"Guy's Night Out"

 

“Guy’s Night Out”

            Sheila Carpenter was the biggest influencer there was on all social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. At twenty-five years old, she was already worth half a million dollars, owning her own beachside mansion in Miami. She was a blonde with striking features: full lips, an hourglass figure that always showed through the tight red dresses she owned, and sparkling blue eyes.

            Her friends, Kim and Alana, were just as much the same. Kim was just a year younger; a Korean-American girl with olive skin that she always kept moisturized and tanned, and hair that was long, straight, and black. Alana was the youngest of the three; a fresh-faced brunette, she was beautiful by nature, requiring very little makeup or skin care products.

            They were just as popular among the social media crowd, but Sheila had the most followers, particularly on TikTok. In fact, she just finished uploading the latest video she recorded that night at Applebee’s, where they were having dinner. “Whaddup, ya’ll!” She screeched in the video, high on positive energy. “It’s yo girl, comin’ at cha from AB’s! ‘Cause ya’ll know we be fancy like!” She threw in the Walker Hayes song as background music, hoping that it wouldn’t get removed along with the rest of the sound, due to copyright.

            The video was only a couple of minutes long, basically a shout-out video with Kim and Alana in the back, whooping along with her. They were definitely the loudest patrons in the place, which was mostly made up of families that Friday evening. But the three girlfriends didn’t care who they annoyed, as long as they had fun and ate delicious food. Sheila had quite the attractive burger and fries sitting on her plate.

            She took a quick snap of it on her phone and uploaded it to her Instagram, when a notification suddenly pinged onscreen. It alerted her that her TikTok video received 20,000 likes with 900 comments in just a few minutes. She squealed with excitement; it was the most attention she had gotten on a single post in the last week. She switched from her Instagram over to TikTok in a few swipes.

            The comments mostly complimented how good Sheila, Kim, and Alana all looked.

            A few bot comments here and there, trying to get them into some pathetic scams.

            Some even shared their own experiences at Applebee’s, good and bad.

            As she kept scrolling, the comments suddenly went from positive to negative, much to Sheila’s displeasure. There were criticisms of her loud, brash behavior in a family venue, telling her to “Shut up!” or “Get out! People are trying to eat! Not listen to your loud mouth!” Those didn’t really bother her, as it was merely trolls. It was the ones that labeled her as “shallow” and “selfish” that were really upsetting.

            “What’s wrong, Shell?” Kim asked, halfway into her bowl of noodles.

            “Yeah, you look mad,” Alana noted, just about to dig into her tuna sandwich.

            “That’s because I am!” Sheila snapped. She shared the comments with them, hovering her phone over their meals and in front of their faces. “Look at all these hateful comments I’m getting!”

            “They’re just basement-dwellers, hon,” Kim said. “Don’t pay them any attention.”

            “Yeah, but ‘shallow’ and ‘selfish’?” Sheila griped, swiping through more comments. “This one dude is comparing me to Amouranth!”

            Alana cringed. “Oooh! Now that’s hurtful!”

            “This is ridiculous!” Sheila slammed her phone on the table. The family sitting at the booth adjacent to theirs slightly turned upon her outburst. The father and mother were unhappy, whereas their two pre-adolescent boys were giggling.

            There suddenly came a knock on the window where the girls were seated.

            It came from a homeless man with a scruffy brown beard and shaggy hair of the same color. He was dressed in a tattered orange coat with cotton poking out from the seams, a stained plaid shirt, and ripped denim jeans that sagged. He smiled directly at Sheila, Kim, Alana while holding a cardboard sign that read, “Spare a bite or some change?”

            “Oh, dangit!” Kim groaned with disgust. “This is the fifth time tonight this dude’s bothered us!” Luckily, an Applebee’s waiter was passing by just at the right moment. “Excuse me?” Kim summoned him. The young man responded right away, walking up to their booth. Kim gestured to the homeless man leering through the window and reported, “This guy’s been disrupting our meal all night. Can you get the manager or somebody to just…you know…?”

            The young waiter caught her drift and left immediately to handle the situation himself. He stepped outside and shooed the homeless man away from the window. Kim and Alana gave a satisfactory applause, returning to their meals not a second after. Sheila, on the other hand, kept her eyes on the vagrant, watching as he went across the street and sat on a wooden crate in a dark, disused alley.

            Sheila regarded his pitiful condition, an idea forming in her mind.

            Without warning, she got up from the booth, taking her barely-touched burger and fries along with her. Kim and Alana were as confused as they were surprised to see her leave, taking her meal to go in a doggy bag. “What the heck is she doing?” Kim asked, though Alana could only shrug in reply.

            They saw her through the window of their booth, rushing across the street and approaching the homeless man. “Oh, no, honey!” Alana cried, despite Sheila being too far away to hear her plea. “Please don’t do what I think you’re doing!”

            Sheila handed the doggy bag to the beggar and then took out her phone.

            “Is she…?” Before Kim could finish, both her phone and Alana’s pinged – a notification for a live video on Sheila’s TikTok. Reluctantly, they both pressed the banner and were instantly taken to the feed.

            There Sheila was, hovering over the homeless man as he consumed the burger and fries, barely paying any mind to the fact that Sheila was streaming his consumption to her million followers. “Whaddup, ya’ll! It’s yo girl again! So, I saw some people in the comments callin’ me out, saying how I’m ‘shallow’ and ‘selfish’. Well, I’ve got sumthin’ for ya’ll.” She turned to the homeless man and asked, “Sir, what’s your name?”

            The vagrant gazed up; bits of food stuck in his beard. “Guy,” he belched.

            Smiling, Sheila returned to the camera. “Over the next two days, I am personally gonna change Guy’s life by giving him what I like to call a ‘20K Makeover’! Now, you’re probably asking, ‘WTH is a 20K Makeover?’ That’s where me and my friends – Kim and Alana – are gonna spend up to $20,000 of our hard-earned cash making Guy here look like a million’s worth of that!”

            Kim choked on her soda, hearing this announcement. “$20,000?!?!”

            Alana and Kim certainly didn’t see this night going the direction it went in, after Sheila’s spontaneous announcement. The girls returned to the mansion – with Guy in tow – and while he made himself at home (at Sheila’s insistence), the girls had a private discussion upstairs in Sheila’s bedroom.

            “Are you outta your flippin’ mind, girl?!” Kim confronted her. “You and Alana may’ve earned most of your cheques shakin’ your bodies on a webcam, but I actually work outside of my Twitch streams! And, lemme tell ya, it ain’t easy earnin’ a livin’ as a Korean woman in a redneck state!”

            “There aren’t that many rednecks in Miami, Kim,” Alana innocently stated.

            “Not my point, Alana!” Kim stormed.

            “I wasn’t even gonna involve either of you in this,” Sheila confessed. “And then I read some of what they were saying about ya’ll.”

            This piqued Kim and Alan’s interest. Sheila showed them the comments that were left in regards to them. Alana was unsettled by the criticism of her looks, describing her as “pale” and needing to cover up the supposed “acne” on her face. Kim was the target of some blatant racism that poked fun at her slanted eyes, mislabeling her with jokes about China or Japan.

            It was all enough for both girls to comply.

            “Alright,” Kim made it official. “We’re in on your Pretty Woman project.”

            “It’s more Cinderella than Pretty Woman,” Sheila clarified.

            The first stages of Guy’s makeover – shower and new clothes – brought out some of the best in him. With a clean, pressed suit and tie, he looked more dignified and respectable. His posture straightened, making him taller than he looked when the girls first found him outside Applebee’s.

            But the real big change occurred once Guy received a shave and a haircut.

            Sheila was the only one there at the barbershop to witness how different he looked – like an entirely new man. Underneath that beard and shaggy hair was a thirty-something, Robert Pattison-type. Sheila could’ve sworn she even saw his skin sparkle like diamonds…or she could’ve just imagined that part.

            “How do I look?” he asked after the barber spun him around to face her.

            Sheila couldn’t put into words how she felt that moment. Her heart raced and her whole body went numb. Guy – this new version of him – was a masterpiece. And Sheila wanted him all to herself.

            The two-day deadline passed, but it expanded into two weeks and then a month.

            $20,000 became $50,000 – and that became $100,000.

            Sheila was spending her money, as well as Kim and Alana’s, on extravagant gifts for Guy, such as a Ferrari and a gold watch. He got even more suits from the collection of Giorgio Armani. She even put in a photo shoot to immortalize Guy’s newfound beauty in photographs that she hung around her mansion.

            Sheila had become obsessed.

            One night, she treated Guy to a candlelit dinner in her backyard. She arranged for the dinner to be prepared by actual cooks from Applebee’s and tended by their waiters. Sheila paid them to be there for only the hour, returning to the restaurant soon after the dinner – burgers and fries – was served.

            “I…don’t know what to say, Sheila,” an overwhelmed Guy said.

            “Don’t say anything, hon,” Sheila insisted. “Let me be the one to pop the question.” She got up from their table and got down on one knee beside him, holding a small purple-and-gold case. “Guy? Will you…?”

            “Uh, Sheila?” Guy quickly interjected. “It’s a little too soon for marriage, don’t you think?”

            Sheila frowned. “Marriage? No! All I was gonna ask was that you move into my mansion.” She opened the case, revealing a golden key and not the wedding ring Guy thought it was.

            “Un-freaking-believable!!!”

            The happy moment was interrupted with the arrival of Kim and Alana. Guy and Sheila saw them walk out onto the terrace through the sliding door. Both women looked extremely peeved.

            “What’re you two doing here?” Sheila asked them.

            Kim scoffed. “What’re we doing?! What are you doing, Shell?!”

            “You maxed out our credit cards!” Alana roared. “Our accounts are dried up!”

            Sheila shook her head negatively. “No, no. That can’t be right. I…I only spent $20,000, remember?”

            “Better look at your checkbook again, honey,” Kim said. “You spent $750,600 on this guy, Guy!” She pointed at Guy with an aggression none of the girls expressed towards him until that moment. “And you wanna know the kicker? Our buddy, Guy, isn’t who we thought he was!”

            “Yeah, Guy is really—”

            Suddenly, Kim and Alana’s eyes turned white and lifeless as they rolled back, and their bodies thudded to the terrace. The whole thing happened so fast that it took Sheila a minute to process it all. As soon as she did, she let out a horrified shriek.

            “Sheila?” She barely heard Guy call out to her in an eerily calm voice. “Sheila, I’m gonna need you to shut up for me, O.K.?” Wondering why he was so calm, she looked to him…only to stare down the barrel of the handgun he had aimed at her head.

            Her first thought was that he was the one who did it – he shot and killed her friends in cold blood. “Wh…Why?” she whimpered.

            “Why?” Guy’s face twisted in disbelief. “How could you even ask me that after all you’ve done? To me? To them?!” He nodded towards the dead bodies of Kim and Alana. “It’s about time self-centered girls like you got what was coming to them!”

            “G-Guy…” Sheila fought to get the words past her quivering lips. “I love you.”

            “You loved me after you cleaned me up. I was nothing but a pity project to you and your soulless friends!”

            Guy could no longer take it. His finger hugged the trigger, desperately wanting to fire. Sheila saw the burning anticipation on his face and knew this was it – she was about to die. She shut her eyes, bracing herself. She imagined what the pain would be like. Would she even feel the bullet? Or would it be quick and painless?

            After more than a few seconds, she was still wondering.

            And then, she heard Guy meekly grunt, “Go.”

            “W-What?”

            “I said go!” He howled. “Get outta here before I change my mind!”

            Surprised yet grateful, Sheila made her way towards the sliding door. She had to carefully step around Kim and Alana’s bodies just to get to it. But, before she went any further, she turned to Guy one last time and kissed him on the lips. It caught him completely by surprise. Here was a girl he was only seconds from killing, and she still gave into her urges, even with her friends lying dead nearby.

            After the long, passionate kiss, Sheila proceeded with her escape.

            Her hand barely got to the sliding door handle before she felt a sudden sting in the back of her head. The last thing she saw was her own face reflected in the door, frozen in a state of shock, before her entire body shattered through the glass and thudded to the floor of her living room.

            Her death stunned Guy, who continued uselessly holding his handgun.

            He didn’t fire it once, not on Sheila or even on Kim or Alana.

            The real culprit of the girls’ deaths was the person Guy immediately called on the phone Sheila bought for him. He looked across the beach to the crashing waves in the distance. “The plan was to let her live,” he griped to his associate.

            “That was before she kissed you,” said the cold voice of a woman on the other line. The woman herself was a raven-haired supermodel in a black bathing suit and silk black robe that framed her slender body. She stood, twenty miles off the coast, upon the rear deck of a large, white $10 million yacht, steadily aiming a sniper rifle towards the mansion of Sheila Carpenter. Through the scope, the crosshairs were fixed on Guy’s disappointed face. “She had to die, babe. We don’t want any loose ends.”

            “Whatever, Barbara,” Guy accepted. “Just get over here and help with the cleanup, will ya?”

            “Of course,” Barbara gladly obliged, packing away her rifle. “I’m ready to move into my brand-new mansion with my fresh new fiancée.”