Chapter 13: Commitment

By some miracle, none of us had to work on Saturday night. We’d just started working this week and some of us hadn’t even finished training yet. I was sure that our schedules would get screwed up pretty soon. Sarah Lynn and I were both working at the grocery store. Kelly was at Donaldson’s. Charmaine and Jas had both landed waitressing jobs at Applebee’s. Only Ariel was still unemployed and I wasn’t sure what she’d be doing. I just figured this was the last chance for a while that we’d all be able to spend the night together, so I called Granddad. He agreed we could use the lower level room for an overnight campout.

We needed a meeting. The house we’d toured was beginning to grow on us. I think we could all see possibilities that would require a little work over the summer but would give us a pretty decent space to live in by the time school started. The big question was whether we could afford it.

“Three grand sounds like an awful lot for that dump,” Ariel sighed.

“Even twenty-one hundred is a stretch,” Kelly agreed. “But I like it.”

“Here’s a question before we all start shooting it down,” Charmaine said. She was usually the quietest of all of us, so when she spoke, we listened. “How many of you originally intended to live in a dorm this fall?” All except Kelly raised their hands. I know she was intending to just live at home and commute by bus to the campus. I wasn’t sure what Charmaine had planned to do since she was doing the polling and didn’t raise her hand. “Now, have you looked at the cost of dorm rooms? They cost between nine and twelve thousand for the school year. Keep in mind that is room and board. You get meals at some level. The very cheapest rooms are what they call expanded living. Nice name, but it means that instead of two in a dorm room, there are three. Same room-size, just more crowded.”

“Ten grand for a year of room and board doesn’t sound so bad,” Sarah Lynn said. “And there are janitors. You only have to clean your own room, not the bathroom and kitchen.”

“Not like the former tenants in our house ever cleaned,” I jabbed.

“I agree that ten thousand dollars a year isn’t a bad rate for the services, but it isn’t for a year,” Charmaine continued. “It’s for the school year, September through May. And not even all of that. You can’t stay in the dorm over winter break. There’s a month that the school expects you to go home to mommy like a good little girl.”

“Wait. So, we pay ten grand for eight months?” Kelly asked.

“Yeah. Twelve-fifty a month and you still have to deal with winter break and summer,” Charmaine said. “When you look at that, even the five hundred a month is a bargain. At three-fifty, it’s a steal—though we have to do our own cleaning and cooking.”

“If we showed Jett’s and my moms that place, they’d hit it like an atom bomb. Everything would be clean and sterilized in a week,” Jas said.

“What about food?” Ariel asked. “Do we all just buy our own, or do we pool the money and create menus?”

“That would be most efficient,” Charmaine said, “but maybe everyone isn’t willing to do that. I checked the USDA website and it says that the monthly food cost for a nineteen-year-old is between two-eighty and three-seventy-five. At the top end, you have a male who eats out part of his meals—or orders pizza.” We looked at the empty pizza boxes in front of us and started laughing.

“So, what you are saying, if I have the number right in my head, is that we’d pay twelve-fifty a month for eight months of campus housing and food, or we’d pay a maximum of eight-fifty and we could get it down to six hundred a month for twelve months of living independently with each other,” Sarah Lynn said. “I’m in.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“There’s only three bedrooms,” Jas said. “Who gets to be roommates? And can we get a double bed for Jett’s room?”

“We should get a king-size bed and use the other two rooms for overflow,” Ariel laughed. “I’m in.”

“I have a request,” Kelly said.

“Go with it, girlfriend,” Jas answered.

“Um… Not that I don’t want to room with any of you, but I need to earn a lot more money than I do to pay for school and housing. That’s why I was going to live at home. But I’ve been experimenting a little with some help from one of my co-workers at Donaldson’s. She uses her job there just so she can answer the question, ‘Where do you work?’ without admitting she’s a stripper.”

“Kelly, are you still thinking of becoming a stripper?” I asked softly.

“Not exactly. I told you something Thursday and it’s still true. You’re really the only male I want to be close to—in any way. Delilah doesn’t work in a club. She does it all online. I mean, we’ve been doing that with each other for three years. You’ve probably all seen me come a million times. Why not add a few anonymous viewers who will pay for the privilege?” she said.

“Can you really make money that way?” Jas asked.

“Yeah, but please don’t go into competition with me,” Kelly laughed. “Delilah says that in a slow month, she makes about a thousand dollars. During her birthday month this year, she made five thousand.”

I could see where this was going at last. I had no strong feelings one way or another about Kelly doing sex shows for online viewers. What she needed, though, was a broadcast space.

“That’s why you are interested in the attic,” I said. “You would have your own private studio.”

“Yeah. I’d need a few things to make sure I could do a good quality broadcast. For example, I’d need a broadband connection that was stable and had unlimited high-speed internet. The agent already told us that I’d need a space heater. Maybe some lights and stuff,” Kelly said.

“How are you going to pay for the startup costs?” I asked. “I mean, we do okay with our short sessions and WiFi, but aren’t you going to need a more powerful computer and camera and stuff for this?”

“Um… You know my mom is a single parent, right? Well, Siobhan has always been very upfront with me about sex and men and all. She’s got a nice secretarial job now, but when she was my age, she was a stripper. Exotic dancer, as she says. Exotic enough that she got knocked up and I came along. That changed a lot of her career. Anyway, she knows I do stuff online with you. And it’s one of the reasons I’ve had this birth control implant since my first period,” Kelly giggled. “Anyway, she doesn’t make enough to pay for college, but she said that if this is what I wanted to do, she’d invest in new equipment for me and give me tips.”

“Your mom is so cool,” Charmaine sighed.

“I don’t mind Kelly having the big room, but I think Jett needs a room, too. Maybe not his own bedroom by himself because we all want to sleep with him,” Jas said. “But Jett needs somewhere to paint and not be limited by studio hours and availability at the U.”

“That one should be obvious,” Ariel said. “What would we do with that office space off the living room? If it’s not too crowded for you, Jett, would that work as a private space to paint?”

“Yeah. That would work. I don’t have much more room than that in my bedroom at home and there wouldn’t be a bed in this room,” I said.

“Which brings us to the lease,” Sarah Lynn said. “Do we each sign separately, or have just one or two of us sign with the others subletting?”

“A hundred and fifty bucks a month is eighteen hundred a year,” Jas said. “We could bank that and all go to Florida for spring break.”

“Who should sign the lease?” Kelly asked.

“Jett and me,” Charmaine answered. We jerked our heads around to look at our quiet friend. “It makes sense. Jas and I found the place, but when we toured it, the agent addressed all her comments to Jett. It’s just a reality of the world. She just figured we were his harem.”

“We are,” Jas giggled.

“So why you?” Sarah Lynn asked.

“Because I’m going to be our group’s accountant and treasurer,” Charmaine answered. “Jas is studying business and marketing which will always be helpful. Ariel is in engineering. You’re doing rocket science and brain surgery as a double major or something. Kelly is doing sex. Jett is doing art. I’m the only one who is doing numbers. I should write the checks for our rent and groceries and such.”

“Char, do you have any idea how much you mean to all of us?” I asked. The other girls nodded. I’d been about to object to having my name on the lease, but her simple and selfless declaration made me change my mind. We had a lot of things to work out, but we had found a place to work on them.

Charmaine and I went in to the agency Monday after I got off work and signed the lease. I paid the damage deposit and first month’s rent. Well, if this didn’t work out, I’d just signed away most of the thirty thousand I had in my account. The agent said they would have the house ‘mucked out’—like it was a horse stall—by the end of the week and we could have the keys, even though it was still a week before the first of the month.

The next day I met Char after work again and we went to the bank with seven hundred fifty-dollar checks from each of us. We tried to open a business account and were told we needed to create a business first. I had about thirty-five thousand in that bank, so they were really helpful and showed us the options. She helped us set up a co-op and navigate the state registration process. Then, we could open a checking account for our club. All the checks were made out to me but, because I had a healthy checking account at the bank, I was permitted to endorse the checks payable to our co-op. We set it up as a basic food co-op with the house as our location. We could now pay the rent and pay for food from the co-op account. Charmaine figured out that because I paid the damage deposit and the first month’s rent, I didn’t need to pay my ‘dues’ for six months. She was registered as the treasurer and I was registered as the president of the co-op.