i.
Cardan clocked in ten minutes after his shift was supposed to begin and retrieved a Redbull from the fridge. In full view of the "security camera" (read: employee monitoring device), he cracked the can and took a long swallow. It still wasn't sweet enough for him and so he walked over to the shelf of syrups and contemplated his choices. Lavender this time, or rose? Or maybe he should branch out and do raspberry. Unable to decide, he did a pump of each before sticking a straw into the top to stir.
He took another sip from the can. Much better.
His coworker, a blonde girl with green streaks in her hair whose name he couldn't remember, rushed past him towards the espresso machine. She looked extraordinarily frazzled and, glancing out the window, it was no wonder why. The line of cars wound all the way around the building.
He supposed he could lighten her burden a bit. He opened the order window and said, "Welcome to Greenbriar Beans, where we caffeinate your soul." Absolutely no one told him to say that and indeed, the woman sitting in the driver's seat of her car blinked at him in what could only be described as bewilderment. "What can I get started for you?"
He took her order and, as he made his way over to the shelf of plastic cups, he opened up his phone. His group text with Nicasia, Locke, and Valerian was blowing up but he found it tedious to scroll up and read everything his friends had said. He texted as much.
The blonde sprinted past him. "Hey," he called, "This is for the lady in the Prius."
He passed the drink to his coworker, who took it dutifully and walked to the window as Cardan opened up his TikTok app.
"Cardan," the girl said. "She says she ordered it hot, not iced."
Cardan closed TikTok. "Does she want a new one?" he called, heavily put-upon. "The weather is so much better for iced drinks."
Wordlessly, the blonde made her way to the espresso machine and began making the new drink.
The door opened. "The line outside is fucked up. Did the prince not show up again?" said a girl as she hung up her purse on a coat hook before clocking in.
The prince! He sort of liked that. The girl was wearing Allbirds-Cardan always noticed a tasteful shoe-and very little makeup. She was a relatively new hire, if he recalled correctly.
"Well, that's probably for the best. We'll get more work done without-" she looked up to see Cardan standing there, smirking. Instead of looking horrified at what she had said, she frowned. "Oh, good," she said, flatly. "I was hoping you'd be here to mess up orders and get underfoot."
Cardan was almost pleased to be spoken to in such a way. He drew himself up to his full height.
"You know, it would be very easy to tell my brother that I caught you skimming the till," Cardan said nonchalantly.
The girl rolled her eyes. "Your brother has a wealth management team. He doesn't have anything to do with running the business, except to give his piece-of-shit brother something to do during the day other than annoy him."
That stung because it was shockingly accurate. Shocking because he was pretty sure that wasn't information just anyone knew. Suddenly, this wasn't Cardan punching down because he could. This was personal. He read her nametag. Jude. An uncommon name.
"You wouldn't happen to be Jude Duarte, would you?" he asked, his eyes narrowed.
"A genius as well as a hard worker," Jude said. "It only took three weeks for you to look up from your phone long enough to recognize me."
Oh, Cardan did not like this. He had gone to school with Jude, though she was in the grade below him and their paths rarely crossed. Still, he was more than a little chagrinned to be caught working as a fucking barista. Which led to him asking, "Wait a minute, why are you here?"
She looked at him with open contempt. "I work here," she said.
He almost said, Your father employs the same wealth management team as my brother, and therefore you have no reason to be working for minimum wage at a knock-off Starbucks, before realizing that actually he didn't care. He turned to the time clock and punched out. The clock indicated that he had been working for a whole forty-five minutes. "Well, it looks like you've got this place handled," Cardan said, giving Jude a mock-salute. "I'm off."
She returned his salute with her middle finger, which he caught as though it had been a blown kiss and mimed putting it in his pocket. With that, he walked out the door.
Cardan made his way carefully through throng of vehicles surrounding the coffee shop. Who did Jude think she was, anyway? Like making a macchiato with the correct amount of chocolate was anything to brag about.
He was only three steps away from his car when his phone buzzed with an incoming text from Nicasia. Swiping open his messaging app, he saw a picture of Locke and some girl at Pinkberry, her legs in his lap as he fed her a spoonful of yogurt. They were both laughing. Upon closer examination, it was clear that this photo had been taken across the street and covertly-it was a little pixelated and there was a window separating the photographer and her subject. Still, he recognized that fall of brown hair, the bee-stung lips, the round cheeks.
Nicasia messaged again, "Who the fuck is that girl?"
That was the girl who had just called him a piece of shit.
"That's Jude fucking Duarte," Cardan said out loud, incredulous. Then, he messaged Locke: "Are you fucking the Duarte girl?"
Inelegantly but succinctly, Locke messaged back. "? ﾟﾏﾻ ? ﾟﾏﾻ ? ? ?￢ﾀﾝ
The annoyance he'd felt calcified into white-hot rage. He took out his pocket knife and slashed each one of the tires on the car he was 90% sure belonged to Jude. No way the blonde drove a Tesla.
Then he slouched into his own car and drove away.
ii.
Jude smelled of Lysol and espresso when, two hours after closing, she and Fand walked into the cool night. What had supposed to have been a six-hour shift for her had turned into eight, with the line of cars not ceasing until they'd finally locked the window and turned over the OPEN sign.
"Have a good night!" Fand called from the seat of her electric bike as she strapped her helmet into place.
"You, too," Jude called back, pawing for her keys in her purse. She found them and unlocked her car, giving a thumbs up to Fand that she was safe. Fand reciprocated the gesture and took off, quickly accelerating to at least 20 mph. Shit, those things could go fast.
Inside the car, an older-model Tesla that Oriana had given up in favor of something that doesn't spontaneously catch fire, Jude took out the messy topknot her hair had been pulled into and ran her fingers through her tresses before starting her car. Her anger at Cardan, which had grown acute during the worst of her shift, was a far-away thing now. She didn't have to think about him or what a spoiled asshole he was until the next shift they shared.
Selecting an after-work playlist, she turned her music up loud and started to reverse out of the parking lot. The car jerked backward, a worrying noise cutting through the dulcet tones coming through her speaker system.
"What the fuck?" she said aloud, grabbing her phone and hopping out of the driver's seat. She swiped the flashlight app on and beamed it towards her car. The problem was readily apparent: she had a flat tire.
She blew out a breath, thanking a higher power that she'd had the foresight to purchase a spare tire kit back when she'd had money to throw around. Taryn and Vivi had laughed at her since there was an app for Tesla where you could just call for roadside assistance. But the warranty had run out only a few weeks after she and Vivi had moved into their one-bedroom in the Valley and the spare tire kit remained in the Telsa's trunk. As she moved to the back of her car to retrieve it, the light emanating from her phone passed over the rear tire.
It was flat, too.
Jude's heart plummeted to her feet. She practically vaulted across the hood of her car to the other side. Sure enough, every single tire was flat. And, upon closer inspection, she could see that they'd been slashed to ribbons.
For a solid five seconds, Jude blinked in disbelief, unable to comprehend the situation. She couldn't understand how this had happened. But then reality kicked in, and she understood perfectly well: this had to have been Cardan.
Did Cardan know the cost of a tire, let alone four? How much it would be to tow her car? Get it serviced? No, Jude realized with a bright, sickening clarity: Cardan hadn't considered the huge blow this was financially, because he never thought about money. He didn't think about how this stranded her in fucking Burbank when she lived in Van Nuys. He only thought about being cruel for the sake of it.
Jude called Taryn, wiping at the wetness streaming down her cheeks. To her horror, she realized she was crying.
Taryn's phone went straight to voicemail, which was pretty typical of late. Vivi, she knew, was working a shift at the Ramen restaurant for at least the next four hours.
Finally, she tapped her apartment's address into her maps app and looked up how to get home on public transportation. There was a stop at the IKEA several blocks away that was a straight shot to her neighborhood.
Thinking increasingly violent thoughts about Cardan, she weathered cat calls and leers as she trudged resolutely to the bus stop, keys pointing outward between each finger of her right fist in case the leers became grabs.
iii.
Cardan had been thrown out of Revel this morning on his ear, which was quite the feat, considering Revel was, above all, a discerning establishment where the bouncers would tuck you into the backseat of your family's car and send you home with your driver (in the alley in the back, to avoid the keen eyes of the paparazzi) if you were overserved. But what Cardan had done hadn't so much been drinking too much as it had been committing a Class 3 felony. But it wasn't as though the fucking bartenders were cops, and no one had gotten hurt, and it had just been fun, anyway.
Thankfully, he'd requested bottle service at the club and had tucked the last nearly-full bottle of Grey Goose into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket before he'd been unceremoniously tossed out. In his hand, he had his phone out and his thumb hovering over the Lyft app. But he wasn't ready to go home, and probably there was some dive that'd still serve him.
He noticed a scuff on his shoes-a pair of white suede Gucci smoking slippers-and licked his thumb to wipe it off. The shoes had been a gift during Paris Fashion Week the previous year, back when he and Nicasia had been happy. At least, he thought they'd been. In truth, he didn't know when her affair with Locke truly started. Maybe, when Locke and Nicasia went to high tea someplace in the Latin Quarter and Cardan had said he'd rather drown in the Seine than spend three hours eating petit fours, Locke had begun to romance her. Maybe Nicasia was gazing at Locke with hearts in her eyes as all three of them strolled through Sacré-Coeur. Maybe Cardan was just never good enough, at his core. Strange how a pair of shoes can outlast a relationship. The thought didn't bother him so much, drunk and high as he was.
Cardan walked a few unsteady blocks before pausing at a group of Lime scooters clustered together on the sidewalk like a herd of antelope. He stalked towards them, imagining himself a lion, the cocaethylene running its way through his bloodstream making him fast and happy and alive. He pounced on one on the edge, roaring like the king of the jungle.
From his spot on the ground, Lime scooter vanquished and on its side next to him, he propped himself up on his elbows and took a fortifying pull from the bottle of Grey Goose.
Two pretty girls tottered past in sky-high heels, their skin sparkling with body glitter. They giggled at him, and he heard, "Cute," and "Isn't he-?" and "Nicasia," and "TikTok." He watched them turn a corner before he pulled out his credit card, paid for the scooter, and used it to catch up with them.
iv.
There is nothing as bad as coming down from cocaine while hungover.
No, that's not true. What's worse than coming down from cocaine with a raging headache and dry mouth is working at Greenbriar Beans while you do it. He'd ridden the fucking Lime scooter all the way there, thinking about Red Bull and lavender syrup, absolutely blissed out as the wind blew his hair back.
That had been two hours ago. Were he a little more sober, he'd have had the wisdom to blow off his opening shift. Instead, the coffee shop had sounded grand and he'd needed something sweet to counteract the bitter taste in the back of his throat and that blonde girl-not Jude, he resolutely did not think of Jude-was cute enough and maybe he'd flirt with her.
Now, his outlook was quite a bit less rosy.
He took a long, grim swallow of the Grey Goose, using his Red Bull doctored with blackberry syrup as a chaser.
The blonde stared at him for a beat too long and, unhappily, Cardan said, "It is medicinal, I assure you."
Immediately, he regretted saying anything. His brother owned the place. He was practically her boss.
Actually, she was the manager, Cardan remembered. Well, he was her superior, if not her boss. Not that a similar argument hadn't fallen on deaf ears as he was 86'd from Revel mere hours ago. Cardan could feel himself smiling the smile he used when he was uncomfortable as he considered the flaws he had to have to get kicked out of a club his brother had invested in. But he was nothing special. Perhaps the bouncer realized that when he tossed Cardan out like trash and the paparazzi's cameras barely flashed as he collected himself. Who would want a picture of some not-quite-famous, rich brat? Wasn't he always just adjacent to power?
He was adjacent to his brothers and sisters, all of whom would inherit some portion of the nearly-billion dollars their media-mogul father had accumulated, while he was getting a trust fund at age 21 for $400,000, enough to cover the tuition of an ivy-league school (like he had the grades for that!) out of pocket, a few shares in his father's company, Elfhame, and not a cent more. It did not escape his attention just how low that placed him in the pecking order.
And he was adjacent to Nicasia, whose following on Instagram and TikTok had turned profitable, and who had made cheating on him a spectacle on those platforms. Worse, she'd done it without his knowledge-the soap opera of his stupid life unfolding for any ghoul to log on and see what an idiot he'd been. In his worst bouts of self-loathing, he'd open TikTok and look for the video of himself walking in on Locke and Nicasia kissing at a party, the raw pain on his face.
It felt too intimate for even himself to see-the way his eyes had glazed over and his mouth had gone slack before rage had lanced through him. The screencap of that face had become a meme, and when he was feeling particularly magnanimous, he'd open up Twitter and retweet that image of his bald hurt along with a caption like, "when ur mom says youre out of gushers but u can have fruit snacks instead."
Christ, he was low. He stumbled to the first aid kit under the cash register and counted out five individually-wrapped ibuprofen capsules, his fingers trembling as he tore open the packaging.
"Maybe you should go home," the blonde said tentatively, watching as Cardan dropped two of the pills on the dirty floor and picked them back up. Five-second rule.
At that, Cardan let out a mean little chuckle. His phone was dead and he'd ridden a Lime scooter all the way from Hollywood to fucking Burbank. He was well and truly stuck unless he could muster up the energy to walk somewhere that sold phone chargers and order a Lyft. No, what he would have to do is wait out this hangover in the air-conditioned relative safety of Greenbriar Beans, where at least there was caffeine and he could take a nap on the floor if worse came to worse.
"You wouldn't happen to have any weed, would you?" Cardan asked after he'd swallowed the last of the ibuprofen and it didn't immediately cure his headache, depression, nausea, and fatigue.
"If I say yes, will you come back and actually work your shift after you've smoked?" the blonde asked sternly.
"Nothing would please me more," Cardan said gravely, hand over heart, "than to feel well enough to work the remainder of this shift."
He was glad that he hadn't actually lied.
"Alright," the blonde said uncertainly. "In my bag."
Cardan took the three steps to the coat hooks and unzipped a patchwork shoulder bag-the sort hippies sold on Venice Beach-and followed his nose to a pencil pouch with a glass pipe and a ziplock of actual, honest-to-god marijuana.
"You don't have, like, a vape pen?" Cardan asked, a little delighted and a lot miserable. Who smoked anymore? Like, actually smoked? It was all THC-infused tonic water and gummy bears that made your face melt off if you ate more than two.
The look the blonde gave him was one of utter incredulity and Cardan realized that he had found the limits of her patience. Knowing when to exit a room, he grabbed the baggie, plus her sunglasses, and went outside to smoke a bowl.
v.
The bus had been late and crowded when it came and Jude could feel herself sweating off her deodorant before she even got on board.
It had been a fucked up couple of days since her tires had been slashed, and Jude had never realized just how exhausting public transportation can be in a city built for cars.
She'd spent the day before calling every tire shop in Los Angeles, growing increasingly desperate as she did math on a legal pad at the card table they'd set up in the living room. They didn't really need wi-fi, did they? And since she wasn't driving any time soon, she could cancel her barebones car insurance which, she'd found out, did not cover slashed tires.
At least she didn't have to worry about the car getting towed. The day after it'd happened, Fand had called absolutely beside herself with worry when she'd seen Jude's car still in its spot at Greenbriar Beans, and it wasn't like Fand was going to call the towing company. Cardan might.
Cardan. That sniveling, vile little shit. Every time Jude felt hopeless about her situation, she imagined pushing Cardan into traffic. Stabbing him with a fork. Running him over with a bulldozer. Holding his head under the murky water of the LA River until he was forced to swallow big gulps of rainwater and whatever heinous shit had been washed out with the last big storm.
That was what she was thinking about, in vivid detail, as she marched from the bus stop to Greenbriar Beans. It was providence, then, that the object of her ire was sitting on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop.
Jude's heart rate picked up and her mouth went dry. Her vision narrowed and she began to run. She'd played soccer in school and her body was strong from sports, and so Cardan probably didn't know what hit him when her foot connected with his torso.