumph. Be proud of me.”

He twitches his nose. That’s pretty much as excited as he gets. It’s practically a standing ovation.

“Good idea,” I tell him, pulling the scrunchie from my hair and shaking it out. “I should probably brush my hair first.” Otherwise, I might have people thinking they need to give me money because I’m homeless, or at the very least in a state of crisis.

My hair is too long. I know this. But it’s one of those things where I can either deal with it hanging down to my lower back, or I can sit in a salon chair and let somebody use scissors way too close to my ears.

The last time I did that, my whole body locked up like somebody poured concrete into my spine.

The stylist asked if I was okay, and I guess I managed to tell her I was fine, even though I felt like I was going to die in that chair.

Needless to say, I never went back. People compliment it like it’s a statement: my waist-length red hair. It’s not, though. It’s more like a survival mechanism.

After brushing it out, I wind it into another knot on top of my head and wrap the scrunchie around it.

Good enough. I now look reasonably sane and capable of handling a trip to the store like a normal person.

I grab my tote bag from where it hangs near the front door and look back at Socks with my hand on the knob.

“Don’t throw any parties,” I warn him, like I always do.

Of course, he’s already asleep on his cushion.

So I’m quiet as I open, then close the door and check the lock twice. I’m not about to leave him vulnerable.

The air outside is warm with a thread of coolness underneath.

The late afternoon sun comes in low and orange between buildings.

I take a deep breath and hold it for a few steps, and I’m glad, really, that I managed to make it outside.

Sometimes I have to force myself, is all.

But I’m always glad when I do. At least, almost always.

The grocery store smells like floor cleaner and rotisserie chicken, and the thought of chicken makes my stomach growl louder than before.

It gets me moving faster, too, since the sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can go home and eat.

I grab a basket and do actual shopping. Bread, eggs, pasta.

Cereal, because I always get cereal. A bag of clementines that smell sweet through the mesh when I press my nose to them.

I’m doing it. I’m actually buying food like someone who plans on being alive and enjoying it.

My anxiety is not going to kill me today.

But somewhere around the dairy aisle, because I need milk for my cereal, the back of my neck goes tight. Everybody knows this feeling. It’s the one that kept small things alive back when small things were getting eaten constantly. Someone is looking at me.

I should ignore it. I get this feeling from security cameras and mannequins, and one time from a very aggressive cereal display with a cartoon toucan that seemed to be tracking me across the store.

My internal alarm system has cried wolf so many times, I’ve basically started treating it like random car alarms that go off outside my window.

Eventually, you always figure it’s an accident or a mistake, because it’s so common.

This time, I look up casually, pretending to read the nutritional information on a half-gallon of milk like it actually matters. My gaze brushes over a guy at the end of the aisle, who is most definitely looking at me and most definitely has a mullet.

The most aggressive hairstyle.