Outside, the weather was predictably pleasant. San Diego came through with its usual balmy breezes, rustling the palm trees against the clear blue sky. I took a deep breath, letting the salt air fill my lungs. Dumpy apartment notwithstanding, I was extraordinarily lucky to live here, a stone’s throw from the ocean, in a city where the sun always shined.
I hustled past the blue bungalow, relieved Trey was nowhere in sight, then turned left onto Cass Street, where a homeless man was digging through a trash can on the corner. With the ever-growing homeless population in PB, this was a pretty common sight. Normally, I’d avert my eyes and keep walking, but when he unearthed a half-eaten, rancid burrito and thoughtfully sniffed it, as if contemplating his breakfast, I found it hard to turn away.
“Excuse me.” I approached him cautiously, the unopened protein bar in my outstretched hand. “If you’re hungry, you can have this.”
There was a glint of suspicion in his watery eyes. I shifted my weight onto my back foot, just in case things took a turn for the worse. Fortunately, he dropped the burrito and grabbed the protein bar, grunting something that sounded vaguely like “Thanks,” before trudging away.
Well, that put some stuff in perspective. I may have been jobless, carless, and in danger of imminent eviction, but at least I didn’t have to go digging through the trash for my breakfast. Though now that I’d given my own breakfast away, coffee would have to sustain me this morning. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to have a friend who’d provide it for free.
The Bean House was located two blocks south, in a bright yellow, 1920s-era cottage. Considered a PB institution, it had been run by the same owner for almost twenty years. Mari had worked there for ten of them, and I’d been hanging out on the patio during her shifts ever since.
I’d met Mari in seventh grade, when she and her family moved into our apartment complex on the side of the freeway. My mom, Natasha, and I were in unit 209; Mari and her mother were down the hall in 202. I distinctly remember the first time I saw her, hauling a massive milk crate full of books up the stairs. When I offered to help, she accepted with a grateful smile. We quickly bonded over our shared love of The Hunger Games (way better than the Twilight series) and the tweenage frustrations of being raised by strict single moms.
Twelve years later, we were still inseparable. We both still lived in PB, too—though I was alone in my tiny apartment, while she split a bigger, nicer space with two roommates on the other side of town.
The Bean House wasn’t very busy right now, but that was to be expected. According to Mari, their weekday morning rush hours were between five o’clock, before the surfers hit the waves for dawn patrol, and eight o’clock, after all the commuters hit the highway for a long day at work. I was neither a surfer nor a commuter, so I often took advantage of the subsequent lull to say hi.
When I walked in, I spotted Mari at the register, tending to a customer with an extremely specific request for his latte.
“Half-caf, nonfat, two-shot, extra hot, with absolutely no foam.”
There was murder in her big brown eyes. When she caught sight of me in the doorway, though, her face lit up. She called over to a guy standing at the condiment bar, stuffing napkins into a dispenser. “Hey, Logan, can you take care of this gentleman’s order, please? I’m going on break.”
Logan complied, and as the man repeated his lengthy instructions, Mari filled two cups with dark roast, then stepped out from behind the counter. “Let’s sit outside,” she said.
We settled down at a bistro table on the back patio, right beside the rose-filled garden and beneath the shade of a crape myrtle tree.
“What’s going on?” I asked, then took a luxurious sip of the hot brown life elixir.
She shrugged. “Nothing new. Things have been kind of slow around here, which is good because it gives me extra time to write.”
Although Mari worked at The Bean House to pay the bills, her true passion was comedy. Her ultimate goal was to be a Hollywood screenwriter; she had a whole drawer full of original rom-com scripts she’d been pitching to agents with no luck. In the meantime, she’d set herself up with a moderately successful YouTube channel, Marisol Vega Hates Everything, in which she complained about the world in a way that was both hilarious and endearing. In my opinion, she should’ve been famous by now, but it was hard to gain traction in the overcrowded web series world.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Fine.” I swallowed hard. “But my car broke down.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yeah. Right in the middle of a shift. And you’ll never guess who I was delivering to. Remember that physics professor I had? The one who accused me of grade grubbing?”
“Of course I remember. What a dick.”
I’d spent hours crying on this patio after that happened, Mari consoling me with a bottomless cup of joe.
But the truth is, I had been grade grubbing, just a little. My GPA had been on a downward slide for the past two semesters, and I was desperate to bring it back up. Five extra points on my physics final would’ve brought me from a D+ to a C-in that class, saving me from academic probation. With grades like that, Professor Trammel was right that I didn’t have what it took to succeed in the premed program.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to pursue a career in medicine, anyway. At that point, I’d switched majors five times in three years. Six months before I dropped out, I’d been sure my calling in life was urban planning. The semester before that, it was philosophy. No accredited med school would’ve admitted me.
So Trammel was probably also right about me being mediocre.
I wouldn’t have considered myself coddled, though. Mostly, I was just confused.
When I’d dropped out of school, Mari had told me I was making the right decision. That college was a scam fueled by the “education industrial complex” and I was lucky to escape before I’d accrued any more debt.
Natasha, on the other hand, had told me I’d live to regret it. And as I sat here, sipping my coffee, recounting the tale of how I delivered fried chicken to my old physics professor before my car died in his driveway, I had to admit my sister was right.
“Where’s your car now?” Mari asked.
“At some mechanic in Encinitas. I don’t know if they’ll be able to fix it, though.”
“Geez, I’m sorry.” She fidgeted with her earring, a look of genuine concern clouding her face. “What’re you gonna do now?”
“Well, I’m gonna try to find some stuff to sell on Craigslist.”
Her fidgeting stopped abruptly. “What, as, like, your job?”
“No.” Though I hadn’t exactly ruled it out. “I just have to score enough cash to pay my rent on Sunday. I’m short two hundred bucks. Rob left his bong in my closet, I’m thinking of selling that off.”