Page 1 of Dirty Little Secret
Chapter 1
Zandra
Cold wind whipped around me as I climbed the stairs up to my apartment, which I shared with four roommates. Unfortunately, they were four of the messiest and most immature individuals I’d ever had the misfortune of meeting.
I’m met all of them while working as a cocktail waitress at Underground, a nightclub in Chicago, and we’d gotten along well enough to decide to live together. Little did I know that all four of them were very different people at home than they were while working with the public.
Being a few years older than any of them, at twenty-six I supposed I was just growing up a bit. That had to be the reason behind my budding impatience with the people I’d lived with for the last year.
It seemed like just yesterday that I was right there with them all, dumping clean laundry onto the floor instead of putting it in my closet, making a mess while trying to search for just the right thing to wear. Or even leaving dirty dishes in the sink with the hope that someone else would get disgusted enough with the mess to feel the urge to clean up. Yes, I was once just as filthy as they were, but things had changed in the last few months.
I had changed. Now all I wanted was a clean apartment to live in.
Is that too much to ask for?
Walking back into the quiet house after having a morning coffee at the small café down the street, I headed toward the one bathroom the five of us shared.
I would’ve loved to have been able to go to the bathroom without having to clean the damn toilet first. Two of my roommates were guys who had a habit of leaving trails of pee in places that didn’t make sense. Along the edge of the tub, around the floor near the toilet, and once even by the door, for some odd reason. And they never seemed to notice their mishaps either, leaving them for someone else to deal with.
I’d begun carrying around a little container with convenient small towelettes covered in peach-scented bleach that I would use to wipe things down. It seemed I was becoming more like my mother in this regard, a realization I disliked very much, but had no clue how to push away so I could go back to not giving a hoot about cleanliness.
In retaliation to my impending maturity, I’d gone to the salon to get my dark hair done in a more fun, youthful fashion. The new dark blue streaks might just be a visual representation of my attempt to cling to my youth, but so what? I liked them.
But even as I looked into the bathroom mirror after wiping the entire room down, I could see a new maturity in my blue eyes that hadn’t been there even a few months ago.
Yes, the streaks in my hair were the same color as my eyes. A girl likes to match, you know.
Staring disconnectedly into the eyes of the person looking back at me, that empty feeling I had at times started to creep in. Most of the time I could ignore the emptiness, but now and then it would find me and linger for a while before letting up and allowing me some relief once more.
Whenever it hit me, my life would temporary turn into a hellish existence. My dreams would turn into nightmares, and all I could do was drink coffee to keep me awake, trying to keep the bad dreams away. Wishing the feeling wouldn’t last more than a few days this time, instead of the week-long agony that had nearly drowned me the last time it hit me, I closed my eyes.
When I opened them up again, I saw myself staring back at me once more. A young woman, no longer the girl I had been. I needed to face things instead of trying to ignore or forget about them.
I had a bad past. So what?
Lots of people had bad things happen to them in their lives. Who did I think I was?
Was I invincible? Was I too good for anything bad to ever happen to me? No, I wasn’t. And I had to stop the internal berating that came along with every bout of depression.
Leaving the now-clean bathroom, I went to the bedroom I shared with the other two girls in the apartment. They were sprawled out on their little twin beds; one of them had her head at the wrong end of the bed.
I fought the urge to move her into the right position, a motherly urge that only proved to make the depressed feelings inside of me edge closer to the surface.
Tears began to sting the backs of my eyes, and I left the room to go to the kitchen and clean some more. Cleaning was fast becoming the outlet I turned to whenever the emptiness tried to claim me.
And with this crew of slobs, there was plenty of cleaning to do. The dishes needed washing, so I did the sink full of them. The floor needed to be swept and mopped, so I did that too. The fridge needed to be cleaned out, the leftovers tossed, and the entire thing wiped down with one of my handy bleach wipes as well.
By the time the first roommate woke up and dragged his ass out of bed, the kitchen sparkled, and everything smelled peachy. Standing there in his not-so-white, tighty whiteys, Dillon rubbed his brown eyes with the back of one hand as he yawned loudly. “What the hell are you doing, making all this noise on a Sunday, Zandy? We didn’t get in last night until four in the morning. Are you insane?”
Am I?
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I felt it best to ignore his question. “I’m cleaning, Dillon. A thing the rest of you must not have learned how to do yet. I’ll try to be quieter, so you guys can sleep. Sorry about that.” Apologizing for doing chores shouldn’t be something anyone should have to worry about.
I found resentment building up inside of me.These ungrateful kids should have to live in filth!
As Dillon walked wearily back to the bedroom he shared with the other guy who lived with us, I looked at the clean floor and wondered what the hell I was doing there.
My parents lived just outside of town. But I would never go back to live with them. I only talked to my mother when she called incessantly, and then only for a very short amount of time. I would let her know that I was alive and fine, but nothing more than that.
