How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,3

inside.

I kept my face grim. This was not the Jason Carsleigh everyone knew. This was not the Jason Carsleigh I knew. I didn’t recognize this guy at all. But I kept my face straight and hoped Edie would pour me another shot of tequila, because now I had a secret.

That had been fucking fun.

Two

Megan

“No, no, no.”

I turned the key in the ignition again, listening to the engine puff helplessly. This car. This goddamned car. My goddamned car. It wasn’t going to start again.

I was in the back alley behind my apartment, in the tiny parking space I was allotted, at ten forty-five on Sunday morning. I was due at work at eleven.

I scrambled for my purse on the passenger seat and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed as I got out of the car, giving the driver’s door an extra kick. I had a fifty-fifty chance that my dad would answer; his schedule was unpredictable. But this time, he answered on the third ring.

“Dad,” I said, rounding my building and heading for the sidewalk, “can I borrow your car?”

“I would, honey,” my dad said, “but I lent it to Mrs. Feely so she could go to the doctor’s.”

I stopped on the sidewalk and looked down the street. My dad rented an old house only a block away, and I could see his driveway from where I stood. It was empty. “When, exactly, did you lend your car to Mrs. Feely?” I asked him.

“Oh, Jeez,” Dad said. “Two or three weeks ago, I guess.”

“Dad—”

“I know, I know,” Dad said. “I should get it back. I lost track.”

I gritted my teeth. My father rarely used his car, because he worked around the corner from his place at the little shop he owned, selling patchouli, incense, mood stones, imported African masks—a sort of yuppie/hippie combo. Which pretty much described my father. Hence the fact that he hadn’t noticed his car was missing for weeks. “Dad,” I said to him, “I could have used it. I have to get to work.”

“It’s Sunday morning,” my dad said, offended. He wasn’t religious, he just liked to sleep in. “Who the heck works on Sunday morning?”

“Well, when you need to go to the drugstore on Sunday morning, someone has to be there to take your money.”

“That’s inhumane.”

I sighed. The drugstore was just the latest in my long, long series of jobs, most of which I’d been fired from. That was Dad’s influence: No one owns you, he’d always taught me. If you don’t like a situation, you just walk away. I’d walked away from more crappy jobs than I could count. And I’d been fired. Often. If I didn’t get to work, I would be fired again today.

You’re twenty-three, Megan, a voice inside my head said, and what are you doing with your life?

Shut up, I told it.

“Okay,” I said to my father. “I have to go. I’m calling a cab.”

“Get one of those Uber things,” my dad said. “Fight the Man.”

I hung up, gritting my teeth. I didn’t want to fight the Man today, I just wanted to get to work on time. Why, though? The job as a clerk at Drug-Rite was as boring and dead-end as every other job I’d had. Why did it matter if I got fired from this one?

I got an Uber—fuck it, it was faster—and got to Drug-Rite at two minutes to eleven, hurrying through the door and pulling my clerk’s apron from my bag. “I’m here, I’m here,” I said.

Doug, the assistant manager who was the only other employee in the store this morning, gave me a frown. He was thirty, a wispy guy with brown hair and a stature shorter and slimmer than mine. I’m not a big girl, but I could have sat on him and squashed him flat. “You’re late,” he said.

“I’m not,” I argued. “I’m almost late. That’s different.”

“Megan,” he said.

“I’m on time,” I insisted, looping the clerk’s apron over my neck. “Almost late counts as on time.”

“Fine. We got a shipment of gum. Go get it from the back.”

As I filled the little boxes of different brands of gum along the front counter, I wondered again why the hell I even cared. Was it this job? No, it wasn’t. Was it the money? I needed to live, of course–I had moved out on my own, even if it was a rental apartment only a block from my dad’s place—but I did freelance work coding websites on the side, which made me more money