Know Your Worth

33

I had no intention of going back into the dating scene. If it meant being single throughout the remaining three and a half years here, so be it. I wasn't the only one with this mentality. 

Janine and Layla share the mentality of being single. Janine liked girls, however, but she still believed in nothing too serious. She loved looking at pretty girls, loved talking about them but was a firm believer in only having a relationship when she started working. 

Layla was a tad scared that her parents would arrange a marriage for her to an older Arab man, citing that intermingling her precious Arab blood would be considered a familial failure by her relatives, never mind that she wasn't even engaged now. 

It was fascinating to learn about the Arab culture through her, and I loved her dry sense of humour. Janine and Layla's arguments were the funniest, regardless of whether they were serious arguments or arguments simply for the sake of arguing. 

Layla bought all of our burgers for us, and Janine had demanded that she have extra cheese, no lettuce, no tomatoes, and extra ketchup on hers. 

Earlier, Janine had accidentally spilled her coffee on Layla's handwritten notes, and the latter was pretty miffed about it. 

It was payback when Layla got a special burger for Janine that included no cheese, extra lettuce, extra tomatoes, and no ketchup. 

Janine protested, saying that "Bygones should be bygones," and that "Layla needed to stop sabotaging my food for her notes, they were quite shitty to begin with anyway and she ended up writing better notes after my honest mistake, so she take this as an opportunity to thank me," 

Layla had been minimalistic with her words, but effective nonetheless with a nonchalant "Suck it, bitch," 

Sam nearly spat out her sparking water and I choked on my burger. 

Or the other time when Layla had made six enchiladas to give to her friends, and Janine ate all of them over a four-hour time period. The enchiladas had been in a huge and labeled Ziploc bag in the common refrigerator of the kitchen. 

The discussion had gone like this:

Layla asked calmly, " Where are my enchiladas?"

Janine claimed that she had no idea while holding the remaining one in her hand under the table. 

Layla spotted it and got pissed. Sam mouthed "Oh shit," to me. 

"You have my enchiladas!" she shrieked. It had been the first time I'd ever seen Layla lose her cool. 

Janine stuffed her face with the last enchilada, swallowed, and held her hands up in surrender. 

"I got hungry before lunch. And during lunch. And after lunch. And for snack time," Janine said solemnly. 

"There were six of them, and they were not small. How the hell did you manage to eat all of that?" 

"Doesn't matter how. All you need to know is that they are in a better place now, being attacked by my digestive juices," 

Layla was still irked, but Sam and I bought her some twinkies and Janine even bought her some burritos to make it up to her, and all was well. 

Janine was chaos personified. Almost every day, she chose violence and was absolutely unapologetic about it. 

She had the craziest stories to tell, and we believed her because she was crazy enough to do it. 

"There was this one time she ate all the food samples at Costco when the lady manning the sample stall left for a bathroom break.  Janinedenied eating it despite the crumbs on her face and had the gall to accuse the lady of eating them instead," Layla told us after Janine had narrated her great escape from the human Guardians of the Galaxy: the security guards at the mall who chased her after she dropped her milkshake from the fourth floor of the mall to the first floor.