Chapter 1 #2
I almost didn’t answer. I was mid-story about my latest Hinge disaster, and Jacks was doing that thing where he laughs so hard no sound comes out, which is my favorite reaction to achieve, and I wasn’t about to interrupt it for a phone call.
But the caller ID said PALMS AT BAYSHORE MGMT, which was my apartment complex, and apartment complexes don’t call you at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday to tell you you’ve won a prize.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Kwon? This is Terri from Palms at Bayshore management. I’m calling to inform you that there’s been a water event in your unit.”
A water event.
Like my apartment was hosting a pool party.
Or my bathroom had decided to throw a rave without my consent.
Or the plumbing had looked at its calendar and thought, You know what Tuesday needs? An event.
“I’m sorry, a water event?”
“A pipe burst in the wall between your unit and 4C. There’s significant water damage to your bedroom, your living area, and portions of your kitchen. Maintenance is on-site now and—”
I didn’t hear the rest because I was already moving, phone pressed to my ear, apron ripped off, keys grabbed, and Jacks yelling, “Benji, WHAT—” as I blew past the bar like my hair was on fire.
“My cat,” I said to Terri, or possibly to God. “I have a cat. Is my cat okay?”
“Sir, I’m not sure about any pets, but maintenance reported that the unit is—”
“PRINCESS CONSUELA,” I said, as though Terri should know who that was, as though everyone should know who that was.
“She’s a sphinx. She’s hairless. She has anxiety, Terri.
She does not do well with change. One time I moved her water bowl three inches to the left, and she didn’t speak to me for a week.
If your water event has traumatized my cat, I will—”
“Sir, if you could come to the unit, we can assess—”
I was already in my car.
The drive from Barbacks to my apartment normally took eleven minutes.
I made it in seven, which I’m not proud of—except I absolutely am.
I parked crooked across two spots (sorry, Terri) and took the stairs three at a time because the elevator in my building has the urgency of a government employee on a Friday afternoon.
The hallway outside my apartment smelled like wet carpet and broken dreams.
Terri, a woman in a polo shirt who looked like she’d been having a significantly worse Tuesday than me, was standing outside my door with a clipboard and an expression that said she didn’t get paid enough for this shit.
Behind her, through my open door, I could hear the sounds of industrial fans and, distantly, the unmistakable shriek of a cat who had been victimized by the concept of water.
“Princess Consuela!” I shoved past Terri (sorry, Terri) and into my apartment and—
You know in movies when the hero walks into a disaster zone and there’s that slow-motion shot where they turn in a circle and take it all in while dramatic music plays?
This was that, except the dramatic music was the squish, squish, squish of my sneakers on what used to be my floor, and the soundtrack was Princess Consuela screaming from the top of my refrigerator like a gargoyle having a psychotic break.
My bedroom was destroyed.
The wall between my unit and 4C had basically vomited water across everything I owned.
My bed was a swamp.
My closet—oh, God, my closet, where my clothes lived, where my sequined jackets and my vintage band tees and my carefully curated collection of pants that made my ass look like a conversation topic all coexisted in peaceful harmony—was a wading pool.
My living room was only slightly better, which is like saying a dumpster fire is slightly better than a house fire.
The couch was soaked.
The rug was a biohazard.
My TV was fine, because the universe wasn’t completely without mercy, but the stand it sat on was warped and leaning at an angle that suggested imminent collapse.
The kitchen was damp, not destroyed; but it was damp enough that everything felt wrong, like the room was sweating.
And Princess Consuela, my baby, my angel, my tiny naked queen, was on top of the refrigerator, pressed against the ceiling, her huge ears pinned back and her eyes so wide she looked like a furless gremlin mid-transformation.
She was producing a sound I’d never heard from her before, a continuous, warbling scream that was part banshee, part car alarm, part vampire-meets-sunlight.
“Baby doll,” I said, reaching for her. “Baby doll, it’s okay. Daddy’s here—”
She hissed at me with such force that I felt the breeze.
Okay. Fine. That was fair.
A maintenance guy in rubber boots was pulling soaked drywall off the bedroom wall. He looked at me, looked at the screaming cat, and said, “That thing’s yours?”
“She’s having a moment.”
“She’s been having a moment for forty-five minutes.”
“She’s thorough.”
Terri appeared behind me with her clipboard. “Mr. Kwon, I need to discuss the remediation timeline.”
“Remediation timeline” was a phrase that sounded official and competent and like someone had a plan. What it actually meant, as Terri explained while Princess Consuela provided a soundtrack of unrelenting vocal anguish, was this:
Benji would be dislodged for six to eight weeks, minimum.
My apartment was uninhabitable. The drywall needed to be replaced, the flooring needed to be pulled up, and there was a mold risk that required professional assessment. My renter’s insurance would cover temporary housing, and the building would assist with logistics.
Oh, and they were very sorry for the inconvenience.
Inconvenience.
My life was a puddle, and Terri was calling it an inconvenience.
“Six to eight WEEKS,” I said.
“Minimum,” Terri said, which felt unnecessary but also honest. I couldn’t decide if I respected or hated her for it.
“And what exactly am I supposed to do in the meantime? I have a cat, Terri. I have a hairless cat. Do you know how many hotels accept hairless cats? I’ll tell you: none.
I checked once when I was going to a wedding in Orlando and every hotel within my budget treated Princess Consuela like she was a biohazard.
One receptionist asked if she was ‘a medical situation.’ A medical situation, Terri. ”
Terri, to her credit, did not flinch.
Terri had clearly survived worse than me.
“The building is working on placement options for all displaced tenants,” she said with the practiced calm of someone reading from a script she’d already delivered forty times that day.
“We’re reaching out to unaffected units in the building to see if anyone is willing to temporarily house a neighbor.
There are financial incentives involved for any tenant who participates. ”
“Financial incentives.”
“I can’t discuss the specifics, but it’s a generous offer. We’ll be in touch within twenty-four hours once we’ve identified potential matches.”
Matches.
Like this was a dating app.
Like Terri was going to swipe right on someone for me and say, “Congratulations, Mr. Kwon, we’ve found you a man with a spare room and a tolerance for screaming cats. May you live happily ever after in his apartment until your floor dries.”
“Twenty-four hours,” I repeated.
“We’ll call you tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’d like to gather any essential belongings from the unaffected areas—”
I was already moving.
I grabbed what I could: Princess Consuela’s carrier (she went in with the resigned fury of a war criminal being transported to The Hague), a suitcase of clothes from the one dry corner of my closet, my toiletries bag, my phone charger, and the garment bag containing my most structurally important sequined items, because if you think I was leaving those to the mold, you don’t know me at all.
I stood in the hallway with my cat, my suitcase, and my sequins. The door to my apartment was open behind me, industrial fans roaring, the smell of wet drywall and catastrophe wafting out like the world’s worst candle.
Across the hall, apartment 4B was dark and silent.
Newspaper Robe Man was either asleep, out, or simply existing in that specific brand of unbothered quiet that I was constitutionally incapable of achieving.
From inside the carrier, Princess Consuela produced a sound that I can only describe as a very small, very furious opera.
“I know, baby doll,” I said. “I know.”
I loaded us into the car, drove back to Barbacks, and walked in with the carrier in one hand and the garment bag in the other, wearing mascara I didn’t remember applying smudged under both eyes—oh wait, that was from crying in the car.
Finn took one look at me, reached under the bar, poured me a whiskey, and set it on the counter without a word.
“My apartment is a lake,” I said.
“I see that.”
“Princess Consuela has been screaming for an hour.”
“I hear that.” He glanced at the carrier, from which a low, menacing growl was emanating like a haunted handbag. “She okay in there?”
“She’s composing her manifesto.” I took the whiskey, tossed it back in one go, then set the glass down. “They say it’ll be six to eight weeks, Finn. And that’s their minimum.”
“Bloody hell.” Finn’s eyes went wide. “Weeks?”
“The drywall is destroyed, the floor has to come up, and apparently there’s a mold risk.” I said “mold risk” the way other people say “testicular abnormality.”
“Are they putting you up, at least?”
“Terri says the building is finding temporary housing. They’re doing some kind of placement program with other tenants, offering ‘financial incentives.’ She’s supposed to call me tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Finn leaned on the bar, going into problem-solving mode, which was his default state and one of the many reasons I loved him. “Okay, so worst case, if the building’s thing doesn’t work out, we figure out something else—”
“Finn. I can’t go to a hotel with my cat, your apartment is the size of a Prius, and Jacks is at Skyler’s no-pet fortress. Mark lives in fucking Brandon, and Rod’s apartment is so small that his stove and his front door are in a committed relationship.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Finn said. “We always do.”
“What if we don’t?”
“Then you’ll live here. We’ll put a cot in the office. Princess Consuela can guard the liquor.”
From inside the carrier emerged a single, outraged yowl that lasted longer than any of my Texan neighbor’s words.
“She says that’s beneath her,” I translated.
“I believe it.” Finn poured me another whiskey. “Drink. Work your shift. Worry about it later.”
“I don’t want to worry about it later.”
“Then worry about it now, but do it while making drinks, because we’re short-staffed and table six has been waiting for their mojitos for ten minutes.”
I looked at him.
Then at the bar—my bar, the place that had become the center of my universe in the two years since a chaotic interview in which I’d talked too much and made the best drink of my life and somehow gotten hired on the spot.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m keeping Princess Consuela behind the bar.”
“Absolutely not.”
“She’ll be in her carrier! Besides, she’s already here. Where else is she going to go?”
Finn opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the carrier, looked at me, then pinched the bridge of his nose in a gesture I’d seen approximately nine hundred times. I considered it a personal compliment, because it meant I’d gotten under his skin in the way that only family can.
“Behind the bar,” he said. “She stays in the carrier, and if she makes a single sound—”
“She’ll be quiet. She’ll be an angel. You won’t even know she’s there.”
Princess Consuela chose that exact moment to unleash a yowl so loud that a customer at table three flinched and spilled his beer.
Finn glared at me but said nothing.
I worked my shift, making mojitos and old fashioneds and the spicy margarita that had become our bestseller. I did the bottle tricks that made people film me for their Instagram stories and flirted with regulars and welcomed first-timers.
I was Benji with a capital B, a neon-sign, never-stops-moving Benji, and for six hours, I almost forgot that I was homeless and living out of a garment bag and a cat carrier.
Almost.
But every time there was a lull, even a thirty-second gap between orders or a bathroom break or a moment of quiet at the end of the bar, it hit me again.
The soaked closet, the warped TV stand, the six to eight weeks minimum.
Underneath all of it, quiet as a splinter, was the fear that I was a twenty-five-year-old bartender with a hairless cat and no savings and a life that could be upended by a pipe in a wall, that everything I’d built—my job, my TikTok following, my life—was balanced on something as fragile as drywall and busted copper tubing.
But I didn’t say any of that.
I made drinks, I did the show, and I smiled until my face hurt.
At 2 a.m., after close, I loaded Princess Consuela back into the car and drove to Mia’s apartment, where she’d made up the couch and left a bowl of water out for the cat without being asked, because Mia was Mia and she’d probably known I’d end up there before I did.
“One night,” she said, handing me a blanket. “Because I love you; but my building has a no-pet policy, and my landlord has the moral flexibility of a Puritan.”
“Thank you,” I said without conviction.
I lay on Mia’s couch with Princess Consuela on my chest. She was finally quiet, finally still, her wrinkly body warm against mine, as I stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere across town, in an apartment building that was trying to ruin my life, a bulldog was snoring, and a man in an oatmeal bathrobe was reading a newspaper.
Neither of them had any idea what was coming.
Neither did I, honestly.
But Tuesdays, man.
Never trust a Tuesday.