Tear This Place Apart

I can always tell when Jaime has walked into the restaurant where I work without looking, because he always reaches up and flicks the bell hanging above the door, sending it swinging. Today when he walks in it's quarter to eleven, and it's empty. Sean, who is the cook tonight, is washing dishes in the back, and I'm wrapping cutlery.
"hey, hot stuff." he says, and I look up, laughing.
"I'd like to make a snide remark, but since you're my only friend in this city, I'll keep it to myself."
I moved to San Diego about a month and a half ago to start my sound engineering course at San Diego State University. I love the class, and the city, but between work and school, I haven't had a lot of time for making friends. Jaime, who's a regular at the Hurricane Cafe, is the only person that I've managed to hang out with. Luckily for me, he's great. He likes all the same music as me, has an amazing sense of humour, and is a great listener. He's handsome, too - all the girls that come into the Hurricane go crazy for him, and he plays it up, winking and smiling and chatting them up. In spite of all of this, he's not my type. I'm not his either. I think that's why we were able to get so close so quickly - we knew there was no chance of us having feelings for each other.
About two weeks after I moved here, I realized it wasn't going to be as easy as I had expected. I had no money - tuition, rent, and the cost of moving had been hard to come up with, and I hadn't got my first pay cheque yet - and I didn't know anyone. Jaime sat at the bar, drinking coffee and telling me everything would be okay, until I got off at twelve, and he took me to see a movie. We talked a little before that, but since then we've gotten a lot closer. He's a much better friend than anyone I knew in St.Helena, the tiny California town where I grew up.
"It's like blackmail!" he says, with an excited smile. I laugh.
"Do you want anything?" I ask, and he shakes his head.
"I came to pick you up. You're off at eleven, right?"
I glance up at the clock - it's exactly eleven.
"Sure am!" I say, and grab my stuff from under the counter. I sign out, say good bye to Sean, and then walk around the counter.
When Jaime says pick me up, he really means walk with me to the apartment that we share. No one in the city has a car, and we're too poor to take a cab, but it's a nice night. We head out the door and walk the few blocks to our apartment.
He hops up the stairs like a kangaroo, and I raise one eyebrow.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
"Hopping - is that a problem?" he says, completely straight faced. I shake my head and he laughs.

Our place is small - both of us have a tiny bedroom with just enough room for a single bed and a dresser, we've got a pretty nice living room, with a decent sized TV, an X-Box that Jaime's brother gave him for fifty bucks, and a kitchen the size of a closet. Still it's nicer than the tiny hotel room I stayed in when I first arrived in the city. Jaime knew I hated it.

"Shit, Jenna, why do you live here, again?" he asked one day.
"For the same reason you live in your hole-in-the-wall apartment. I'm poor."
"Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that." he said, sitting down at my little kitchen table.
"About being poor?" I walked to the fridge and grabbed two cans of coke.
"No. Well. Maybe. No, just about... would it be weird if we moved in together?"
I had to hold back my laughter to keep from spitting my coke out.
"Yes."
He rolled his eyes. "I'm serious, Jenna. Think about it. If we each put in 500 bucks a month, we could have a decent place. It's not like you're ever home, and me neither, and we like the same kind of music, and we wouldn't get mad at each other for being messy because we're both messy."
"You raise some valid points." I said, laughing. He was right, though. I needed a place to live, and his apartment was every bit as tiny and uninviting as my hotel room. So, we found a place in a decent part of the city, close to my school and both of our jobs, with two bedrooms. Rent wasn't too high, and I could finally tell my family that I had found somewhere to live. We've only been living together for a week, but it's worked out well so far.

I'm standing in the shower, letting the hot water run over me. Long, hot showers are about the only luxury either of us can afford at the moment, so I take advantage of them when I can. I was able to get some scholarships, and my family had a bit of tuition money saved up for me, so I'm one of few students who can say that I don't have any debt, but the cost of living in a city is high. Jaime, on the other hand, is a musician. He just got an offer from some friends of his who had been in a band that broke up. They were still backed by their label, and they wrote and released an album on their own, but now they needed some people to play live shows with them. They asked Jaime and his friend Tony, who had been playing together in various bands since high school. "I could be a real musician." Jaime had said when got home from meeting with the label. They would have their first official band practice tomorrow, and if it went well they would start scheduling shows. If things went according to plan, they could be touring in a few months. I smile at the thought of Jaime, touring the world. We both love music more than anything, and playing it for a living is his dream. I've always wanted to go on tour, but I've never been a performer. I'm a decent singer, and I play guitar and piano, but I lose my nerve as soon as I see people watching me. The thing that I like about the idea of touring is having my job be different every day. I like the idea of seeing new places and meeting new people and spending time with people who love music as much as I do. Jaime, though, has the type of confidence and charisma that makes you famous.
I step out of the shower, dry myself off, and pull on a pair of sweat pants and a black tank-top. The only downside to living with Jaime is that I have to wear a bra when I walk around the house. I drag a comb through my hair and walk out of the bathroom, only to bump straight into someone - someone who isn't Jaime. My phone clatters to the floor, but I leave it there.
I just stare at him for a second, not quite sure what to do. He's not tall, but neither am I, so he still looks down at me. He's got shoulder length brown hair, big, brown eyes, and a nose ring. I suddenly realize where I recognize him from; he's one of the brothers in Jaime's new band. I listened to their album when Jaime started talking about it, and it was really good. The music was complicated, and the lyrics were beautiful. Jaime and Tony liked it because of the Spanish guitar riffs - all four of them had Mexican families, which seemed like a funny coincidence. Jaime had told me that he would be stopping by when he picked me up. "In the middle of the night?" I had asked, and he said "Vic's a middle-of-the-night kind of guy." I was so tired by the time we got home, though, that I forgot all about it.
"I am so sorry." I say, laughing and bending down to pick up my cell.
"Don't be. I walked straight into you."
"It's not like there's a whole lot of extra room in this place." I point out, smiling, and hoping that this admittedly very cute guy doesn't notice that I look like shit.
"You must be Jenna." he says, and I nod.
"And you're Vic. I listened to your record - I love it."
He looks surprised, and flattered. "Thank you so much!" he says. Then Jaime walks in from the kitchen.
"Oh good, you've met."
"Yeah. Thanks for reminding me that we were having company before I got in the shower and put on my pyjamas."
"Shush, darling, you look fabulous." Jaime says. Vic chuckles.
I roll my eyes and walk into the kitchen, yanking the fridge open. "Why do we never have any fucking food?" I demand, scanning the empty shelves. "I give up - I'm going to McDonalds."
"It's after midnight!" Jaime points out.
"So? It's saturday tomorrow - I don't have class, and I don't start work until 4. No rest for the wicked!" I walk into my bedroom and grab a denim jacket and my purse off the back of the door, and cram my feet into my blue vans. "Do you want to come?"
"You know I'm always up for McDicks." he says.
"Oh," I say in a mocking voice, "but it's after midnight!"
Vic is leaning against the kitchen table and laughing at us. I turn to him and smile. "Do you want to come?"
"Of course." he says, and the three of us leave the apartment.

The other two members of Vic and Jaime's band meet us at McDonalds, too. Mike and Tony both shake my hand and the five of us order and then sit at a table in the corner.
"Is it a normal thing, to get a text message from Jaime in the middle of the night inviting you to McDonalds?" Mike asks, dipping his fries in ketchup.
"There's no such things as 'normal' with Jaime." Tony says.
"Well you were awake, obviously!" Jaime says defensively.
"And hungry, clearly." I say, nodding at the three double cheeseburgers on his tray.
"And high, probably." Vic adds. We all laugh.
"So what kind of classes are you taking?" Vic asks me.
"Uh, sound engineering. I want to go into live production - y'know, go out on tour and all that."
"I told her I would see if she could hang out in to booth at our show. Do you think that'll be cool?"
"Jaime!"I say, laughing, "you don't have to ask that now, with me sitting here!"
"I think that'd be awesome." Vic says, smiling.

That night when I finally get to bed, I lie there and stare at the ceiling and smile. Here I am, going to a school that I love so that I can have the career I've dreamt of for years. And now I have friends and a place to live.
I have no money, and my only family is miles away... but I am exactly where I want to be.