Prior to turning eighteen, Bianca stayed with her mother. With their estranged relationship, when Bianca was at home, she pretty much just stayed in her room and kept to herself. She wouldn’t even go down to the kitchen and eat if she heard her mother in there. Their relationship was just too volatile. Just looking at one another wrong could strike up an argument. So, to keep the peace, Bianca was like a hermit when she was home.
On her eighteenth birthday, she moved into an efficiency, which was still tight quarters, but it gave her peace. She stayed there for a couple of years, until she finally moved in with Caesar.
Moving in with Caesar had been her saving grace. She was now free to move about the cabin.
Not that Bianca missed anything about living with her mother, but the one thing she knew she wouldn’t miss for sure were those ridiculous plumbing issues they had, which resulted in a major backup every couple years. The entire basement would flood, and most likely she’d be the one to have to clean it up. Not anymore! And boy, was she glad that those days were gone for her. Yet even now, it was still such a headache to Bianca, because she’d have to listen to Bella go on and on about how much of an inconvenience it was to help Ella get that basement right, and how nobody ever did that basement right but her.
The last time it happened, even though Bianca wasn’t living there, she’d offered to help chip in and pay for whatever it would cost. Hell, she’d much rather be dropping fries for the rest of her life than cleaning up a basement backed up with piss and feces everywhere. When she proposed to pay, Ella just laughed and said, “Yeah, right. Where you going to get thousands of dollars from?”
The truth of the matter was that Bianca had been boosting for the last few years and had been saving damn near every penny. She was boosting on a much larger scale now, versus when she was staying with her mother. That was her beginning stages, when she was learning the life, so even though she hadn’t been making as much money a couple years ago as she was now, she still had a nice little amount of money put away. That was after she gave her mom a little something-something every month back then.
With Caesar now taking care of all the household bills: rent, food, utilities, and whatever they needed, Bianca had really been able to form a nice nest egg. But even when she lived with her mother, besides the change she threw at Ella, Bianca didn’t spend much money. Hell, she basically stole everything she needed! And if she couldn’t steal what she needed, she knew somebody who could, and they bartered.
Bianca had first started boosting one day when she was at the mall and wanted this designer pair of jeans. She’d been saving up birthday money, Christmas money, and money she’d gotten from graduating high school. That was her life savings, literally, and the pair of jeans would suck it all up, but Bianca was so tired of always being labeled the bummy-dressed hood rat, so she went for it and doled out everything in her change purse for those jeans. She barely had enough money for her bus ride back home after the purchase. So when Bianca sat at the bus stop with these two girls who were pulling out items and bragging about what they’d stolen and how much they were going to sell it for, Bianca was sick.
“Only a fool pays full ticket price for shit on these racks,” one girl said to the other, the two high-fiving one another.
All of a sudden, Bianca wasn’t feeling too proud about her first major purchase of a name brand clothing item. That entire bus ride home, Bianca began planning in her head how she was never going to be the fool those girls were referring to again. That very next day, Bianca tried her hand at boosting. She stole stuff that she really didn’t need or could even fit. She just had to take advantage of certain opportunities. Besides, she had to practice, didn’t she?
Not wanting her efforts and successful boosting gigs to be in vain, Bianca learned of this website that mostly teenagers and young adults frequented. They would post pictures of clothing items they wanted to sell, and others would bid on it. Bianca made $200 her first week. She’d started her own online business with zero startup money. Now, between her online store that she still had on the website, her closet, and her trunk, she was handling hers for real. She could have paid the entire plumbing invoice if she wanted to—but she didn’t. Now that she thought about it, that was probably why Bella was calling. Their mother was probably too cowardly to eat her words, saying that Bianca couldn’t afford to help out, and now she needed her help after all.
“You don’t understand. This shit over here is real,” Bella firmly informed her sister.
“Yeah, I know!” she agreed. “You keep forgetting I’ve been there and seen it firsthand. Look, I’m about to go back to sleep. Find out how much the plumbing bill is and let me know in the morning. I will take care of it,” Bianca directed her sister.
“No, no, no! You don’t understand. The plumbers aren’t the issue. It’s the police I’m more worried about.”
“What? Huh? Police? Damn, the shit is that bad, huh?”
“The police.”
“Why are the police there?” Bianca was the
