The apartment door unlatched and swung open, flooding in light and revealing Ariel Leeds leaning in supreme exhaustion against the wooden jamb. She raked slender fingers through her cascading tresses of semi-tangled red hair, releasing a weary sigh as she entered the living space she shared with her older brother. Her boots shuffled weightily along the carpet, as if she lacked the strength now to lift each leg up.
“Sup, sis? Rough night at the bar?” David Leeds said in his usual taunting tone as he sat on the couch beside his best friend Nina. The thirty-one-year-old cast his sibling the same smarmy grin, which she answered with a withering grimace and eye-roll.
“Don’t even start with me today,” Ariel grumbled as she disappeared into the side hall.
“What’s her deal?” Nina questioned softly to her friend, her adorable dimples etching in her cheeks. She gave her luscious dark chocolate-brown locks a flighty toss over her shoulder, then returned to idly picking at the thready cuff of her black hoodie.
“Oh, you know how she gets after those long shifts at the bar. You can’t even say a nice thing to her or she eats your head off.”
“No kidding,” Nina chuckled.
“Give her a rest, you two,” groaned Mary from the adjacent chair beside the couch. She eyed her friends with some disdain. “You have no fricking idea what it’s like out there, being on your feet straight-through for an entire shift, never getting a second to even stand still. It’s seriously torture on your feet!”
“I’ll bet it’s even worse for you, lugging those two big jugs around,” Nina joked to Mary. She pointed at the young woman’s breasts. “You’ll probably get scoliosis.”
The lanky blonde waitress instinctively looked down to her supple D-cups confined to a t-shirt at least two sizes too small, then frowned.
“You really think so?” Mary muttered anxiously. She lightly jostled her tits. “Scoliosis?”
“No, Mary, she doesn’t really think so,” David corrected reassuringly. He winked at Nina. “She’s just lezzing out on you, as usual.”
“Quit it, you fucker!” Nina snorted, punching him good-naturedly in the shoulder and giving his hair a scrunch for good measure. They shared another laugh, and even Mary had to snicker.
Ariel returned to the living room, having replaced her bar waitressing “uniform” with more relaxing workout clothes; her knee-high boots were discarded by her bedroom door, leaving her bare below the thigh as she tramped back into the room. She hardly exchanged a look with her insufferable brother or his annoying friends as she sunk back into the last remaining empty chair in the living room. Plopping back into the cushions, she kicked both naked, leather-cooked feet up onto the coffee table at the center of the cramped room.
It didn’t take long for the odor leaked from Ariel’s sweat-damp peds to percolate around the room. In short order, a soft fog of salty excretion and reeking foot flesh was clogging the room and the lungs of the other three individuals present. Like leather left in water. Mary pretended not to notice, but both David and Nina were sure to cover their noses and twist up their countenances as if they’d sucked on a lemon.
A few minutes passed in awkward silence. Ariel flexed her toes and arched her soles out in the open, wafting their scent around. The TV blathered on at low volume, casting an alien glow over the mostly darkly room. However, after David had been whispering into Nina’s ear for at least sixty seconds and gotten her to loudly giggle, Ariel exhaled with irritation and forcefully cocked her head to glare at them.
“What?” Ariel demanded, twiddling a strand of long, distended ginger hair between her thumbs.
“Nothin’, sis.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Well, I was just telling Nina, it’s a good thing we got the complete insurance package when we were both promoted to managers, cuz we just might need it if we get radiation poisoning cancer from your feet.”
At this, Nina nearly doubled over. She clutched her stomach and cackled, joining David in mocking peals of laughter at Ariel. The redhead, turning a deep rose in her normally pale, thin cheeks, quickly swept her feet off the table and slammed them to the floor. Too embarrassed now to remain in the literally soured air of the living room, Ariel darted toward her bedroom and closed the door behind.
It took another minute for both David and Nina to recover; they were practically spilled across one another at this point, stomachs heaving joyously from the cruel humor of it. Nina wiped her moistened eyes before any happy-cry tears could descend her cheeks and rub out the layer of dark eyeliner beneath.
“You guys sure could use the Golden Rule sometimes, you know?” Mary complained. She frowned at them as she leaned down, reaching to her own sore feet and kneading her heels beneath her fingers. “She’s spending her whole night getting aggravated with drunk bar dudes while trying not to spill any drinks on a tray. You think she needs you two making a big deal about it when she has a tiny bit of B.O. after work? How would you feel if that happened to you?”
“Honestly, I’m just so glad I don’t have that same problem,” Nina commented. She crossed her right foot up and over her left knee, wriggling her black-polished toenails about in David’s direction. “See?”
“You mean smell, not see,” David snickered. He playfully swatted at his friend’s size-eight foot until she placed it back on the floor. “And no, you’re right, Nina, you don’t have that problem. I guess my sister just has a knack for producing biohazards when she has those stinkers in boots all day and night.”
Ariel laid atop the covers of her bed, fists clenched at her side, teeth gritted so hard she was on the verge of shaving off enamel. Her fiery green eyes were still alight with righteous fury. It took all she had to keep from grunting melodramatically just to quell the rage.
Sure, siblings occasionally made cracks at one another; that snide comment of David’s, humiliating her in order to make his friends laugh, wasn’t the real problem. It was simply the last straw in a very tall stack of straw built over years and years.
He’d always thought he was better than her. Everything, from grade school report cards to track & field PRs to the size of Christmas gifts purchased for their parents, her older sibling took it upon himself to upstage her as visibly as possible. It went beyond a mere brother-sister rivalry. It was just a plain old bitter rivalry, a brutal contest, and one where he’d put himself on top for all the years they’d been forced to live together. David, with his better job and bigger circle of friends and higher income, had the actual, inconceivable nerve to rub that imagined superiority in her face every hour of every day of every year that he was capable. And the awful part was, according to the laws of society, he was doing well and worthy of praise; meanwhile, Ariel was left to slum through the worst job of her life and still be verbally pelted when all she wanted to do was rest. This couldn’t stand any longer.
Ariel couldn’t explain how she knew, even as she sat up from her bed and moved toward the closet, but she just knew: it was time for a change. As if on autopilot, she followed the prescribed motions of instinct. She brushed past gobs of clothing, shouldered a few stacks of boxes out onto the floor, until at last she came to the dusty storage container of moth-eaten heirlooms and inheritances the twenty-eight-year-old had neglected to examine up until now.
Most of the ancient items inside were crappy polaroids she’d never look at or pieces of cheap jewelry she’d never wear. However, at the bottom of the stack, the redhead discovered a brown leather tome the size of a science class text book. At first she mistook the book for a photo album, but upon lifting it up and peeling back its yellowed pages, she revealed it to be something else entirely.
Ariel raised an eyebrow. She drummed her bare toes against the rug. A hopeful, treacherous smile teased across her lips.
It was worth a try.