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ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 𝟷: ᴛʜᴇ ғᴀɴᴄʏ ᴛᴏɪʟᴇᴛ ᴘᴀᴘᴇʀ ʜᴇɪꜱᴛ.
"I kinda feel sorry for the guy, he was sweet." I tell Faye, eating a Cheetos, "He left more than 20% tip."
"Don't you dare catch feelings, Vee," she pops a Cheetos in her mouth, "We promised to return his chips if he asked about them but he didn't. You snooze, you lose."
We swiped a customer's family-sized Cheetos bag when he was wolfing The Big Texan burger at the diner.
"I was just saying that out loud so I can't blame myself later." I laugh, "Don't you worry about me catching feelings, hepatitis maybe, but definitely not feelings."
"Good," Faye says as she opens the door to our shared one-bedroom apartment, then pushes it with her shoulder to unhitch it from the door frame, "because we're too poor to afford those."
She struts inside, throwing her keys on the used Baseball glove that serves as a key-tray in our dingy apartment. We didn't come from money, obviously, otherwise we wouldn't be stealing a man's bag of Cheetos, so we knew how to cut corners to afford living with a roof over our heads in Brooklyn.
We kinda have adopted the lifestyle the great lyricist Lil' Kim preached about in Lady Marmalade; 'Why I spend mine, when I can spend yours.'
We don't have a TV, for example, but we stole the neighbors WIFI password and now we have Netflix and HBO on our computers.
We use candles that we steal from several different churches to light up our apartment. I can't count the times that I pretended to be an Evangelist, or a Catholic, or a Protestant, to sneak inside the church and take a couple of candles. Once I even pretended to be a Greek Orthodox.
It is what it is.
It's not that we don't have electricity in our apartment, it's just that we economize when we have other alternatives, like candles or street lights if they're working, because when I use my kiln to cook my ceramic pieces it uses a lot of power to the point that sometimes our building's hallway lights stop working. The only thing that uses electricity full-time is our mini fridge. Everything else we unhook and hook when needed, like our ancient computers, our crappy hair straightener and curler, our second-hand microwave, or our old oven.
