Afternoon Shifts

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     Rowena Pierce is broke.

     Like, I-can't-even-afford-a-value-meal broke.

     (And she knows it's a dire situation because she doesn't even have enough money to buy a soft drink from the school vending machine. Like, not even enough money to buy just one.)

     (Or even half.)

     (She's that broke.)

     "Dammit," she mutters darkly, because buying a Pepsi every day before lunch is practically routine and you don't just break a routine because you're incredibly poor.

     Rowena turns on her heel with a rare scowl drawn on her face like the slip of a painter's brush and wonders why bad things happen to good people. If the amount of a person's misfortunes defined their virtue, then she should be a saint by now.

     Because her day has just been, for lack of a better phrase, completely batshit crazy.

     And not in a good way.

      A faint murmur of her clock's radio alarm, in the form of Celine Dion screeching about how her fucking heart will go on, seems to still pulse its way through her brain in sickening waves. The taste of dry breakfast cereal from the morning is stuck like a piece of bread to the roof of her mouth.

     Everything just sucks.

     She looks down at her raggy, chewed yellow shoes (have they always been this dirty?) and sneers at the bottled water in her hands.

     There's no Pepsi.

     Fan-fucking-tastic.

     She hates this. She hates Tuesdays and she hates just drinking water for lunch and she hates hates hates hates how absolutely everything has to go wrong in a single day rather than gradually over a span of a few.

     And then someone—Ruth—sits down and she feels marginally better.

     "You'll never guess what day it is!" she sings cheerfully, her blonde hair stunningly bright. Her everlasting peppiness and knack for dramatics has placed her right in the cheerleading squad and advanced theatre.

     Rowena raises both eyebrows (mostly because raising only one is a talent she has yet to acquire) at the high soprano her friend's voice has taken on. "Tuesday," she says, taking a bite from her sandwich. It's dry, but at the very least it removes the sickening taste of artificial breakfast sweetener from her mouth.

     "Yeah, but what kind of Tuesday is it?"

     "The one that comes after Monday but before Wednesday?"

     The sarcasm goes straight over her head as she playfully bats Rowena's arm, all bright white smiles and happy chuckles. "No silly, everyone knows that. I mean, it's the fourteenth!"

     The fourteenth?

      "Oh shit." The beginnings of terror are starting to trickle through her fingertips. "That history essay was due today, wasn't it? I was going to wake up early and slap something together but-"

     "It's not due today."

     She deflates visibly, going through the mental checklist of possible late homework assignments. No others come up, which is a good thing, because she'd really prefer for the whole mad dash to the library thing to stay as an occasional occurence and not a habit.