It was about midnight when I heard the front door open, followed by footsteps passing my room and heading down the hall. I knew it was Jake returning from Boston. Immediately, the butterflies that lay dormant all weekend in my stomach came to life and kept me up most of the night.
CHAPTER 4
It was a rainy early September day in Brooklyn, but the five block walk from the apartment to the main university building on the corner of Flatbush and DeKalb was a breeze.
This semester I would be taking Psychology, Anatomy and Physiology, English Composition and Finite Math. I was fairly certain I would be able to handle the material in all of the courses with little difficulty, except for math, which had always been a nearly impossible subject for me. Unfortunately, the math class was a requirement for the nursing program, and if I didn’t get at least a C average, I was screwed.
Math was the final class of the day, and I wanted to cry when I saw the syllabus and skimmed through the textbook. Professor Hernandez seemed like a jerk on top of that. Listening to him lecture as he wrote out problems on the dry-erase board, I started to sweat. Select a number “n” multiply it by 4, add 10 to the product, divide the sum by 2, and subtract 5 from the quotient. Heh?
I hated math, plain and simple. My brain just wasn’t wired to understand numbers. But so much rode on this class, and I was determined to find a way to get through it. My parents were certainly not going to continue to pay for nursing school if I couldn’t pass my classes. I owed it to them to try as hard as I could, despite the current lack of faith in myself.
Feeling defeated, I walked home from the university in the rain. I was already stressed about the small amount of homework I had received for tonight and a math test scheduled for Wednesday.
I was one block away from the apartment when a van drove right into a puddle next to me, causing what seemed like a tidal wave of water to hit me. I was now drenched and looking like a drowned rat.
Arriving at our front steps, I noticed the woman who lived on the second floor peeking out of her window watching me approach the building. She looked to be in her sixties.
Still standing on the sidewalk below, I waved. “Hi, I’m Nina Kennedy. I just moved upstairs.”
The woman looked at me and said nothing. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head and didn’t look happy at all.
It was awkward, but I gave it one more try. “You live on the second floor?”
The woman squinted her eyes and looked angrier by the second. Finally, she leaned a bit more out of the window and in a strong Jamaican accent said, “Go fuck yourself!”
My heart started beating fast. “Come again?”
“Go fuck yourself!” she repeated and then abruptly shut the window.
I stood there in the rain stunned, not knowing whether to run into the building or away from it. This was definitely not my day. I opened the door and was panting as I ran up the stairs past her apartment to the third floor.
What was wrong with her? Why did she say that to me? What did I do?
I entered our apartment and slammed the door behind me, leaning against it breathing in and out heavily. That encounter shocked me so much that it took me a few seconds to notice Jake standing in front of me eating a banana.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked.
I kept panting and then said between breaths, “I was attacked…verbally…by the woman on the second floor.”
He nearly choked as he began to double over. He was laughing so hard that no sound came out of his mouth.
He stopped just long enough to ask, “Did she try to drown you too?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, that was something else.”
Jake continued to laugh uncontrollably. He gripped his abs as if in pain and smacked the counter, then said “Now, you are officially part of this household.”
“What?”
“You’ve just been Ballsworthied.”
“Balls, what? Excuse me?”
My reaction seemed to make him laugh even harder now. My body stiffened when he walked over and pulled me into a quick friendly hug then patted me on the back. It sounded the alarm to the butterflies in my stomach. “It’s okay. You’re good. She’s harmless.”
I shivered. “What the heck is wrong with her?”
“That’s Mrs. Ballsworthy. No one knows why the fuck she is the way she is. Some days she’ll tell us to go fuck ourselves, and other days, she’s perfectly fine. One time, I shit you not, she baked us a chocolate cake. It said ‘Fuck You All’ on top. It was the most delicious fuckin’ cake I have ever eaten. She could have put shit in it. I still would have taken another bite. That’s how good it was.”
That story broke my funk, and I started to laugh at the absurdity of it all. I wiped my eyes. “Are you pulling my leg again?”