Room Three

When Daisy moved to D.C., she ended up with room three. The other girls had arrived first and claimed the good spaces.

She dragged her suitcase up the narrow stairs, glad that each step moved her further from the cloud of odors below: a mix of detergent and someone’s overconfident curry. At the top, she shoved the suitcase with her foot, and it rolled into her room, thudding against the wall.

In D.C. townhomes, the third bedroom was usually a narrow sliver of real estate wedged somewhere in the center of the house—a place that might generously be called “cozy,” but more accurately “closet adjacent.” Hers had just enough space for a twin mattress and a few personal items, and it had a tiny window that looked into a shaft-like courtyard. The walls were painted a tired off-white, scuffed where previous tenants had tried to rearrange furniture that didn’t fit.

Still, there was a window. Daisy crouched beside it, brushed aside a tangle of dusty blinds, and peered out. Across the narrow gap was the identical window of another unfortunate tenant in the townhome next door. Their curtain—pink with faded flamingos—was drawn halfway, revealing a cluttered bookshelf and the faint glow of a desk lamp. Pressing her nose against the glass, Daisy could just barely catch a sliver of blue sky above, like looking up from the bottom of a well. “At least there’s that,” she said to no one.

Her twin mattress arrived that night, folded and wrapped in plastic. Once it expanded, it greedily took up most of the floor space. She spent the evening figuring out how to live in the few remaining inches—storing her suitcase in the basement and propping her shoes on the window ledge. She found herself tiptoeing around the house, hoping to avoid her room mates.

Despite the fact that Daisy had no room for furniture, she scoured cheap furniture websites the next morning, ending up with a particleboard dresser she squeezed between her bed and the wall.

Summer in D.C. was hot and humid, but Daisy preferred the sticky streets over staying indoors. She hated the skunky smell of weed emanating from room one, and the inevitable cackling laughter when the girl's boyfriend told her the latest office gossip. Sometimes, the sheer stupidity and loneliness of the situation drove her to silent tears. So Daisy started walking the streets at night, looking for treasure people had left in back alleys in the hopes someone like her might come along and save them the trouble of lugging furniture to a dumpster.

One evening, she was cutting through an alley on her way back from the red line when she saw it: a respectably preserved leather armchair, with simply carved hardwood bones. She walked away at first, but circled back after realizing the chair hadn’t been there the night before, and so there was a limited chance it was filled with bugs or festering mold. And surely she could lug the thing home because she’d been taking parkour classes at an old fire station and her biceps were stronger than they’d been in a while.

Daisy pushed out a breath as she hefted the chair up—it was apparently very dense hardwood and therefore also very heavy. When she reached the halfway point, her arms were reduced to jelly and a tremor had begun in her abs. So she put the chair down with a thump under the warm glow of an alley light, and plopped into it for a break.

Her pulse slowed. Her red face evened back to normal. For a moment, she felt like a queen in her found throne, and reveled in how easy it was to step outside the city’s rhythm of work, shop, eat, and sleep.

Then, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. Something is watching me, Daisy thought. And indeed something shifted in the corner of her vision. She turned.

A creature was staring at her from the fence— fuzzy, ginormous, with two wet and beady eyes. The opossum watched her without blinking, mouth hanging slightly open. She could swear he was willing her to find him adorable—and maybe lobbying for her to tell everyone he was, in fact, quite clean.

Maybe it was the heat or that she was so comfy in that chair, but her fear softened to appreciation—though she kept an eye on the bugger, worried that if she turned away he’d leap on her.

They regarded each other.

“Well,” Daisy said. “You live here?”

The opossum didn’t blink. Its pink nose twitched once, almost politely.

From the mouth of the alley came a quick intake of breath. Daisy looked up to see a group of teenagers huddled on the sidewalk, staring at her and the animal as if they’d walked in on a séance. One of them giggled, “Did anyone else see that?” and they hurried off, half-laughing, half-spooked. Their whispers trailed behind.

Daisy turned back to her opossum friend and congratulated him on performing the scene with her: D.C. denizen and alleyway opossum share a private conversation, she dubbed the scene in her head. Finally the opossum gave a little snort and crawled down the fence line, out of the glow of light.

The night felt suspended, until she broke the moment. She picked up her chair and lugged it the rest of the way home.

By the time she reached her building, her fingers had turned to lead. She pushed through the front door with her hip and climbed the stairs sideways. The silence indicated that the other girls were asleep, or maybe were at their boyfriends’ places. She maneuvered the chair into room three and set it down with a low sigh.

It filled the space completely. There was hardly room to walk around it, but the sight of it there made her grin. The thing didn’t match anything else she owned—it was too large, too deliberate.

Maybe she’d clean the chair tomorrow. Maybe she wouldn’t. Room three was hers now, and that was enough.

At dawn, her new friend slunk under a car and scuttled across the streets until he was back in his own den. He fell asleep as the sun rose.