Purple Flowers, Part One
So begins the tale of one girl, two bags, and three soon to be maxed out credit cards
Shannon woke up late in LA. It was raining and after ten already. It rained in LA? Nobody had ever told her that. She thought this was supposed to be the desert. In the desert rain should be an event. It should only rain on special occasions.
She was thinking about God again. God and karma and the Universe and signs. All the shit that had happened to bring her to this moment, alone on the West Coast.
Mainly that one spam caller in Santa Monica. She’d blocked that number more times than she could count, but practically every time she checked her voicemail she had a new one promising to raise her credit score fast.
Shannon already had near-perfect credit because she barely ever spent any money. Paying the bills on time had always been easy. But that was about to change.
She didn’t realize she was hungover until her feet hit the floor. Right. Great start.
She wobbled to the bathroom, nauseated. The smudgy faux-ornate mirror showed her a pallid, heavy-lidded woman masquerading as a fresh-faced girl. The mirror told her she was a loser. It said this ill-conceived stab at self-actualization was doomed from the start. She told it to go fuck itself before sitting heavily on the toilet.
She sat there for some time before it was safe to get up and face the day.
“Hey, how’d you sleep?” Mandy asked when she emerged into the too-bright kitchen. “That comforter too warm? Or not warm enough?”
“I slept really well,” Shannon rasped. “Better than I have in months.”
“Oh good.” Mandy sighed. “We haven’t had a guest in a while. Just let us know if you need another blanket.”
“I think I’ll be okay. But thanks.”
“Hey, you want some breakfast? Or is it lunch? I always eat my main meal before noon.”
“I was just trying to motivate myself to go pick up some groceries.”
Mandy and her husband Greg had shown Shannon her designated food storage areas when she arrived the previous afternoon: a crumbless pantry shelf, an empty crisper drawer, a generous portion of the freezer.
“You can use our almond milk,” Greg had said. “It’s homemade. Good in oatmeal.”
“He’s lactose intolerant,” Mandy had explained. “Like, severely. But sometimes I get some half and half for my coffee.”
Shannon had taken their hospitality the same way she had taken being kicked out of her dad’s house for stumbling in at three in the morning one too many times: in stride. “I’m not really a dairy person. Or a nondairy one, I don’t know.”
“Okay!” Mandy’s teeth were too big for her mouth. She was beautiful, though, with mahogany skin and lustrous hair. “Anyway. You wanna see your room?”
The apartment was clean in the obvious places, with spiderwebs and dust bunnies and polka dots of orange mold in some less-trafficked corners. Shannon’s room—the guest bedroom—was minimally furnished and sparsely decorated with photographs of palm trees blowing in the wind. There were two stress balls on the otherwise empty desk.
This was a room for traveling professionals, not aimless vagabonds. But you know the thing about beggars and choosers.
“The nearest grocery store is only two blocks away but it doesn’t have the best selection,” Mandy said, yanking Shannon out of her self-pitying reverie. “For produce you’re gonna want World Market. That’s almost a mile uphill though.”
“Which one has good prices?” Shannon asked, impatient. The floral pattern on the tile backsplash was making her dizzy.
“Oh. Um. Neither?” When Mandy laughed she sounded like a yipping terrier. “Welcome to California, babe.”
Shannon didn’t bring an umbrella to LA. Or a rain jacket. Or a hat. She took a few steps outside before retreating to the dry fluorescent warmth of the Patels’ kitchen.
“Oh my gosh, you’re soaking wet,” Mandy cried. “There are fresh towels in the linen closet. I’ll make us some scrambled eggs.”
Unfortunately in Mandy’s world “scrambled eggs” meant a bag of baby spinach with a drizzle of liquid egg whites. Better than nothing, but only marginally. When she was done Shannon jumped up to wash her plate, still ravenous.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. We’ve got a dishwasher right here, see?” Mandy gestured to some kind of old timey contraption. It sported a giant smiley face with the words DIRTY and CLEAN printed in pink bubble letters on it. It was turned sideways. When Shannon opened the dishwasher a foul smell assaulted her senses, so she loaded her plate and fork and turned the smiley face upside down for DIRTY.
“So what’s on the docket for today?” Mandy asked. “Once the weather improves, I mean. Should be nice out later.”
Shannon shrugged. She didn’t really like those kinds of questions, the kind her mom called “prying.” “After I get groceries? Just exploring, I guess. Getting the lay of the land.”
“Griffith Park is only a short walk away, you know. It’s gorgeous after it rains.”
Shannon said she would keep that in mind.
She stayed holed up not working in her remote worker cell until the clouds parted and sunlight streamed through the speckled windows in canary yellow stripes. Now the clock said two-thirty, but it still felt like morning. Still. It was time to be a person.
*****
To be continued. Come back soon to experience Shannon's first taco and a cat on a leash, among other LA things.