Dusk (A Twilight Revamp)

Chapter One

"All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

...

Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty...

The crisp bills fell flat against the table. Each one a landing it a semi-crooked heap.

Forty-five. Fifty-five. Sixty-Five...

It wasn't gonna be enough. Even though, there was still a considerable wad of ones and loose change that had yet to be counted.

Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine...

Lilly sat across from me, her slim fingers tapping on the table. She was too young to be worrying about money. She was only eleven; but hunched over like she was, with her chin in her palm and her thin brows scrunched together, made her look more like a grad student worrying over student loan debt. She brushed a stubborn strand of frizzy hair behind her ear and sighed.

She knew it too. As I was counting all the money, she was mouthing the numbers going through my head. "How much are we short?" She asked.

"About fifteen-hundred and some change."

She hissed,"Shit!"

I frowned. She shouldn't be swearing. But given the circumstances, I couldn't find the heart to scold her. "Even with the money from Charlie..." I trailed off, fingering the stack of folded papers by my elbow. The words "Eviction Notice" was printed across the top.

"What are we gonna do? Do you think Larry could...?"

"No," I said shooting that idea down before it could even start, "We barely have enough to cover this month's rent. Let alone the past two." Larry, our landlord, had gotten tired of our excuses. And, I didn't see him working with us any further than he already had.

What a shitstorm, I sighed and buried my face in my palms, rubbing at the bags under my eyes. The fluorescent light overhead was starting to give me a headache. I felt so tired—I'm sure I looked it too with my unwashed hair pulled up into a tangled bun at the base of my neck and my eyes feeling as sore as they were bloodshot from staying up two nights in a row to finish an essay for school. "I guess I could borrow some money."

Lilly had stopped tapping on the table and instead began to chew idly at her thumbnail as she watched me. "From who?" She asked.

That was a good question. The number of people who'd be willing to lend money, let alone lend money when there was zero chance of getting it back, was pretty much non-existent. "I don't know...Mandy, maybe?" Mandy was someone I worked with at a little coffee shop in downtown Phoenix. She was probably my closest friend, although we didn't really see each other outside of work. Surely, she wouldn't mind lending me a hundred bucks or so.

Lilly looked surprised. "Would she lend us that much?"

We both knew that Mandy wasn't much better off than we were. She was a nursing student living with a roommate and her roommate's boyfriend in a 1400 square-foot apartment on North 99th Avenue, and yet compared to us living on West Van Buren Street in a run-down-roach-infested apartment she might as well have been a millionaire. "I doubt it. But it's better than nothing."

Suddenly, there was a thud at the front door. Both our heads snapped up and Lilly leaned back in her chair, twisting to look behind her. Then there was a woman's laugh followed by another thud on the door and deeper man's voice too low to understand. "Shit—Grab the money," I said already reaching for the bills and shoving them into a ziplock bag. Lilly was quick to follow, dumping all the coins in before I sealed it and wrapped it in a plastic grocery bag.