Sometimes when you wake up in a new bed, your mind and body can forget that you are not in your own. On too little sleep, it’s easy to convince yourself that you are in your own comfortable bed, in your own home (or, wherever you regularly sleep), and that your day is about to go on as if it were any other regular day, and not one that is about to begin by waking up in a snow-buried motel, with someone you only met a few hours ago sleeping on the couch beside you. In this situation, if an alarm goes off at five, when you usually wake up around eight or nine, it’s understandable that you would get up in a daze, turn off the alarm, and fall back asleep. And if you were in this situation, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for your new friend on the couch to wake up an hour later, frantic that you have both slept in because their alarm didn’t go off.
“FuckFuckFuckFuckFuck!” Drake shouted, scrambling to get into fresh clothes. “Lulu! Hey! Wake up! We gotta go!”
Lulu turned over onto her side, facing away from the lights he’d turned on. She barely mumbled a response.
In the bathroom, Drake took his shirt back off, did a quick sink-bath for the hot spots (pits, neck, face, and hair), applied deodorant, and pulled his shirt back over his head, then brushed his teeth. Lulu kept trying to block out the sound, not totally understanding what was making it. When he came out of the bathroom, Drake was fully dressed, shaved, and had styled his hair, yet still looked like he’d woken up in the bathtub.
“You getting up or what?” he pressed, dashing across the room to store his toiletries in his bag.
Lulu, slowly coming back to herself, forced herself to sit up. In contrast to him, or maybe it was just through his own lens, she woke up looking as ready for the day as one could ever be, without a single loc of her curly hair out of place, except for the hair that she had left in a pile on the bathroom floor.
“Up? The sun’s not even up. We don’t have to be up yet.” She slowly lowered herself back onto the pillow.
Drake threw the window shades open, but she was right; there was no sun coming in, and not just because most of the window was buried behind a wall of snow.
“Welcome to the north,” he said, coming back over to the bed where he considered pulling the blankets off her.
His greeting became the key that reminded her of exactly what was going on. The previous night's events reformed in her memory, from the detoured plane landing to the argument before falling asleep. And in between there was an unfinished FanGirlz request that was supposed to pay for breakfast and a rideshare.
Without much enthusiasm, Lulu pulled herself out of bed. “Alright, I’m up. Time?” she asked him as she picked up her phone from the nightstand. A dozen and a half messages had come in from Marsha. Lulu called her back as Drake pestered her about getting up and to the airport.
Lulu gently shushed him when Marsha answered the phone, sounding half-angry, half-totally pissed. “What the hell happened, Lulu? I was up all night! Did you miss your flight?”
Up all night but not a text or a call until five a.m.? Lulu knew better but didn’t feel as though she was in any position to call out her lie. “I’m in Chicago,” Lulu told her. “We got rerouted ‘cause of the storm.”
Drake was standing by the door, bag in hand. He tapped his bare wrist and insisted, “It’s time to go.”
“Are you with someone?” Marsh asked over the phone.
Lulu made a pinching gesture over her mouth for Drake, then said, “No. I mean, yeah. It’s my ride. Had to get a place to stay for the night. Oh! And I meant to ask, can you spot me for a new flight? Or, check to find me a new flight? Everything was down last night when we landed, and I’m kinda stuck here until it gets fixed.”
Over by the door, Drake waved his hand in a come-on motion. Lulu scrambled out of bed and stole away her shorts and her one spare tank top into the bathroom to change. She mouthed the words, just gimme a sec!, as she passed him, and closed the door between them. The locs of her hair were still there when she entered the bathroom, and she promptly picked them up and shoved them into her toiletry bag.
“Are you serious? Do you know how much that first flight already cost me? Why didn’t you get it fixed when you landed last night?”
Lulu kept her voice low in case Drake was listening on the other side of the door. “Everything was down when we landed. We were all stuck. How bad did you get hit over there?”
Before an answer, Lulu heard a huff on the other side of the line. “Bad. Real bad. Look, I’m not surprised the flight got screwed, but you have to be on top of shit like this, sweetie.” She huffed again, then, “Geez, Lulu, you shouldn’t have left the airport.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
There was a short, but simultaneously terribly long pause before Marsha broke the news. “Everything’s booked. The flight insurance will waitlist you, but I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything before Thursday without paying extra. Holy shit, this storm is fucking nasty.”
“We’ll just pay extra, then!” Lulu exclaimed hopefully, struggling to keep her voice down.
Drake knocked on the door then, and called, “Hey! Lulu, you coming or what? Car’s on the way.”
She called back, “Just a sec!”
Marsha replied without acknowledging the interruption. “We? Lulu, that’s on you. I’ve already bled for you over this. I can’t keep holding your hand through everything. I got you this meeting, I got you a flight, now you have to get yourself over here. This isn’t just your future we’re talking about. Do you know how bad it’ll look for me if this girl I’ve been showering praise over never shows? Is that really how you want to pay me back?”
“No! No, obviously I don’t.”
Drake banged on the door again.
“Then get your ass over here. I don’t care how you do it, but if you’re not at that party on Thursday, I don’t know what else I can do for you.”
Lulu sucked in her lips and covered the microphone, ignoring whatever it was Drake was yelling about on the other side of the door. She didn’t wait for her breathing to steady when she said into the phone, “I’ll be there. I won’t let you down.”
“Good girl. I know you won’t.”
Marsha hung up the phone before Lulu could say ‘goodbye’, and the guilt started to flow. Here Marsha was, constantly throwing out lifelines for a girl who either couldn’t get her shit together, or refused to. When was the last time Lulu paid rent? Who knows. Not this year, that was for sure. This phone Lulu had? Lulu hadn’t paid for it. She paid for the cellular plan, at least, until she couldn’t afford it anymore.
In her mind, Lulu tried creating an income sheet for all the debts she owed Marsha, and that list had a whole lot of red in it that only ever seemed to grow. But did Marsha ever call that debt? Not yet. At the very least, Lulu knew Marsha wouldn’t call it until she could actually pay it back. But as long as it was owed, Lulu knew her place. And if Marsha said be to in the city by any means possible, Lulu would be there.
By any means possible.
The FanGirlz app on her phone displayed the last night’s unfinished private request. The video was ready to go as long as Drake’s interruption at the end was cut off, and the payout could be collected. With a shortened cut of the ice cream video she filmed the day before, she could probably get an extra tip. It wasn’t her best work, but booking a new flight right now wouldn’t be cheap, either.
Lulu sent both videos and marked the request as ‘Complete’. The payout came immediately, with an additional $5 tip for the shortened ice cream video.
Wonderful, she thought. Fifty-five bucks to get me cross-country.
Although there was one other option he had to get the most out of this fan. She sent him another message and came to an agreement for an extra $50. She just had to get to a post office to collect the payout.
Lulu looked at herself in the mirror. That face Drake had glimpsed with awe, to her, looked a mess. Lulu wiped her eyes and cleaned off the mascara she forgot to remove the night before.
Drake knocked again, calling, “Car’s here! I’m gonna be outside. You coming or what?”
“I’ll be there in just a second!” she called back, trying to sound her usual self, but unable to hold back the shame in her voice.
On the other side of the door, Drake paused. He looked at his phone and saw the rideshare icon approaching the motel. He wanted to meet the driver at the door and take off again before it came to a full stop. Lulu acted with zero sense of urgency, but then she answered him, sounding like she was having a panic attack.
“You feeling okay?” he asked, trying to soften his voice.
“Fine,” she called.
“Everything okay with your flight?”
Her answer wasn’t immediate, but it did come. “Yep.”
The bathroom door opened, and Lulu kept her head low. “Car’s here?”
Drake ignored the question, staring at her.
“I know,” she said. “I look like shit without makeup.”
He sputtered out a response. “No, you still look cute. Good! Fine. You look alright.” He then settled on, “You look great.”
Lulu went to brush back the hair on the side of her head, forgetting it wasn’t there anymore. “Thanks.”
“Was that your mom?”
Now was definitely not the time to explain the dynamic to him. “Yeah.”
Every short answer made him feel like last night’s argument was still going on. On the plane and at the airport, it felt like he couldn’t get her to stop talking. But now, he felt like he and her weren’t too dissimilar in one regard.
“Parents can be a bitch, sometimes,” he said.
Lulu squeezed past him to pack up her toiletries in her backpack. “Sometimes they’re just trying to show us they care.”
“That excuse doesn’t always work.”
“For mine it does.”
Maybe they were still dissimilar in that regard, Drake thought.
Lulu met him at the door, bag over her shoulder. She wore Drake’s sweater, with her jean jacket stuffed into the backpack.
“Still feeling up for breakfast?” he asked. “You’re paying, so I’ll let you pick. As long as it’s quick. We’re already late, and the rush at the airport is gonna be crazy.”