LOVE, INC. ♥

Chapter Two

Acknowledgements: This chapter is dedicated to AlexusBurns for the amazingly kind review she left for “Love, Inc.” in her critique board, which motivated me to write this chapter. She’s also a fantastic writer, so check her stories out if you love paranormal action books. From now on I’m planning to dedicate every chapter to one of my readers. A little promotion is the least I could do for those who are supporting my story.

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♥ Chapter Two

 Faces passed in blurs through the hallways. Shoes squeaked on mopped floors, and murmurs echoed down the long walls. The sounds in the busy traffic of the walking period were far away in Riley’s ears as she floated through the aisles like a ghost. Her face looked dark with the way the shadows angled in her downward stare, and purple blotches dotted below her eyes. Strands of hair stuck out from her head, like a doll that had been brushed with a spike comb.

She roamed the faceless halls in its muffled background noises until a voice echoed.

 “Nice tumbleweed, Riley!” A hefty male in a polo shirt cupped his hands around his mouth, a megaphone for his holler. “Must’ve been a craaazy weekend!”

“Yeah,” Riley muttered, passing by him with her eyes still glued to the floor.

The yeller’s friend stopped walking as he realized no one was by his side. He turned around and gawked at the polo shirt man, who stood frozen in his tracks. His eyes were widened, his back stiff.

“What’s wrong, Nolan?”

The apple in his throat bobbed as he swallowed hard. “R-Riley said… ‘yeah’,” he stuttered. “She didn’t sock me in the gut, or dropkick me, or shout that she would shove her fist so far down my throat she would sock me from the inside of my gut while doing a dropkick. She just said… ‘yeah.’”

“Holy—”

The two scrambled their legs as they darted down the hallway and disappeared in the next corner, screaming for their lives.

Riley reached her locker at last through the blurs of students, and her head slammed against the door. She slid a calculator out from her pocket to check the screen again, just to confirm if the device had computed an error.

The calculator was not wrong.

-100.

That was the total amount of money Riley would have by the end of the month. Negative one hundred. She groaned, slamming her forehead against the locker once more. How was it possible to have money less than zero? By that logic, she couldn’t even enjoy free things—no, something free would be one hundred dollars more expensive than what she had!

Riley had already spent the entire weekend circling newspaper ads and bookmarking Internet sites for job offers, but responses were either slow or discouraging. She remembered already asking the cranky landlord for an extension last month, so a second time in delaying the rent would only infuriate that old hag even more.

There was no way she could make a hundred dollars by the end of this month. Even if employers considered her for a fraction of a second, Riley would ruin her chances at the interviews. Those nosy bosses always asked that dreaded question: what had happened in your previous job? The job before that? And the other job before that?

“I got fired for spitting in customers’ drinks,” she had said. “But those customers were harassing the blind man next to their table—they deserved it!”

“I got fired for punching my boss,” she had replied. “He rubbed his hand on one of our co-worker’s rack. That sleazeball had it coming to him.”