5:09pm
Well, fuck. Jeannie’s growling stomach made her look at the time and she was shocked at how late it was. Where had the whole day gone? Surely she hadn’t wasted the last six hours looking at apartments in Paris on the internet and daydreaming about having a sweet pied-a-terre in the 14th arrondissement with a loyal dark-eyed dachshund and an equally loyal and dark-haired French man living there with her? Overlooking the rooftops of Paris, speaking fluent francais that she’d pick up effortlessly, learning to bake sophisticated pastries?
Jeannie hated every molecule of her lazy and stupid self. She had realized this morning that the apartment hunt was going to take longer than she’d hoped, and yet here she was wasting a whole half of a day doing nothing useful at all.
She hadn’t even eaten lunch. Jeannie never went this long without eating, it made a person get too hungry and that inevitably led to bad nutritional decisions.
She shoved her feet into her shoes and prepared to head out. Her bank account couldn’t afford dinner in the hotel every night, and her scale couldn’t afford any more cheeseburgers.
She glanced at herself in the full length mirror, and saw her blonde curly hair was a bit mussy, and the eyeliner and lip gloss she’d put on this morning was pretty much gone. Who cared, though? She made sure she had her wallet, phone, car keys and her hotel room key card and opened the door.
“Adrian!” a voice screamed.
Jeannie paused, half in and half out of her room. There were a half dozen people clustered around the door right next to her room, and they all seemed to be screaming at each other.
“Adriaaaaan,” someone called in an imitation of the famous scene in Rocky.
“Oh yeah, there he is,” a woman holding a bottle of beer said to another woman who was also holding a beer.
“Adrian! Adrian!” They all seemed to be yelling.
Jeannie stuck her head out of the doorway and saw a guy running full speed down the hallway at them, followed by two other guys. He had one fist in the air and the other hand was pulling a wheelie suitcase behind him.
“Oi, oi, oi,” The guy that Jeannie assumed to be Adrian was yelling.
The women next to Jeannie raised their beers in the air.
“War! War,” Adrian chanted, and crashed into a dark-haired guy standing in the doorway next to Jeannie’s room.
They fell to the ground and rolled over a couple of times, legs and arms flying. Adrian’s suitcase fell over next to them, and Adrian’s flailing foot knocked it towards the two women, who quickly backed away, holding their beers out in front of them.
“We’re all here! Are we all here?”
“Wasteland!”
“Warren!”
“Where’s Dave and Kelley?”
“You made me spill my beer!”
The cacophony was overwhelming, and somehow Jeannie had been caught in the middle of it. She stood still in her doorway as people spread out around her.
Adrian stood up and pulled his friend up.
“Who doesn’t have a beer?”
“I want a beer!”
“Wasteland!”
People were still randomly yelling things in apparent celebration. Someone picked up the kicked over suitcase, and suddenly Adrian attacked his friend yet again.
