I have read some writers here on Sajha and enjoyed them emmensely. So I have tried something on myself. Please pardon my language and innuendos at some places. Hope you will like it. I would greatly appreciate some feedbacks, whether it is criticism or praise. 

 

I am officially twenty-eight years old today. I celebrated my birthday yesterday and I am coming back to my apartment from the venue. It was Adriana’s one of the houses. We were seven people together, Sarah, Ricardo, Adriana, Hanna, Mike, Mark and I. I know, Sarah likes me, Adriana even told me once that she said she does. Since then, sometimes the verbal interaction between the two of us gets replaced by us looking at each other and grinning at times. Among the seven of us, I am the most image conscious kind. Even when we are grinning at each other, I worry about where my hands are. I always want to look carefree to hide my consciousness and I usually fail. Adriana’s father owns eight houses in greater Boston area. Sarah, Adriana, Ricardo and I work together in a billing department of a private hospital in Boston. Sarah had brought Mark, her boyfriend and Mike was Hanna’s. Though I had heard about them till my ears blew off, it was the first time that I had met them. Ricardo had once asked me to make a plan of knocking Adriana up, so he could inherit her father’s property as she was her parents’ only child. Yesterday could have been that night, I don’t know yet. I have to call Ricardo to find that out.

As I was cruising towards my apartment this afternoon with this smirk of satisfaction, I began to think of last night. We were all drunk except Adriana. She was the oldest of us all, host of the get-together with a couple of relatively unknown attendees, hence a bit careful and to top it all off, one ridiculously rich hot chick with no boyfriend. She works in the hospital only to pass her time and to keep in touch with non Hispanic people like me and Sarah. Both of her parents were doctors who had moved here from Mexico. After several years of practice, her father had decided to invest their savings in real estate which had been raking a lot of moolahs for their family. It is also true that she is a bit lazy kid who doesn’t have to care about anything. Part of it had to do with the fact that she had done her high school in Mexico and when she came in the US ten years ago, she barely spoke English. Outside of us, she didn’t have any non-Hispanic friends. Her father wanted her that way, only to be content to see her age as a woman with a virtue and spend her entire life with only one husband. He would probably give her away to a rich Catholic and Hispanic restaurateur from Allston or a real estate mogul’s heir from Somerville.

“For men it is nice to know that good looking ladies talk about you.”  

This was my reply when Adriana had said that Sarah liked me. Sometimes I would drop a couple of thankyous in between my sentences just to show I was not being rude but my smirk wouldn’t help.  I think she likes that I am a knowledgeable college graduate, with only my race as a drawback on climbing the ladder of success.  Sometimes I feel like I am way too older than all of them, because they still joke about farts and feces and laugh out loud without any disgust.

“You are a nice guy but you are very selfish.  You don’t care about other’s feeling”.

When Sarah is drunk, she always likes to argue with me. Last night, after the cake cutting ceremony and dressing up as a cookie girl, she brought up that incident in the movie theater. That day we had gone to see a horror flick. We were sitting in the middle of a top row. I could see that there were twenty-three seats in that row and she was sitting on a chair that was numbered 114.

“See, I am sitting right in the middle of the row, so I am making exact right angle to the center of that screen. I am going to get the best view of this movie than any of you. On your face, kid.” She had said looking at me.

“Actually, there are twenty-three seats, so number 112 would be the seat to be on, if you were to get the best viewing. And somebody else is sitting there. ” I had replied back.

“How do you know there are 23 seats?”

And she started counting and gave up when she was almost done saying that she miscounted.  I had seen the number on the seat at the end of the row that had 123 plated on it before we sat. It started getting a little noisy so I told her to go see that number. She still wouldn’t get up to go see that number and kept insisting that she is in the middle. After that, it was completely beyond my understanding why she wasn’t talking to me anymore and only with Adriana till the show started. I finally gathered some nerve and asked her for some popcorn.

“Kevin, what did you get by winning that argument, huh? Why do you have to be such a smartass? Would the f#%ing hell break loose if, only if, you lose an argument once in your life?”

“I was just correcting you for acting like a baby. Now don’t bring it up again.”

“Stop talking. Stop talking. Admit that I was in the middle. Just admit that I was in the middle.”

“Now you are freaking me out. Jesus, okay you were in the middle. Happy now?”

“Don’t be condescending to me or even try to convince me. Just admit.”

I reached my apartment and opened the door. It took me a while to figure out that it was freezing cold in my apartment. I turned the heat on, seemed like the winter had arrived a little early this year. I closed all my windows and locked them at least for five months.

 

(To be Contd …)

good going...

You had a couple of typos in the beginning, but that can be forgiven. I thought the rest of the story was quite interesting. Waiting for more...

kanchho bhai and fortunefaded, thanks a bunch for your encouragement and pardon my typos. I will post the remaining of the story after I go through the editing process once again.