It’s the first of the month and the rent is due. I walk into my sister’s bedroom and push her awake. Lila is a sound sleeper and not someone who is easy to wake up. She’s a waitress who works at a popular bar/restaurant on Melrose, and she almost always works the closing shift. It’s not uncommon for her to get home at 4 am, which means that she sleeps until at least noon. It’s only ten a.m. right now. I know that she’s going to be moody, to say the least.

“Lila. Lila!” I shake her.

“What?” she mumbles, burying her hear deeper into the pillow.

“Where are your tips?”

“Go away.”

“The rent’s due. I have to take all your cash to the bank so I can write a check and it doesn’t bounce.”

I’m sure that the details of the whole situation are lost on her. Honestly, I don’t know how she ever lived on her own and didn’t get evicted. I’m the one who takes care of all the bills – actually, pays them. She works and brings in good money, more than I do most months, but she never bothers to deposit any of her cash on time and constantly forgets to pay her credit card bills.

“Lila,” I say again. I can see that she’s not sleeping anymore, just refusing to engage me.

“Lila. I’m going to stop bothering you if you just tell me where you put your tips from last night. They’re not in your purse.”

“Check my coat,” she says after a beat. “Inside pocket.”

I look around for her coat on the coat rack, but it’s filled with four jackets that she rarely wears. The one she was wearing last night is on the floor at the bottom of her closet. I search the pockets and finally find a wad of cash. I count the money.

“You made over three hundred dollars last night?” I ask, astonished.

“There was this old guy who really had the hots for me,” she says, finally flipping around to face me.

Her makeup is all smeared, with half of it rubbed into her pillow. I know that all the dirt on her pillow is new because I just did the laundry yesterday afternoon.

“Still, $300 is really good.”

“Well, I told you that you need to find yourself a job at some place that stays open past eleven. Nothing good happens between 11 and 2, except the tips. People drink a lot and they tend to tip a lot too.”

I roll my eyes. I’ve heard this spiel a number of times before, and frankly, I’m pretty sick of it. I like my job at Fat Dog, just fine. I like the fact that they close at 11 so that I can actually get a full night’s rest. Though the tips do leave a lot to be desired for.

“All I need is another $150 from you,” I say. “Where do you want me to leave the rest?”

“Wherever,” Lila says, rolling away from me.

I put the rest of her money on her makeup table. It’s wide and expansive and filled with all sorts of eyebrow kits, lotions and tiny bottles of liquid. It’s like a whole Sephora there, without any of the organization. How she can find anything there is beyond me.

“Can you pull those shades closed?” she mumbles.

I pull them down and walk out.

I don’t have much time to eat and put on my makeup. I usually shower at night, which means that my hair is a little bit of a mess in the morning. I head to the bathroom and spray about half a can of dry shampoo onto it. I really should’ve taken a shower this morning, given the important meeting, but it’s a little too late for regrets now. I’m lucky that my hair is straight and relatively easy to handle. I flip my head over, running my fingers through it. When I flip my head over, it’s magically filled with body. Both Lila and I have light brown hair, but she has been dying her hair platinum blonde for as long as I can remember. She goes to the salon every six weeks like clockwork, leaving behind about $150 each time. I don’t have that luxury. I tried coloring with box dyes a few years back, but gave up and grew out my natural color. A few weeks ago, for my birthday, Lila got me a gift certificate so I got some highlights put in. They looked amazing for about a week. Now, they are clearly growing out and I have a decision to make. Do I keep growing them out or go back to shelling out $70 every two months on new highlights? The decision to this question will have to be made later.

I pour milk over my cereal and chow it down without sitting down. I look out of the window at the cloudless Los Angeles sky and the tall palm trees reaching for the sky. Today has to go well, I say to myself. Just be yourself, and it will. Then I run back to the bathroom and apply some eyeliner, mascara, eye shadow and lipstick. I put on a tiny amount of foundation, and I’m ready. I look in the mirror. Something is off. Oh yes, I have to fix my eyebrows! I almost forgot. I get out the eyebrow liner and quickly fill in some spots. Apparently, lush eyebrows are back in. I didn’t get the memo until a month ago when Lila suddenly stared at me and said that I looked sick.

“Oh wait, no,” she had added. “Your eyebrows are just natural. You really need to do something about that.”

Later that night, she showed me how to fix them. Her process had about a million steps, so I cut it down to two. A few brushes of the pencil and then a few smudges of the brush. Perfect. Well, probably not perfect, but fine.

I look at my phone for the time. Dammit. I’m running late.

I pop back into Lila’s room.

“Lila, can you take the money to the bank?” I ask. She’s asleep again so I say it extra loud. She jumps up a little as I startle her.

“What?” she asks.

“I’m running late to my meeting, but I won’t have time afterwards. I’m afraid it won’t deposit in time.”

“I can’t. I have an audition,” Lila says into the pillow.

I roll my eyes. Lila always has auditions. I decide not to rely on her. She will probably forget. She isn’t much of a stickler for deadlines. Nothing bad happens when she misses them, but the fact that there is a deadline makes me super nervous. Besides, we’ve been late on the rent before, and the landlord was none too pleased. We got this long email about how he could get way more than $2000 for our two-bedroom apartment, and he’s doing us a favor for renting it to us for so cheap in this area. And that if we’re late again, he going to start proceedings to find new tenants after our lease runs out. Lila got mad and was going to write him back something mean and colorful, if I hadn’t stopped her. The thing is that the landlord is right. Despite the fact that the rent is astronomical, it is underpriced for West Hollywood. It should cost at least $2500, and he’d have it rented in a day if he listed it for $2300. I’m going to go to the bank myself. I have time.