Esme and the Money Grab: (A Very Dark Romantic Comedy) Read Online Free

were interrupted. This time by my buzzing phone. My phone was in the pocket of my dress. The idea of getting up to retrieve it was almost too much in the heat, but I did it anyway.
      “Hello,” I said as if I didn’t know who was calling. I knew it was Jack. Cellphones had taken away all the surprise of a phone call.
      “Baby,” He yelled out. He was always in high spirits. I generally liked that about him. He was up, while I was usually neutral. “I’m in a bind… I need to borrow some money, three hundred dollars should do it.”
      “What happened?” I asked as calmly as possible.
      Jack could never hold onto a job for more than a few weeks. As his lifelong friend and sometime girlfriend, this was hard to watch. He seemed to think the world was fighting him, but from my vantage point, it was clear that it was Jack, not the world that was out to get him.
      Jack had grown up in the group home run by our church around the corner from me in the Valley. His mother had emigrated with him from Russia and promptly left him at the local fire station and disappeared into the immense landscape of the city. Or maybe she went back to Russia. Who knows?
      He had been a sickly hyper boy with a stomach filled with exotic parasites. It had taken years for him to recover, and he was smaller than all the other boys for a very long time. It hadn’t helped that he hadn’t spoken a word on English either.
      But, he was smart. He was conversant in English within the year, fully fluent within two. By the time we started high school, he no longer had an accent. Our school was mostly kids from Mexico and Latin America. He was the only white boy, although nobody ever thought of him that way. He defied categories.
      Jack was an outsider everywhere he went.
      I understood his awkward position. I was a Colombian in a world of girls from Mexico and Latin America. It was not a huge gulf, it’s similar to the differences between an American and a Brit. I was lighter skinned and my hair wavy with a golden hued brown. It certainly wasn’t a big deal, but we were aware of it.
      Colombia was exotic to the girls in the way Britain is to Americans, to go back to that analogy. Jack though, was a Russian boy growing up in a Latino culture. He was accepted, in fact even looked up to in some ways, but he never really fit into our close-knit world. Forget about fitting into the adult world.
      To me he would always be the sweetest boy. He played with me on the old swing set at our elementary school, teaching me Russian swear words. He was my first kiss at my very modest Quinceañera. When my parents died, he was by my side as much as he could be. He didn’t have much to say. The loss of my parents, my newfound orphan status was too much for him, too close to his own life. He held my hand tightly instead, and that was enough.  
      But this phone call was seven years later. His life had tumbled around him since leaving the group home. He would disappear for months at time. I would be frantic with worry, but then he would turn up again, a little wounded looking, but okay. One time he came back to me with his back covered in tattoos written in the Russian language.
      He laughed it off, saying he had been drunk and didn’t even know what was written. I offered to write it all down for him, so he could translate it. He said not to bother.
      His energy in the previous few months had grown frightening. He had been more out of it than in it, if that makes sense. Still, he was my Jack and there wasn’t anything that he could do to make me give up on him. Or so I thought until the phone call.
      “You don’t want to know.” He replied in his easy, breezy way.
      “I do want to know.” Maybe I didn’t.
      “What do you call it? I’m on the lam,” He laughed as if what he just said was funny. It wasn’t. “Actually, a couple of thousand would help more, but I know you don’t have that.”
      “I would if you ever