The Saver Read Online Free Page B

want to double or triple the rent.
    But they always wait before they take action on a late tenant, because taking action costs money, and then if you pay the rent they lose that money. Since we’ve always been on time, they won’t want to take action for nothing. So I can stay at least until the end of December without paying the December rent. That gives me time to plan what I’ll do next.
    It was really windy and cold today, with rain turning into ice. But I went to clean a house anyhow, just to get my mind off things while I figure out what to do. I hadbad dreams again, by the way. So I went to the Thursday-Saturday house.
    Insane people live there. It’s amazing how people can be part of society and everything, and be completely insane inside their house. The husband, Mr. Dixler, teaches at university, and his wife teaches aerobics at the Y, so you’d think they’d be normal, but they’re not. They have four kids. All the kids are crazy too, probably because of their parents.
    I love how no one is gross on your planet, Xanoth, and you don’t even have a word for disgusting because you don’t know what it is. Here on Earth it’s very different.
    For one thing, no one in that house flushes the toilet. I don’t understand that part. I don’t get how they don’t mind going to the toilet and being forced to see other people’s dumps. They have four bathrooms and it’s the same in all of them.
    But that’s just a small detail. The whole house is a lunatic asylum, dark, filthy, with a million old appliances and tools and probably torture instruments lying all over the place. Just piles of strange things on the floor, which you have to step over as you walk. There’s a TV screen the size of a whole wall in the living room and flat screen TVs in every room. They have locks on the outside of all the kids’ doors, so the kids can get locked in when they’re bad, and their rooms are full of skulls and pet snakes and scorpions in jars and posters from every horror movie ever made, including some they drew themselves.
    On top of all that, the place is teeming with cockroaches, and it’s a new house. It’s new and enormous and probably cost three million dollars, but it’s even more wrecked than our building. The whole house smells because of the weird snakes and rotting food, and because of their chihuahua, who sometimes goes in the corner and no one bothers cleaning it up. When no one’s home the chihuahua goes to a daycare for dogs, so at least he has a break from the family.
    The only time I cleaned this house before was on Saturday, when most of them were home. I won’t even try to describe what that was like, with the chihuahua going completely crazy, and every single TV on a different station, plus they put on music, plus they shouted nonstop.
    There’s three boys and a girl. One of the boys and the girl are twins, I think, around ten, and the other two boys are older. They were all fighting with each other and with their parents. None of their arguments made sense. It’s like they were all talking about different things, but they acted as if they were on the same topic.
    I spent the whole day hiding in the laundry room. Even the laundry room had this big poster of a giant stuffing the arm of a small man inside his mouth. He’s already bitten off the head and there’s blood everywhere. The poster was from an exhibition of an artist called Goya. The one art poster they have, and it has to be of a cannibal eating a human head. I had to concentrate the whole day on not looking at it.
    I did a million loads of laundry, filling the machine, then the dryer, then folding everything. In between, I cleaned the laundry room. That kept me busy until it was time to go. They didn’t care what I did. I think they all have ADD.
    After that Saturday, I didn’t want to go back, so when Mom was sick I just called and said she