What can I say about Jellybean?? She was a spitfire.
She was 5 feet tall and 90lbs soaking wet - though she'd insist she weighed 95-100lbs. She was skinny, but had a little belly. She always wore the worst clothes for her body - tops that gave her "uniboob," low-rise jeans that landed right under the jelly belly, short skirts that showed her dirty, dirty knees. She wasn't particularly pretty, with a blobby nose and cystic acne scars, but she had such charisma that people couldn't help but be drawn to her.
She was in the Navy, and all the Navy-girl stereotypes were true about her. She was wild, and she slept with ANYONE. Tho she was only 21, she already had cervical cancer - the STD kind - and she was on steroids to treat it. She invited me to a party at her place once, but I didn't go. I heard later that it was a wild night that culminated with Jellybean going to the ER - because she wasn't supposed to mix her medication with alcohol. She nearly died, and it didn't slow her down a bit.
She passed a drug test to work at X-Corp, and said for the first two weeks that she used to party, but she had straightened out and was never going to do that again. And then she met some people who did drugs, so she dove right back into it. This happened two or three times in the two years I managed to keep track of her.
A few stories about Jellybean:
Her parents divorced at some point in her childhood, and when she was ~15, her mother ditched her and her siblings in L.A. and ran off with their inheritance money. Jellybean dropped out of school and spent her days partying and seeing bands like No Doubt play garage shows, but then went to one of those alternative schools in order to graduate. When she was 18, her dad married one of her friends / classmates who was only a year older than her. Awkward. She found out at some point that her mom had moved to Maine and started a tattoo parlor. As the Hell's Angels summer in Maine, she makes money hand over fist.
Jellybean joined the Navy right out of high school and was stationed overseas. The entire time she was there, she never once set foot on a ship. She liked to tell the story of the time she accidentally electrocuted herself in her base housing and shot herself across the room backwards, and she liked to talk about the terrible drivers in Sicily, and how many cars she wrecked while there. When she got out of the Navy, she moved to Oregon because she had an aunt and uncle here – and no friends to influence her.
***
Jellybean was *terrible* at her job at X-Corp - she was haphazard and careless, always making a mess for someone else to clean up. But Crazy Boss looooooooved Dirk, and Dirk loved Jellybean, so she lasted way longer than she otherwise would have. She was a bad influence on Dirk. Before Jellybean showed up, Dirk was on time 99.9% of the time; he rarely called in sick; and he did his job. After Dirk and Jellybean started dating, he moved to her shift (And Crazy let him work on the same test, side by side with Jellybean!), and the two of them were 45 minutes late every single day. No joke. But I was the only other person on their test, so I was the only person who complained. They also took an hour or more for lunch every day, and took roughly six 15-20 minute breaks a day. At one point, our productivity had dropped to the point where we were getting less than 30% of the print count we were supposed to, but Joe Engineer was effing clueless and couldn't figure out why...
Jellybean even convinced Crazy Boss to let her work part-time so she could go to school. But she kept calling in sick instead of working her half-days, and someone at The Agency finally emailed her and told her that she needed to improve her attendance or she would get fired. Jellybean's 'roid rage got the better of her, and she responded that The Agency rep wasn't the boss of her, Crazy Boss was, and so unless it came from Crazy, he could shove it. The rep responded and said, "Actually, sweetie, you DON'T work for Crazy - you DO work for us - and you'd better straighten up and fly right." Jellybean responded with an expletive-laced email telling the rep where he could go and what he could do when he got there. He called Security and had her escorted off of the premises. Crazy tried to get her back (to appease Dirk, of course), but it was too late. Unfortunately for the rep, he didn't have the authority to fire Jellybean, so he got transferred or fired - not sure which, but we never saw or heard from him again.
***
Dirk and Jellybean continued to date off and on after she was fired, and that allowed me to hear all kinds of crazy stories about her. For instance, her mother had come for a visit while she was still at X-Corp, and she was throwing around money like a Hilton, so Jellybean decided to spend the summer with dear old mom (and one of her sisters, who had been working for her mom for years). Dirk was against it, since her mom and sister were really hard partiers, and apparently Jellybean had tried to keep up when her mom was in town. Jellybean was all, "Whateva, whateva, I'll do what I want!"
So she broke up with Dirk and went to Maine for the summer, and ended up calling Dirk nearly every morning in tears because she couldn't remember what (well, let's be honest, who) she had done the night before. Finally Dirk was like, "Stop calling me! I can't hear this anymore!!"
She finally decided all the drugs and debauchery were wearing thin and came home, swearing she wasn't going to do drugs anymore. She got back together with Dirk, swearing she'd be faithful. Wrong on both counts. Until recently, when I stumbled across her profile on myspace, I totally thought she was dead in a ditch somewhere, but apparently she has actually cleaned up her act enough to finish school and get a hella good job in the microbiology field. *shocked face*
And Dirk bought a condo downtown, sold his car, and started riding his bike everywhere. No, really.
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