Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 102355 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102355 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
In front of me, the kid—he can’t be older than seventeen—stands waiting for his boss to arrive while trying very hard to not meet my eyes. A side door opens and out waddles the man of the hour, Mr. Hostel Manager himself, stuffed into a white tank top stretched so tightly across his soft chest that it’s almost see-through. His coarse chest hair spreads up toward his neck.
“What?” he barks at the kid.
The kid points to me, and the man turns in my direction.
“What’s this about?” he asks, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his saggy pants and lighting one up as he steps closer to the counter. He exhales smoke near my face, and I grind my molars together so hard I’m surprised they don’t splinter.
“I woke up this morning to find that someone took cash out of the locker in my room.”
If I’m a little curt, it’s only because I’ve already explained the robbery twice: once to the girls in my room and again to the clerk. Beyond swearing they didn’t steal it, my roommates had nothing helpful to say and no words of sympathy.
“You shouldn’t be traveling with that much cash in the first place.”
Yes, thank you for that helpful tip.
The manager taps the end of his cigarette onto a blackened ashtray between us.
“All of it?” he asks, sounding tired and annoyed.
It’s early; there’s a chance I’m the only reason he’s awake right now, but I don’t feel bad.
I train my voice into sounding calm. “No, not all of it. Like I told your employee, I’m five hundred euros short.”
The manager scratches his patchy beard, unbothered by my discovery. “So you have some left?”
I resist snapping at him. What does it matter if they took some of my money or all of it? I was robbed!
“You sure someone even took it?” he continues, cocking his head and eyeing me like I’m the one who shouldn’t be trusted here. “Could have counted wrong.”
Surely he can tell I’m about to explode. At any moment, steam will shoot out of my ears. I know the exact amount of cash that was in my locker last night, and the moment I went to check it again this morning, I knew something was off. I counted the bills immediately and found I was five hundred short.
“I’m sure,” I tell the manager, barely masking my indignation.
He nods, tapping out his cigarette again, and crosses his arms over his chest. “Okay.”
“Okay?!”
He shrugs. “Not much I can do. I’ll warn guests about it.”
“We should file a police report at the very least.”
He smiles as he glances at the clerk, then looks back to me, holding up his hand in invitation. “Be my guest. Theft that small… you’ll be waiting awhile.”
I hate that he’s right. Clearly, the police have a lot more pressing matters to deal with. I’m wasting daylight, precious time I could be using to land a job at Aura. Instead, I sit twiddling my thumbs and flipping through old, yellowed magazines in the hostel’s foyer—avoiding the gaze of the clerk—for two and a half hours before anyone shows up. The manager listens in as I describe the situation to the police officer, and he can barely contain his self-righteous smile when the officer makes it clear I should be glad it wasn’t worse.
“A few hundred euro? Count yourself lucky,” the officer says in thickly accented English, ripping off a carbon copy of his police report so he can hand it to me. “My advice? Find a new hostel.”
I look down at the duffel bag at my feet and nod. “Yeah… planning on it.”
I don’t demand to know how he plans to investigate the theft. Chances are, I won’t like what I hear. There are any number of possibilities for what happened: My roommates saw me input my locker combination and decided they’d skim a little of my money while I was sleeping, or the locker is broken and the hostel staff routinely steal from their guests, or… worse. I shudder.
The moment I leave the hostel, I decide to drop it. I fold up the police report and stuff it into my duffel bag. In a way, the manager and the officer are right. It could be worse, but it’s still bad. I have even less wiggle room now. I need to focus. I have to find a place to stay and secure a job by the end of today, and I just wasted the better part of my morning waiting for that officer. I’m hungry, cranky, and also late calling my grandmother. I told her I’d check in today; that was part of her demands about allowing me my summer abroad, so once I buy a cheap but delicious café con leche in a quiet café, I dial her number. She picks up after the third ring.