Foster's

Robbery 1

Angelica's day job was with a major bank. She was a bank manager at one of their downtown branches.

She liked her job. Most of it was just dealing with customers, staff and making sure that everything was even at the end of the day. She was good at it too. She had always prided herself on her customer service abilities because she wasn't exactly a people person. She had always been kind of awkward all her life, hard to make friends, even harder to let people past those walls she built around her heart.

The friends she did make were close to her. Near and dear to her heart. But that just meant they could hurt her.

And her closest work friend was hurting her now.

Christina and Angelica had started as Tellers at the same time. They did all their trainings together, had similar shifts and often took breaks off together. There had always been a bit of a friendly rivalry between them, who had the better car, the better place, the better stats at work. You normal competition, nothing too serious, or at least, Angelica didn't take it seriously.

Christina was a dark haired beauty, the exact opposite of Angelica. She used to have her own style but since getting close with Angelica she had sort of adopted hers. Pencil skirts and loose blouses. Angelica liked her pencil skirts dark and her blouses pastel. Christina liked hers in her neutral tones, which worked well against her olive skin.

They had applied for the same promotion, and there had been some bitterness when Angelica got it over her, but she always gave Christina tips when she went to interview for other positions in the bank. Just none of them had stuck yet.

Angelica was always sure to be supportive, to have a positive thing to say, to comfort her when Christina was passed over again. But the bitterness was getting worse, Angelica could tell and she had started comparing other parts of their lives trying to one-up Angelica in some way.

When Angelica used her bonus to buy a house, Christina put herself into debt to buy a condo. They had different tastes, so Angelica's cozy little bungalow was filled with brick-a-brack and antiques. Christina's condo was sterile, sleek, minimalism. It wasn't Angelica's style but it suited Christina and that was what was more important.

Then it was about who had more friends. Christina rightly won that one, because Angelica made it a point to not make connections to people. In her experience people left, people betrayed you, people could not be trusted. Christina was a social butterfly she could make friends with everyone.

Angelica made acquaintances.

But Christina never took a chance to lord that above her and Angelica realized that maybe on Christina's end she was a little more serious about the rivalry than she had previously thought.

It got so bad that Angelica had started distancing herself from Christina out of work. She had a boyfriend at that point anyway, a pretty serious boyfriend originally who had been talking about moving in with her, who had started talking about marriage and futures. Yeah, he didn't last.

Then Angelica had gotten her monsters and she basically stopped paying attention to the people in her life.

This meant that Christina had been acting weird for a while and Angelica was late to realizing that. She had been away from work so often trying to deal with the new monsters in her life that she hadn't quite noticed that something was wrong with her work-friend right away.

There had been a distance between them, like even more than was previously put between them. It was like a sort of disconnect between them that hadn't been there before. Angelica had been trying to building a bridge across it but Christina had not been interested or at least hadn't been paying attention.

The thing was, she got like that, super distant, whenever she got a new boyfriend. She would pull away and spend all her time and energy on him.

Angelica had come back from her latest monster induced week vacation and she didn't even have to ask. Apparently while she was gone Christina had been talking no stop about her new boyfriend but she was being super cagey about his name, nor would she show off any pictures.

That was usually the first two things she did. So they were certain she was hiding him for a reason. Probably wasn't as cute and she didn't want anyone to find him on social media.

But Angelica was her "friend" and they had that rivalry and it was totally like her to brag about a new beau, so it was weird that she hadn't and it was super weird that she hadn't shown him off to everyone.

Which just made Angelica more curious. So on her lunch break she took her homemade lunch, which was necessary is because her monsters were eating her out of house and home, and found Christina.

She sat down beside her, smiled at her friend who just stared at her blankly. Right so she was really trying to make this awkward then.

Might as well just get right to it.

"So, how's your new boyfriend?"

"Boyfriend who told you I have one of those?"

"Uh, it's the tea around the office that you got yourself a new man," she said with a smile. "Plus you always get super involved when you get yourself a new guy."

Christina just hmmed at her. "It's not different from you who got dumped and stopped talking to everyone except yourself."

Angelica blinked her eyes. How had she known that? Because of the rivalry with Christina and the stress of having new monsters in her life, she hadn't told anyone that her and Peter had broken up. She just wasn't ready to have to fend off Christina's thinly-veiled underhanded comments about letting Peter get away.

"Yeah? Where did you get that?"

"It's the tea around..."

"Uh... it shouldn't be. Because I didn't tell anyone so how would anyone know?"

Christina faltered. A sort of redness touched her olive cheeks. She started to stutter, she started to get defensive.

Something was off. Something was wrong.

She opened her mouth to point that out, to ask how she knew something that only she and Peter knew when there came shouts from the teller floor.

Angelica got up right away and went back to the floor. That was probably a shit idea because she found out why her tellers and customers were screaming.

There were five men with guns and ski masks standing in the middle the floor.

Ah shit, they were being robbed.