Note: .

I apologize to anyone who lives in Austin for geographical mistakes I may make. I don’t live there; I’ve just visited a few times and am relying on my memory and MapQuest. To the best of my knowledge, there is no White Mansion in Austin, though I suppose you could look.

For the record, the name Regan is pronounced “REE-gan”, not “RAY- gan” as some may think. It’s an East Texas thing.

I don’t own Starbucks, Urban Outfitters, American Eagle, Abercrombie and Fitch, or Victoria’s Secret. Though I kinda wish I did.

Enjoy!

Regan, White, and the Seven Deadly Sins

I.

Eviction notices suck.

They suck even more when you get them from your best friend.

“So you’re kicking me out.” It wasn’t a question. Therese was kicking me out, but was admittedly being very nice about it.

“I’m not kicking you out! You can stay if you really want to; I just though that you wouldn’t want to stay here since Drake is moving in.”

Ah. Drake. The boyfriend and constant thorn in my side.

Therese and I had been friends since elementary school. We’d lived three doors down from each other since third grade, had most of the same classes in high school, and went on every vacation together. She was like my sister. It was only logical that we move in together once we were in college.

And yet here we were, halfway into our second year at the University of Texas, having a lovely conversation that started out with the words (and I quote), “Regan, you know I love you, right?”

To which I replied, “Oh, God, what did you do now?”

The first time she’d started off a conversation like that was when I’d left town for a few days and my fish had died.

Because she’d forgotten to feed it.

Because she was too tired after staying out all night.

With Drake.

The second time she’d started a conversation with the words “Regan, you know I love you, right?” she had accidentally burned my brand new Burberry scarf (cashmere! I was not amused).

Because she’d left it too close to the stove.

After she’d been “showing it off”.

To Drake.

Are you sensing a pattern here yet?

So anyway. Conversation. Right.

“Regan, you know I love you, right?”

I glanced up at her from my place on the couch. “Oh, God, what did you do now?”

“Well, I just…it’s…complicated.” She bit her lip and shuffled her feet awkwardly as she stood in front of me.

I put down the shirt I’d been mending and sighed. “Everything’s complicated with you, Therese. Spit it out.”

“Drake’s moving in, and I think that it would be best if you moved out.”

Silence.

“Since, you know, you hate each other and all.”

Okay, for the record, I do not hate Drake. He just makes my life a living hell. There’s a big difference.

“I don’t hate him.”

“Yes, Regan, you really do.”

“How would you know?”

“You call him Damien Jr.,” she pointed out.

“It’s an endearing nickname!” I argued.

“He hates it…”

“I…”

“…and you know it.”

I pondered this. “Well, yeah, okay. Maybe I do hate him. A little.”

“And that’s why I think it would be best if you…found somewhere else to live.” Again with the awkward shuffling.

“So you’re kicking me out.” It, again, wasn’t a question.

“I’m not kicking you out! You can stay if you really want to; I just thought that you wouldn’t want to stay her e since Drake is moving in.”

I leaned back against the couch—our couch, the one we’d bought from Urban Outfitters after six months of saving—and appraised Therese with narrowed eyes. She looked back at me, and I softened when I saw that her eyes were starting to fill with tears. I stifled a sigh; she wasn’t being manipulative, Therese was just really, really sensitive, something I’d never understood about her. I think it had something to do with the fact that she’d never, ever been hurt emotionally in her life. Not once.

Disgusting, I know.

“Regan…” she said, getting down on her knees and ootching toward me. The gesture was too much for my stomach to handle.

“Oh, fine,” I snapped. Therese stared up at me with her damn blue eyes (eyes I’ve always been jealous of—guys can make all sorts of great comparisons and metaphors for blue eyes, but brown eyes get, what? Shit and mud. Thanks, genetics) and I sighed deeply. “Don’t worry about it,” I said in my most reassuring voice, which isn’t, I’ll admit, very reassuring.

I have a problem with sincerity. So sue me.

“Really?” she yelped, and before I could answer she flung herself at my neck and had me in a vise-like hug. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou for being so understanding!” She started doing a little jumpy dance thing and squealing for joy…holding on to my head all the while.

“Uh, Therese?” I managed to choke out. “I love you and all, and I’m really glad you’re happy and stuff, but do you think you could let go of my neck?”

“Oh, sorry,” she gasped, taking a step back. “Do you want some ice?”

“No, I do not want some ice. I want…” I bit my lip and looked around the apartment.

It was the first signal that I was officially grown up—an apartment of my very own (except for Therese, of course). It was mostly her style, but my tastes showed up occasionally...the huge CD rack, “Animal House” memorabilia, James Dean poster in the bathroom, huge white board where I made scatterbrained Therese write down her work and school schedule every week.

What did I want? I wanted to make Therese happy, naturally—she was my best friend after all. But it saddened me that her happiness meant me leaving and Drake moving in. I wanted things to be like they were when we started college, when Therese hadn’t quite discovered how to put her curves and blonde hair and blue eyes to use. I wanted to go back to being ‘Regan and Therese’ instead of ‘Therese and Drake…oh, and Therese’s friend’.

Jealous? Moi? Nahh.

“Regan?” Therese asked, looking at me tentatively. I snapped out of my trance and smiled at her. I wondered vaguely if she could tell I was faking it.

“When is he moving in?”

“Next Wednesday,” she replied, biting her lip.

Wednesday? I wanted to scream. That gave me six days—six!—to find a new place to live. A year and a half of living together over in six days. Our friendship as we knew it gone with the passing of a week.

Yeah, I have a flair for melodrama.

“Well,” I said, looking around with a distinct sense of foreboding. “I guess I’d better pack, huh?”

---

“So she just asked you to leave like that?” Tyler stared at me incredulously over his soy half-caff latte with no whipped cream. I nodded, taking a sip of my iced chai latte.

“But, I mean, it does make sense,” I said in her defense.

Tyler raised a carefully manicured blonde eyebrow at me. “And how is that?” he asked, pursing his lips in an almost comically gay gesture.

I repressed the urge to laugh. “Well, Drake and I do hate each other, and who am I to hold her back from falling in love—“

“And getting her heart broken.”

“—and getting her heart broken, but that’s beside the point. Plus, I think I’ll look at this as a chance to get out on my own and learn to live without having to tell someone to pick up after herself and to not stop having sex altogether, but maybe just be a little more quiet about it, and…what?”

Tyler had burst into a fit of hysterical laughter and was fanning his blue eyes dramatically with one hand.

“Stop it, you’ll hemorrhage,” I snapped, not at all amused. “I’m glad you find this so funny.”

“Quiet sex,” he managed to choke out between hysterical gasps for air. “Really, you are a virgin!”

“Shut up!” I exclaimed, turning pink. “This has nothing to do with my virginity, which, incidentally, is none of your business.”

“Sure it is. At nineteen you’d think you would have at least had the decency to jump in bed with one guy and ease my worried mind.” This earned him a patented Regan glare. “Okay, okay, sorry.” He took a sip of his drink. “Continue.”

“So,” I finished grandly, “I think this will be a growth opportunity.”

“Booo-ring,” Tyler replied, rolling his eyes theatrically. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“…and she said I could have the couch.”

“The couch?” His eyes widened and he stared at me in happy disbelief. “The one from Urban?”

“The very same,” I said with a nod. “We’re treating the whole thing like a very amicable divorce. I take what’s mine, she keeps what’s hers, and we split what we bought together. Since she gets the apartment, I get everything we’ve ever bought from Urban.”

Which is a pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.

“Okay. So let me get this straight. She gets that lovely little apartment near campus, but you get the couch, rug, shower curtain, the coffee table, the dish chair, both floor cushions, the bowls, the plates, the bartending set, and the Position of the Day Playbook?”

“I told her she could have the book, but yes, I get the rest of it.”

“Dammit! Why’d you give her the book?” Tyler looked genuinely angry, but I knew better. Tyler was too…gay to be angry. He felt that anger ruined his complexion and would eventually give him wrinkles.

“Because she’ll actually use it.”

Tyler considered this for a moment.

“Good point. It would be a complete waste in your clutches.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, it’s true!” he replied with a smirk. “Honestly. You’d think you didn’t date in high school or something.”

I was about to snap a witty reply when “It’s Raining Men” blared out of his cell phone. A few businesswomen at the table next to us shot a glare in his direction. He blew them a kiss.

“Sorry, darlings.”

“Could that ringer be any more cliché?” I asked as he flipped it open.

“Probably not. Hello?” he said into the phone. “Having coffee with Regan; you remember her, right? Yeah…Marc says hi.”

“Hi, Marc,” I said automatically. Marc was Tyler’s boyfriend of almost three years; they were a year older than me—juniors, more than halfway done, the jerks—and would have been married had the Texas legislature allowed it. They absolutely defined the saying ‘opposites attract’—Tyler was so flamboyant, you wouldn’t even think he wasn’t gay, while Marc was much more subdued. I’d actually thought he was straight the first time I met him, even with my built in gaydar (which I think comes with the territory of being female). Tyler was a blonde-haired, blue eyed beauty queen, built like a track star, with an aristocratic face featuring high cheekbones, a wide, clear forehead, and a nose that could be described as nothing except a ski slope. Marc, on the other hand, was short and burly, with dark hair that he kept trimmed close to his head and deep set green eyes. He was also a chronic hypochondriac, but Tyler was able to overlook this in favor of Marc’s other excellent qualities—patience, a sense of humor, cleanliness, a mean grilled cheese sandwich, and (as Tyler put it) “the man’s hung like a moose”.

Like I really needed to know that.

“She says hi. So what’s up?” Tyler crooned into the phone. “Oh, it was good. Yours?...He did not….He did not….Ugh, that whore!”

I laughed and took our empty drinks to the trash. Tyler held up a five dollar bill upon my return and gestured wildly at the cookie display. Rolling my eyes, I went up to the counter and got us a chocolate chip cookie to share. As I set the plate back down on the table, I noticed that the flirty tone was out of Tyler’s voice entirely. I frowned at him and he waved a hand dismissively, grabbing for the cookie.

“You’re sure? Like, for positive?…Uh huh…yeah, we could definitely do that. How much a month?” He grinned at me, his eyes shining with excitement. I grabbed a napkin, pulled a pen out of my purse, and wrote ‘Apartment shopping?’ Tyler read it and nodded. “Four thousand? No, babe, sorry. There’s no way.”

He shook his head sadly while I stared at him in shock. Four thousand? I thought. This is a freaking college town. Who would charge that much for rent?

“I just don’t think—what?” Tyler’s eyes lit up again. He leaned forward and spoke into the phone more intently. “How many? Wow….Yeah. Yeah, that could for sure work. Who?...I need names here, babe. Okay…okay…okay…okay…ooh, okay for sure!...Shut up, you know you’re the only one for me.”

Tyler jerked his head toward the door. I nodded and we headed outside, walking down the sidewalk past American Eagle, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Victoria’s Secret. I stopped and stared inside the latter, noticing a ‘sale’ sign in the window. Tyler turned and looked at me, rolled his eyes, and opened the door for me, chattering away into his phone all the while.

“How many bedrooms?...Seven? Shit, that’s a lot. Bathrooms?...Shit, that’s a lot. We could actually have one more. That would at least make the rent an even five hundred per person, per month.” He frowned thoughtfully at the thong I held aloft for his approval and nodded. “All these guys have jobs, right?...Good. Now…one more person we can all stand…who has a job.”

I made my way over to the bras and inspected a bright green one I’d had my eye on for a while. It was marked down to fifteen dollars from forty. I grabbed it without hesitation. One can never have too many bras, right?

“Ugh, no, I despise him. He’s too…you know, him…Nope. He made a homophobic joke the other day in my English class…Not him, either. Jason’s enough of a partier; we don’t need two.” Tyler looked up at the thong I was dangling in his face and snatched it out of my hand impatiently. Throwing it back into one bin, he rummaged around in another until he came up with two more he apparently liked better.

“You have no taste,” he sighed at me. “No, not you, Marc. Regan.”

Suddenly his eyes lit up. He looked at me appraisingly, almost as if I were some sort of dress he was thinking of wearing on his next excursion to his favorite gay club, All American Beef.

“Marc. I’ve just had an epiphany.” He dashed off and hid over in the teddy section, an area he knew I’d never venture. I stared after him for a moment before shrugging and continuing on my search for the final two thongs that would make up the five in my ‘five for twenty-five’ deal.

After paying, I looked around the shop for a moment for Tyler before spotting him outside. He was smoking a cigarette and still talking on his phone.

“No,” he was saying as I walked outside and perched on the sidewalk next to him. “Of course it’s a good idea. I thought of it…Yeah, I’ll arrange it all...Okay. Love you, bye.”

He snapped the phone shut and looked at me with a distinctly evil gleam in his eyes.

“What?” I asked warily. Tyler only looked at me like that when he wanted to try a new hairstyle on me.

“Regan, how would you like to play Snow White?”