Just Pru Read online

  Just Pru

  by

  Anne Pfeffer

  Copyright 2014 by Anne Pfeffer

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The quote “For whatever you have tamed, you are responsible” is taken from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

  ISBN-13:978-1503113664 (paperback)

  ISBN- 10:1503113663 (paperback)

  ISBN-13:978-0-692-33502-4 (ebook)

  ISBN-10:0692335021 (ebook)

  Published by Anne Pfeffer

  [email protected]

  www.annepfeffer.com

  Cover Design by Laura Duffy

  Chapter One

  From Pru’s Journal:

  How can you know if you’re normal when you’re always alone? You have no one to compare yourself to. I mean, I have my mom and dad, and I’m pretty normal compared to them. But then… a lot of people are normal compared to them.

  **

  As the rich CaraMellow ice cream slipped along my tongue, I popped a few potato chips in my mouth for contrast. Ah, the soothing combination of sweet, salt, cream, and crunch.

  No good. Its magic wasn’t working.

  Shifting my size 16 tush around on the sofa, I focused on the TV. It played an old episode from Model Cop, my favorite show ever on the Wholesome Family Channel.

  Today, the show’s awesome heroine, Pepper Hathaway, was tracking down a serial killer in between fittings for a runway show at Fashion Week. It was hard to juggle her two jobs as a police detective and supermodel, but she excelled at both. Pepper ended every episode with a wink to the camera and her life motto: Remember, folks. Do Good, Look Good!

  She was amazing.

  I sighed. I bet Pepper didn’t get job rejections like the one I’d had today. Dear Loser, the letter said. We are relieved to say we cannot offer you the position of Low-Level Proofreading Gnome at our crummy little start-up online encyclopedia. No matter how unknown and undesirable our company is, you are more so.

  Sincerely,

  Executive Drone

  Okay, so they didn’t use those exact words, but it’s what they meant. As I lifted my spoon, caramel dribbled down the front of my flannel nightgown. I scraped it off with a potato chip and ate it.

  Mmraow. My cat emerged from one of his many hiding places. I suspected he hid on purpose, just to annoy me. “Hey, Chuck-Chuck.” I scratched his orange-and-white striped back. It lasted only a few seconds. Done with human contact, Chuck strolled away, tail in the air.

  On the TV, Pepper was returning home to her elegant apartment in the Big City. Hey, girlfriend, she called out to her funny, devoted homosexual roommate Tad. They sat down and sipped Chardonnay. She was so cool.

  I bet Pepper could pay her rent. I bet she didn’t run out of money just two months after moving into her place. I could justify having bought a used car, but perhaps the fifty-inch flat-screen TV had been excessive. Then there were those unfortunate yard sale purchases, but I had needed furniture, after all. I needed that Victorian-style vanity and the faux-leather recliner.

  I could still hear my father’s voice, cool and cutting. You won’t last a month in Los Angeles. Mark my words, you’ll be back in Oregon before you know it.

  Well, ha ha on him, I’d lasted two months now.

  And ha ha on me, because I didn’t know if I could last a third.

  Tears prickled the backs of my eyes. I wished I could talk to Dr. Abbot, my wonderful therapist back in my hometown of Clayton. He had died unexpectedly last week. I’d hardly left my apartment since I’d gotten the news.

  On the TV, Pepper was modeling her latest fashion purchases for Tad. I scraped the bowl with my spoon while contemplating her minuscule waistline. Was that real or digitally enhanced? Could a person’s body organs really fit into such a tiny space?

  Not mine—I was sure about that. My body organs undoubtedly filled giant caverns, which was why I’d been blessed with my five foot ten inch, big-boned body.

  A ringing began—yet another fire alarm. Great. We’d had two go off already this month, I thought grumpily, and they’d turned out to be cases of burned toast—a total waste of time.

  I struggled up from horizontal, made my way to the living room window, and peered out. It was 8:00 on a June evening. It had just turned dark. Below loomed the building’s quiet, empty courtyard.

  Just as I thought—no flames, no people fleeing for their lives.

  The sofa called to me, yet the alarm blared on.

  I should probably investigate, even though it meant I might have to talk to someone. And for what had to be a false alarm. I stumbled to my bedroom dresser and wrestled a pair of plain white panties up under my nightie. Where had I thrown my bra? When you’re a size 36D, you do not venture forth into public without one.

  My eyes swept my twin-sized bed, the flowered rug, the vanity whose drawers I used to store cat toys. No bra to be seen.

  Feet thudded down my hallway.

  WHOMP! A fist hit my front door. “Vacate the building now! Everyone out!” The man’s voice resounded through my door, then grew fainter as he moved away from me.

  In an instant, sweat beaded my forehead. Vacate the building?

  A siren, then others, wailed from the street. A megaphone-amplified voice blared from outside. “Immediate evacuation is required.”

  “Chuck!” I shrieked. That ingrate. He’d probably hidden from me again. I dropped to my belly and crawled commando-style around the bedroom, checking under the bed and dresser. No sign of his malevolent green-eyed gaze. I checked the open laundry hamper. He wasn’t there either.

  Outside, shouts and cries came to me from a distance, sirens grew louder, and banging noises intensified. I rushed again to the open living room window. Spotlights now lit the courtyard below, which had transformed into a disaster scene. Groups of people milled behind barricades. Firefighters twice the size of ordinary humans unfurled hoses and set ladders up against walls, while smoke drifted from some windows on the fourth floor, where I was.

  Holy moley! Were we really on fire?

  I had to find my cat. Heart pounding, I zoomed through my small apartment, checking all his hangouts. My bed pillow, no. The wide sofa arm – not there either. “Chuck!”

  Hot air surrounded me. If I didn’t hurry, smoke would come next. I’d heard that smoke inhalation was a quick and easy way to go, even better than pills. The smoke just drifted in, then out again, taking pain and problems with it.

  Your head’s in a different place now, Pru. And it wasn’t just about me anymore. I had Chuck to think about.

  When my mom had heard that my new apartment came furnished with an abandoned cat, she had, as usual, expressed her faith in me. “You can’t even take care of yourself!”

  Dr. Abbot had disagreed. “You can do anything you want to, Pru.” I was determined to prove him right and my parents wrong. I would live by myself and have a cat and a job and maybe even friends, like everyone else did.

  And yet, Not gonna happen, the universe seemed to be saying, as the air around me grew hotter, making my throat burn. You will live forever in the clutches of your parental units. You will never become a self-fulfilled and independent woman.

  Frantic, I looked out the living room window again. Down below they were counting heads. Megaphone-voice spoke again. “All residents are accounted for. The building evacuation is complete.”

  “Wait! Help!” Leaning out, I flung my arms around. What was wrong with these people? I mean, I knew I was way too quiet and shy to have met anyone or made an impression in the time I’d lived here. Still, you’d think they’d have my name on a l
ist somewhere.

  “The building’s unsafe. Stay by the window!” the megaphone called up to me.

  Not with my cat missing, I wouldn’t. Come on, Chuck. Where are you? I rushed to the kitchen and tore open a pouch of Wacky Cat Snacks, accidentally ripping the bag in half and spewing his favorite all-natural liver bits across the floor.

  “Snack time!” I screamed.

  An orange and white ear poked up from the top of the refrigerator.

  “What are you doing up there?” In an instant, I’d dragged over a chair and climbed up to pull him off, while Chuck struggled in my arms.

  A firefighter entered my kitchen. He moved swiftly toward me. “We need to get you out of here. Now.”

  I just had time to register a tall, broad expanse of gray uniform. The man swooped me and Chuck off the chair and into his arms. He didn’t slip a disc or even stagger, proving just how strong those guys really are. A second later, we were in the living room again, where a ladder stood outside the window.

  “Please save my cat!”

  A different firefighter scooped Chuck away from me and disappeared down the ladder with him. Plumes of smoke boiled menacingly by the ceiling.

  My savior was already at the window with me. “You ready?”

  Dumbstruck, I nodded. All my perceptions had narrowed to this time and moment: the whirling smoke, the heat in the air, this guy’s arms and chest making a safe circle around my body. Strange, random thoughts wandered through my brain. I probably had ice cream on my face. I could feel liver snacks stuck to the bottom of my feet.

  He set me down, climbed out onto the ladder, and beckoned to me.

  That’s when I realized that I was supposed to go out the window, too. I must have been in denial before that.

  “I’ll fall!” I’d almost rather have chosen death by flames over having to crawl out a fourth story window. My head spun from the smoke. My glance fell on a cloth-bound book lying on a side table next to me. My journal! Without thinking, I grabbed it.

  He extended a gloved hand. “I won’t let you.” His calm self-confidence buoyed me up and helped me breathe.

  Did I hear flames crackling behind me? I scrambled out onto the windowsill, heart galloping, not daring to look down at the ground. A tiny part of my brain gave thanks for my underpants.

  “Atta girl.” The firefighter reached for me. I latched onto him like metal filings to a magnet, one hand clutching my journal.

  “Hold on tight.” He began to move, his strong legs carrying us down the ladder. Foggy-headed, I clung to him, nuzzling my face into his rough firefighter’s jacket. I heard his breathing and felt the hardness of his body against my chest and arms.

  Steadily, rung by rung, he brought us to safety. At the bottom he set me on my feet. For the first time, I really saw him. He was cute enough to model underwear.

  My knees buckled.

  “Easy does it.” His arm tightened around my waist.

  “Thank you. So much.” I loosened my death grip around his neck, stepped away from him, and tucked my journal under my arm for safekeeping.

  “Hey, Ben!” he called out to a firefighter behind me. “You got that cat?”

  Ben pointed to a girl standing nearby in a black tank top and leggings. “It’s all under control,” she was saying to someone beside her. “Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.” At her feet was a pet carrier with breathing holes in its side. It took me a minute to see the orange tufts of fur poking through the holes.

  “Chuck!” I rushed over and knelt to look in the metal grill door of the carrier, then gasped when I saw him crowded in with a second cat.

  One reason I didn’t say much was that, whenever I did, it was the wrong thing. “Who said you could lock my cat up with yours?”

  The girl gave me a searching look, as if she didn’t want to be impolite, but how dumb could I be? “I offered to share my carrier with your cat, who I might add is unusually large. So he’d be safe and wouldn’t run off. Do you want me to take him out?”

  Chuck, pressed against one wall of the carrier, subjected me to a blast of feline outrage. An all-black kitten snuggled up to him, purring.

  “No,” I mumbled, realizing I’d made another one of my grievous social faux pas. “Thank you for helping.”

  What would I do now? My home was on fire, possibly destroyed. I should be glad I was alive, but all I could think was that I was among strangers, half-dressed, with only my cat to my name.

  What about all my stuff? My medications. I couldn’t go a day without them. My computer with its records of my well-intentioned and failed job search. And my money. The only money I had left in the world resided in a backpack in my closet behind the laundry hamper.

  Gone. I took a deep, shaky breath.

  Then there was the matter of my cell phone. That one was for my parents, who would pass a bowling ball if they couldn’t reach me daily by phone.

  For better or worse, it was gone, too.

  Squatting there beside the cat carrier, I put a finger through one of the holes. “Hey, Chuck-Chuck, it’s just you and me now.”

  He favored me with a head rub against my finger. I looked up to see smoke pour from my living room window. A second later, the sprinklers went off.

  Was that the demise of my last surviving belongings? As I scratched the warm fur of Chuck’s neck, it felt as if the final bits of my world had slowly crumpled and collapsed around me.

  Chapter Two

  From Pru’s Journal

  “When Pru was a baby,” my mom told Dr. Abbot, “she cried all the time. Almost from the beginning, she was scared of everything!”

  But you want to hear something interesting? I saw this in a TV documentary. Babies don’t just cry when they’re scared. They cry when they’re hungry or bored or cold or anything else. They cry when they’re trying to tell you something.

  **

  For what felt like a long time, I waited in the courtyard. While others stood around together talking, I sat alone with the carrier at my feet. My lips had started to do this trembly, blubbery thing. I wanted to go back to my apartment, but I couldn’t. What would I do? I had no bed, no money, no clothes.

  I could just see what would happen. An hour from now I’d be wandering somewhere, barefoot, with Chuck under my arm. We’d be lost, scared, with nowhere to go. We’d end up sleeping beneath a bridge. Chuck would run away and be crushed by the wheels of a delivery truck. Thugs would attack me, beat me senseless, and leave me bleeding on the sidewalk. I’d be taken to a hospital, where I’d lie for years, unmoving, in a vegetative state. The financial burden would bring my family to ruin, putting my parents in the streets, where they would die lingering deaths.

  Or not. Dr. Abbot would have urged me to take a hard look at my little scenario (How likely is this, really, Pru?), but he had deserted me by dying. I continued to catastrophize.

  “Hey!” It was the cat-carrier girl.

  I would have liked to ignore her, but it seemed ungrateful under the circumstances.

  “You live in this building?” The girl was probably in her late twenties, only a few years older than me. She acted older somehow. For the last hour, she’d been on a mission of mercy, going around to check on people, comforting them, whipping off little remarks that made them laugh. She had dark hair cut short in a bob and small square eyeglasses in white plastic. “Did you just move in?”

  I looked down, arms wrapped around me. “Two months ago.”

  Her head jerked back. “Huh! I’m surprised I haven’t seen you around. I’m Ellen.”

  I tightened my arms around myself and kept my eyes trained on the ground. I couldn’t believe I was walking around without a bra in public. Thank goodness my nightgown was made of industrial strength flannel.

  She cleared her throat. “And… you are?”

  “Pru.”

  “As in Prudence?”

  “Just Pru.” I was not a Prudence and never would be.

  “Will you be here for a few more minutes? To watch th
e cats.”

  As Ellen took off, I sank back down on my brick planter edge and put my head down between my knees. Long, even breaths. Clear your mind.

  Around me, displaced building residents traded rumors, facts, and misinformation. Eight apartments totally destroyed…. three cases of smoke inhalation… letting us go in tomorrow to look for our stuff…

  What could I do? I did not exactly have a large circle of buddies in LA, all willing to put me up for a few days. The obvious answer was to move back with my parents. The thought made me want to stab myself with a dull, rusty object.

  My car. Horror pulled me to my feet as I suddenly realized that it, too, might have burned up. In my panic, I was even willing to start a conversation with a stranger, a prospect that normally sent me scurrying to eat animal crackers in the closet.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a nearby shoulder, as I wound my arms across my chest. For all my work with Dr. Abbot, I still wasn’t really good at looking people in the eyes. It made me nervous, as if they’d invaded my personal body space, or I’d invaded theirs. “What about the parking garage? Are the cars safe?”

  “Fortunately, yes,” the shoulder replied. “All the damage occurred to apartments on the west side of the courtyard.”

  That would be me. We viewed the blackened, drenched length of the western courtyard, my apartment conveniently located at the mid-point. But at least my car was okay. I moved my eyes up to his chin.

  The guy held a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. From his nicely buttoned shirt and pressed pants, I assumed he’d been out somewhere and returned to find his building on fire. “I’m Adam.”

  “Pru.”

  “So you guys have met.” Ellen had just walked up. A highly random crowd trailed her: a beach-babe type, a trio of guys, and a tiny old couple who supported one another as they walked. Their attire ranged from dressy stuff to sweats, but I couldn’t help but notice that I was the only one in my jammies. Even the old people had clothes on. What, no one else ever turned in early?