This Crazy Rich Boy

It has been a truly long, tiring, miserable day. Claire's feet ache so much that the moment her feet touch the warm water in the basin she prepared in the bathroom, it is deliriously satisfying. She closes her eyes, not even having the energy to actually be self-conscious about her nȧkėdness. After all, who's there to see her? Karen's busy with the boyfriend, watching Netflix in their poor excuse of a living room. And she's sure Lena's not in the apartment at the moment. She didn't ask because she didn't want to know or has the energy to want to know. Things are already tiring as they are. What she needs most in the world right now, right at this very moment, is a little "me time." And thankfully, the bathroom is one of the few sanctuaries in this crazy world for her; it's even a sanctuary from her mates' daily ȧssault on her senses.

Living with Karen and Lena isn't easy. Their personalities are worlds apart. Karen's a little worldly—too worldly for Claire's taste—and having a string of rich boyfriends did not help her reputation. Karen would ditch the present one the moment she finds another who's richer or more willing to splurge material gifts on her. The words "super sŀut" and "gold digger" keep flashing in Claire's mind whenever the topic of Karen's lifestyle enters the picture, but she swats the thoughts away—it is not fair to harbor ill feelings toward the other person you share the apartment with. After all, Karen has always been nothing but nice to her, if not a bit condescending, especially for Claire's lack of boyfriends. The phrase "No Boyfriend Since Birth" has been uttered out in the open all too often, at the expense of Claire's sense of confidence.

Back in college, having no boyfriend or any relationship with the same or the opposite sėx (there were a lot of lesbians at Xavier University) was no big deal, really. Claire Monteverde was an over-achiever, and she scared the boys away. She had a reputation for being a fierce debater, an all-around Miss Brainy. She was also President of the student council. Whenever anyone had the nerve to actually ask her the million-dollar question of, "Why are you single?" Claire simply dismissed it with, "Who has time for boys?" Then she would laugh, or deflect attention to something else. But secretly, she pined for someone, anyone who would not be intimidated by her. She didn't like boys of her age, those college jocks who are into nothing but sports and musky colognes. She wants someone whom she could look up to, someone she could respect.

These are things neither Karen nor Lena knows—all they thought was she was some loser who couldn't even get laid in college, some vɨrġɨn who was so painfully innocent that there's simply no saving her. Karen was more forthright, always offering to "double date" her with her boyfriend's buddy, to which Claire would respond with some excuse or other. "You'll never get laid if you keep that up, Claire," Karen would say. Karen's boyfriend, some dude named Russel, would look at her in some weird way—something that borders on ŀust and feigned disgust. Because why not? Claire's goodlooking, she has the curves, she's beauty and brains, yet for some reason nobody sees all that.

Lena, on the other hand, is a bit more level-headed. Lena also doesn't have a boyfriend currently, as the last one she dumped months ago on account of finding him in bed with someone else. Cliché, but that was true—Jack was never big on loyalty, anyway, and going out with Lena, Claire had heard, was due to some wager he had with friends. Long story short, Lena is currently heartbroken, and bitter, and often spends hours inside her room, binge-watching on Korean dramas whenever she's not at work.

Right now, as Claire soaks her feet in the warm water, letting her nȧkėdness go all out in the sanctuary of the bathroom, she thinks of how in the past many months her money dwindled unstoppably along with her failure to find a decent job. What was wrong with her? When she graduated, in flying colors and all that, she had high hopes—she'd sally forth into the interview with her heart brimming with confidence. But always, always, they allowed her to leave, saying, "Don't call us, we'll call you." But no one called. Is it something to do with how she dresses up? Is her skirt too short, too revealing? Does she come off as too intimidating, to the point of irritating her interviewer? How her confidence went down with every failed interview, her prospects diminishing. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, she finds this opening for a personal ȧssistant—too low for her standards, but it's for a company called TXCI Technologies, which sells and manufactures high-tech gadgets for half of the world's consumers, and you're serving the CEO directly, so Claire thought, "Why not?"

And now, her first day with TXCI's CEO has just ended, and what a long day. What a douchebag. What a monster! If you'd read Forbes magazine or Time, you'd think the way Gabriel Tan responded to those interview question, he seemed like a normal, even admirable person. Who knew there's a monster that lay behind that charming smile? Maybe not a total monster, maybe just some insane person with his rich boy problems and eccentricities, but still. One day down, twenty-nine more to go. Would she even survive one month? She looks at her feet and rummages through her heart for the answer, and her heart sinks: she might not even survive a week, at the rate Gabriel Tan's eccentricities are going.

She's deep in these thoughts when all of a sudden the bathroom door swings open—didn't she just lock that door—and Russel, Karen's boyfriend, appears, sees her, his mouth dropping open.

Claire screams so hard that Russel jumps out and goes scrambling back to wherever he came from.